One of the frustrations of my new job is that I hear about great things that I want to write up for the blog but can’t. This story is one of them.
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.”
Let that one settle in for a bit. “May not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.” Two things come to mind: One, what exactly was so dangerous about these early episodes that they need to be hidden from the kids today, and Two, how are the “needs of today’s preschool child” so different from the needs of the preschool child circa 1972?
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
The obesity “crisis” strikes again! But it’s more than that — apparently, today’s preschoolers must be protected from all depictions of adultish behavior, for fear, I suppose, that they’re going to take to the pipe (and swallow it) by the time they hit first grade.
Something to consider about Original Recipe Sesame Street — it was created with adults in mind, because research showed that kids learned better if their parents and older siblings were involved. And it was created for a particular segment of kids — inner-city kids of color, who were lagging behind white kids in preparation for school. Without that adult humor, the adults and older kids in the house would be far less interested and engaged in helping the younger ones learn. And some of the bits on Monsterpiece Theater were quite sophisticated, while still presenting goofy characters and simple lessons. Not only that, that multilayered presentation gives kids something new to discover as they get older and continue to watch the show, and keeps adults involved. I mean, back in 1972, I didn’t get all the adult references, either, but I look back on it now and I can see them (sort of like how I didn’t get all the Cold War humor in “Rocky and Bullwinkle” until I started watching it as an adult — up until then, it was just a goofy moose and squirrel).
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — 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.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.
God forbid preschoolers might be exposed to some complexity. I presume that Oscar has mellowed over the years; to be perfectly honest, I never really cared for him. But at least he’s not that insipid Elmo.
Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’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 (“om nom nom nom”). 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 wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.
Snuffleupagus was a little after my time, so I don’t have much to say about him, but let’s talk about Cookie Monster. I understood, even as a little kid, that he was not someone to imitate. He was over-the-top, a rampaging Id. I was discussing this article with the guys I work with, and they had both understood that as well. Are “today’s preschoolers” so impressionable that they will follow his example, zombie-like?
I find it interesting that the change in Cookie Monster’s food choices came about in the 2000s (Monsterpiece Theater was a 1980s-90s skit), just as the moral panic about the obesity “crisis” started reaching a fever pitch in the media. But consider: so he’s eating fruits and vegetables now instead of just cookies. Does that make his behavior any different? Isn’t it wrong to simply switch out the food without changing the habits (unless, of course, they have, which means they might as well just dump the character altogether).
The dumbing-down, sanitization and Elmo-ization of the show, however, might have more to do with competition from “Blue’s Clues” than anything else. I have unfortunately loaned out my copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point so I have to go by memory, but Gladwell discussed the development of “Sesame Street” and later “Blue’s Clues” in terms of “stickiness,” meaning how much attention kids were giving the show and each of its segments. The linked excerpt shows how “Sesame Street’s” stickiness was somewhat accidental and haphazard and the show wound up succeeding in spite of itself. “Blue’s Clues” was the result of far more sophisticated research methods (including tracking eye movements) and has become very popular with preschoolers, who love the simplicity, long cuts, repetition (the same episode is repeated for five days straight) and leisurely pace. Even if it drives their parents nuts and they won’t be searching out videos from the show 35 years hence.
Via Julie, who says:
But what do I know, I buy my daughter candy cigarettes.
Just don’t call CPS on me, okay?
Hide the children! Inappropriate videos ahead!
(Which I never knew until now was the Pointer Sisters.)
That railing looks unsafe! And the song mentions the devil!
I remember Snuffleupagus, and having been a child who HAD an imaginary friend I never got over the fact the Snuffleupagus finally was made seeable by everyone on Sesame Street. The whole point of Snuffy was that he was Big Bird’s imaginary friend and was real to Big Bird, even though no one else could see him. He represented something many children have (imaginary friend) and he validated the experience. I started watching Sesame Street as an adult and before I had children. The first years were intelligent, and delightful and could be used to help bring the adults and children together. It is sad that Sesame Street has now been so homogenized that it is not the show I knew and loved.
To be fair, I think this is still true of the show. In watching the show, I’ve seen a Law and Order:SVU parody where they search for the letter M and a Desperate Housewives parody called “Desperate Houseplants” where two plants complain about “not getting what they need” until a gardener comes by to water them. There was also a hilarious bit yesterday where Robert DeNiro explained method acting to Elmo. So I think that article is a smidge overstated. Just a smidge.
