Sesame Street Not for Kids

Proco · Nov 20, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine...amp;oref=slogin

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of "Sesame Street" are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don't bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, "Sesame Street: Old School" is adults-only: "These early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child."

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. "What did they do to us?" asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.[/b]
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http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?...mp;in_page_id=2

However, anyone expecting scenes where Big Bird lives up to his name will be disappointed.

The reasons for the warning are much less perverted.

According to the show's producers, kids today would not be able to handle watching Cookie Monster holding a pipe, which he later eats.

The character who has posed the most problems, however, is Oscar the Grouch. His crime? He is too miserable for today's toddlers.[/b]
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Having cut my teeth on Sesame Street during this particular era, I can see that there are probably some things in there that don't really fly today. Times have changed, and the show has changed with the times. But I don't know that these episodes are all that bad, either.

I'm inclined to think there's more than a little overreacting going on here. How many of us are smokers because Cookie Monster ate a pipe? Heck, how many of us are now obese because Cookie Monster was a poor nutritional role model? Did anyone out there become a sarcastic curmudgeon because of Oscar the Grouch?

I think we all need to unbunch our collective undies.

hyo silver · Nov 20, 2007

Oh, for Pete's sake. Sure, there was humour aimed at the parents watching with their kids, but that made it all the better. Monsterpiece Theatre and Vincent Twice are classics. I suppose The Muppets are verboten, too?

Oh wait - you mean Bert and Ernie were gay? Horrors. Oh, how naive could I be? I was tricked. Betrayed! By the very people I thought were educating me! I'm crushed. Life will never be the same.

Umm...yeah. Far better the little people watch the evening news instead. That still gives me nightmares.

Godiva · Nov 20, 2007

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Proco @ Nov 20 2007, 03:01 PM) [snapback]542102[/snapback]</div>

Did anyone out there become a sarcastic curmudgeon because of Oscar the Grouch?
[/b]
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Hey! I resemble that remark!

Proco · Nov 21, 2007

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(hyo silver @ Nov 20 2007, 04:45 PM) [snapback]542136[/snapback]</div>

Oh, for Pete's sake. Sure, there was humour aimed at the parents watching with their kids, but that made it all the better. Monsterpiece Theatre and Vincent Twice are classics. I suppose The Muppets are verboten, too?[/b]
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Well, I think you hit on the problem. Parents don't watch with their kids anymore. The DVD player is the new babysitter. I'll admit that some things they did back then weren't the best ideas. Having the adults think that Big Bird was telling fibs about Snuffleupagus, for example. You don't want kids thinking they can't tell adults anything.

Other than things like that, this has overreaction written all over it.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Godiva @ Nov 20 2007, 07:30 PM) [snapback]542198[/snapback]</div>

Hey! I resemble that remark![/b]
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:lol:

hycamguy07 · Nov 21, 2007

I thought Seame Street was for Gang Bangers :huh: :lol: :lol: :lol:

What was wrong with Sesame Street you ask?
What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscarâ€™s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didnâ€™t exist.

Nothing in the childrenâ€™s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then â€” as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 â€” a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen â€” cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-â€™60s news report â€” something about a â€œsenior American officialâ€ and â€œtwo billion in credit over the next five yearsâ€ â€” that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old â€œSesame Streetâ€ is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper â€œElmoâ€™s Worldâ€ started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place â€” well, the original â€œSesame Streetâ€ might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of â€œSesame Street,â€ how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody â€œMonsterpiece Theater.â€ Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, â€œThat modeled the wrong behaviorâ€ â€” smoking, eating pipes â€” â€œso we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.â€

Which brought Parente to a feature of â€œSesame Streetâ€ that had not been reconstructed Which brought Parente to a feature of â€œSesame Streetâ€ that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable â€” hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) â€œWe might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,â€ she said.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Birdâ€™s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (â€œom nom nom nomâ€). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldnâ€™t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Childâ€™s First Addict.

Oh, whatâ€™s that? Right, the trance of early â€œSesame Streetâ€ and its country-time sequences. In spite of the showâ€™s devotion to its â€œtarget child,â€ the â€œ4-year-old inner-city black youngsterâ€ (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain â€” black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of Americaâ€™s farms uniquely on â€œSesame Street.â€
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine...amp;oref=slogin[/b]
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WoW , Im gonna take it that this is the view of the new Politicaly Correct People :blink: :mellow:

galaxee · Nov 21, 2007

talk about overreaction

the content of tv has gotten less and less appropriate for children over the years and they pick out sesame street? what about all the graphic crime dramas? wouldn't that give a 3 year old nightmares to see a simulation of someone taking a bullet to the chest when mom and dad are watching tv? how is cookie monster eating cookies WORSE than that?

ny biker · Nov 21, 2007

Oscar was always my favorite. But then I always liked Eeyore, too.

Trevor · Nov 21, 2007

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Proco @ Nov 20 2007, 04:01 PM) [snapback]542102[/snapback]</div>

. How many of us are smokers because Cookie Monster ate a pipe? Heck, how many of us are now obese because Cookie Monster was a poor nutritional role model? Did anyone out there become a sarcastic curmudgeon because of Oscar the Grouch?

I think we all need to unbunch our collective undies.
[/b]
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I know I watched more than my fair share of Sesame Street. I even 'smoked' bubble gum cigarettes while watching it. Chances are that I would play with my cap gun afterward. I've never touched a real gun or cigarette in my life, so chances are that I may have escaped any permanent damage from watching too much sesame st.

Sesame Street Not for Kids

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