The thing that really, really bothers me about Sesame Street today. One is that they’re so clearly underfunded. They make decidedly fewer episodes now, and introduce new characters that are obviously designed to sell more crap, like the retch-inducing Abby Cadabby. They barely have sets anymore, a lot of it is blue screen. And the puppets look cheap and shabby a lot of the time.
IMO, the problem with casting one kind of behavior good and another bad is that kids get a fairy tale understanding of people, in which only bad people do X and good people do Y. Smoking is bad and people who smoke are bad, but Grandma smokes and Babykid loves Grandma. Is Grandma a bad person? Cursing is bad and people who curse are bad, but Mom says “Goddammit” (a lot) and Babykid loves Mom. Is Mom a bad person? I think kids understand a certain amount of complexity in life, as you mention above, zuzu, and I say it’s good for them.
And I’m sorry, but you can’t underestimate the power of cool. Even little kids are interested in being of the moment, especially when they’re around and interacting with older kids and adults. The older Sesame Street episodes had a certain amount of wink and knowingness that I recognized even when I was too young to understand why. And just because the show is cool doesn’t mean everyone who watches it is growing up to be a pipe gobbler (ahem). The old school Sesame Street was dead cool, and if I get my hands on it I’ll watch it with my little one (if he’ll submit to watching it — it’s “for babies” he says, and anymore I agree).
I bought the Electric Company DVD which came out earlier this year. The very first episode has (a) Bill Cosby puffing away on a cigar, and (b) Easy Reader asking for a book of matches because there’s nothing else to read. (“Close cover before striking”)
And my first reaction was how these ewre things you’d never see today…
This all comes down to the greatest tragedy in the history of tv, the loss of Jim Henson. *puts on black and lights candles in mourning*
Really, I always thought that one of the best qualities of the old Sesame Street was that all the characters were flawed or cranky or had unhealthy obsessions. The point was that you learned to respect the special needs of others, needs that you might not have yourself, because you liked and respected the people who had those needs.
I did read some article with Henson a million years ago where he explained the Snuffaluphagus thing- the decision was made specifically because of child sexual abuse. The fact that nobody belived Big Bird when he was telling the adults something that all the children watching knew was true was the problem and Henson felt it discouraged children from speaking up, since nobody would believe them.
Thank you so much fo that stoll down memoy lane. Occasionally when I am off and have my son home with me, we’ll watch sesame steet. Sometimes they have clips from the shows I used to watch…but I kept looking for that pointers sisters counting song (1-12). I still, as an adult hear it in my head on occasion.
Anywho, I think we’ll be getting these “old school” videos and watching them with my son. He will LOVE the live music and his favorite character, Ernie (he has two ernie dolls who he lurves to death).
HOwever I just don’t get that the old school videos are for adults only….and how someone could make that claim. So what if Oscar is a bit crankey and Cookie over the top. Kids like that kind of thing! I know I did…hell I HAD to have an Oscar the Grouch birthday cake for my 3rd and 4th birthdays. Why? Because Oscar was different and could tell people to SCRAM.
Nowadays he still does, but is given much less airtime on SS….thanks to newcomers like Zoe, Telly (is he new or just more prominent), Elmo….there are times I hardly recognize the show.
It is a video set we will be ordering and showing our son….
I don’t think I knew other people could see Snuffleupagus now.
Well, I’m almost 50 and I’ve been watching the show from the beginning. Seems like there was always a little kid around me or living with me–first babysitting, then working in a daycare, then working as a nanny for several years, then having kids of my own. So I’ve watched the show change. Several things stay the same though, and lend continuity: the adult characters, especially Maria and Luis, are now parents and their daughter, Gaby, is almost grown. Other adult characters have stayed on also and kids have been able to count on that–grown-ups who stick around, who stay involved in the community.
I do hate Elmo, though. I hate the way he talks and I hate the way he’s got his own whole segment that takes up 20 minutes of the show.
(I also remember when nobody but Big Bird could see Snuffy. And I remember when Buffy St. Marie was part of the cast–that’s really going back a lot of years.)
i LOVED sesame street! all of it…i lived close to canada and a good portion of it was in french for me. i loved how everyone was so varied and complex…even oscar had his worm that he had a soft spot for! i learned sign language, and how to cope w/ things like death (does any one remember when mr. hooper died?)
these reviews about how they are for adults only make me so angry…now when anyone asks what my kid wants for holiday gifts, i am going to tell them sesame street…
“I did read some article with Henson a million years ago where he explained the Snuffaluphagus thing- the decision was made specifically because of child sexual abuse. The fact that nobody belived Big Bird when he was telling the adults something that all the children watching knew was true was the problem and Henson felt it discouraged children from speaking up, since nobody would believe them.”
Sigh.
Although I find the idea that they’re for adults only a bit ridiculous, it is true that the Sesame Street old school stuff we have seems aimed at a slightly older child than the current Sesame street stuff. Having an almost-4-year-old daughter, there are spots where we can really see this, whereas some of the current-run Sesame Street videos we have really seem too young for her. (Specifically, I’m thinking of the old school Count, who could wave his arms and shout “silence” when he wished to count something, and the other muppets would be struck silent.)
This isn’t at all that surprising – “preschool kids” used to mean slightly older ages than it does today. Our municipality offers public school beginning at age three now – that’s three years of public schooling prior to first grade, which used to be the first year of public schooling.
Also, know that in the first few seasons there’s stuff that will strike you as just wrong – Oscar didn’t start out as green, and Gordon has been played by at least three different actors over the course of the show.
That date on Snuffy’s visibility seems off. No one believed in him when I was watching, and I think I watched past ’85… I seem to recall Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers peacefully coexisting alongside He-Man, She-Ra, and Thundercats in my TV viewing.
Ok, so I know the writing for Sesame Street has gone downhill since my childhood, but it drives me crazy when people get up-in-arms about Cookie Monster eating a healthier diet. The Sesame Street writers have always been mindful of what message they were sending the children, and Cookie Monster has been advocating healthy eating for some time.
The following is from the 80′s. It is not a recent video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpfluek-1qk
That is the Cookie Monster of a lot of our childhoods, and anyone who says differently doesn’t remember the show correctly!
All the squawking reminds me of how cartoons have changed as well. Heaven forbid a kid see my all-time favorite cartoon: “Rabbit of Seville”… Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd one-upping each other, starting with a handgun pointed at the other, then working up to a shotgun, and eventually cannons.
Kids are a helluva lot smarter than grown-ups give them credit for.
I’ve been trying to let my children see my childhood things and really look forward to introducing all the classic Sesame Street to them. Just today, the boys of 3, 5, and 9 just got their first crack at my suitcase of Legos. Brought back loads of memories for me, and I was proud of the 3-year-old for making a Mad Max style vehicle. He won’t see those movies until he’s at least twelve, I hope. Anyway, I’m happy that they’ve now seen the first two seasons of The Muppet Show, the original Star Wars, and the 80s BBC Robin Hood (Ray Winstone chewing up Sherwood is a blast.) I can’t wait for the time when I show my oldest son Gregory’s Girl.
The big problem with Elmo reminds me of the comparison between the classic Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons. Warner Bros. characters had more flaws and quirks, which made them great enough to be both wonderful and flawed. Disney just got bland and inoffensive as it went on and on (there are exceptions, but they are rare.) Elmo represents the safe version of television: focus-grouped crap designed to elicit the correct zombie behavior. If I wanted my sons to grow up with that useless garbage, I’d let them collect Pokemon cards and play video games for six hours a day. (And I’m no purist, I limit games to about an hour maybe twice a week.)
LS, check see the Muppet wiki for Snuffy’s dates.
I was particularly interested to read the NYT article, as I’m writing a chapter in a forthcoming anthology about Henson’s muppets, and in examining Seasons 1 & 2 of the Muppet Show, I agree that there are episodes you could not air today. However, I have wondered whether the surprising nature of some of this material to us today is not a tribute to how effective Henson’s creations were. We learned the lessons of tolerance and inclusion that Henson so beautifully (and often indirectly) preached.
The Sesame Street early eps situation is related, and I think, heightened by our current culture’s fetishization of The Child and Childhood. While far more researched and theorized, children’s programming today seems to echo too closely the very children’s programming that Henson (and Spinney, for one other example) were attempting to evolve away from.
Okay, thinking back, I realize that in the previous comment I’ve let Disney and Warner Bros. slide for all the racist crap they’ve made. Sure, that wasn’t offensive in its day, but surely is considered such now. (See if Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarves is on YouTube again for a dose of Warner Bros. racism, and Disney’s history has similar stuff.) I was thinking of Roadrunner and Coyote, Speedy Gonzales and the stuttering Porky Pig and such compared to Goofy and Pluto and Mickey and Minnie and their bland adventures. Disney wouldn’t ever have a Yosemite Sam in a Confederate uniforms reiterating “War Between the States!” as he gets a cannonload from a crossdressing rabbit, and they have a lesser animated history for it.
Cigarettes I could understand, but where is a preschooler going to find a fricki’ pipe?
Also, I wonder if any of the kid’s shows today would do something like this.
Djiril, You’re absolutely right about Sesame Street. They were always geared towards sending socially conscious messages to kids.
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
I was a big Fred Rogers fan myself. Loved Mr. Rogers. I cried when he died.
Can we just mention the stupid homophobia involved in separating Bert and Ernie? That pisses me off.
Well, Warner Bros. cartoons were never meant for kids; they were shown prior to adult feature films.
They separated Bert and Ernie? Are you kidding?
I’ve watched it a few times in recent years and they don’t do the skits where they’re knocking around their apartment together anymore or lying in their beds while Ernie keeps Bert awake counting sheep out loud or eating cookies.
They’re both still on the show, but they each do more separate scenes. If they’re ever in a scene together, it’s not apparent that they live together.
Oh, my most vivid memories of Ernie and Bert are the night time segments where Ernie irritates Bert by keeping him awake.
Why would they cut those segments? I can only surmise you’re right!
How sad!
Several things:
1 – “Abby Caddaby” was designed by focus grouping 3-4 year old girls to find the most attractive character. Something tells me that Henson never did a focus group. From watching the early episodes, he picked a variety of characters, some inspirational, some not, some funny, some not, and made it clear through writing and acting which characters were to be emulated, and which weren’t.
2 – It’s a tragedy what happened to Elmo. He used to be quirky and funny (and a little bit mean) just like all of the other monsters. See if you can scope out some early Elmo on the You Tube. You should see some of the things he did to the grown-ups on the Street.
3 – There were definitely some skits that are funny, but shouldn’t really be shown any more. Some of the animations are just scary (there’s one where a mysterious box goes around eating things, and never spits them out, they’re just gone, also, apparently there were several children who thought the skit where the baker falls down the stairs was so funny, they thought they’d try it and got hurt)…but mostly saying the old skits aren’t for children is a matter of the current producers not treating children like human beings. Sesame Street was so great because it really treated children as intelligent, thoughtful human beings. It threw lots of stuff at them, hoping some would stick (more phonics, more counting, more sophisticated concepts), knowing that they’d get it eventually or focus on other things.
4 – related to 3, Sesame Street used to really lead by example — they’d not talk about women doing certain things, just show them doing it. They’d include powerful female characters, diverse characters, as *normal*. Now they spend so much time talking about things, it seems preachy, not normal. They also limit to what they think the average child can learn easily, instead of throwing lots of stuff out there and seeing what sticks. It’s sad, because the producers seem to be trying so hard to do it right, but missing out on what made Sesame Street magic.
I miss Jim Henson too…
What? How can you possibly prefer Rabbit of Seville to the sheer incomparable brilliance of “What’s Opera Doc,” in which Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny sing to the music of Wagner as Elmer chases Bugs, Bugs crossdresses (again, some more) his way into Elmer’s heart, and, for the only time in their long, adversarial history, Elmer actually kills Bugs (because, as Bugs cracks at the end before going back to being dead, “Ehhh, what did you exPECT in opera – a happy ending?”)
Man I love that cartoon. And even as a kid I hated educational programming (including, I have to say, Sesame Street–I was somewhat precocious in counting and reading and had no interest in TV designed to help me with those things, which is how I perceived Sesame Street at the time). A lot of my favorite shows probably wouldn’t see the greenlight today either – my all-time favorite was Muppet Babies (talk about humor aimed for adults – SO many jokes I didn’t get as a kid, like Kermit’s plea for being open-minded about food, “Give Peas a Chance”).
So, then, at what point isn’t it overreacting to want to make sure that kids’ entertainment doesn’t reflect icky values? Should kids go on watching Disney’s Song of the South, if their parents can find a copy of it? Or should their parents just content themselves with letting the kids watch the Jim Crow jokes in Dumbo and the funny Red Indian song in Peter Pan? Is it ridiculous for parents to not want to buy Barbie dolls for their kids, because they don’t like the message Barbie implicitly sends about body image?
Sure, Sesame Street has always done a lot of things better than old Disney movies and Barbie, but I find something off-putting about an automatic reaction of “Why is everyone so intent on coddling these days? Why in my time, we were fine with all this!” because it sounds so much like the “Everyone’s too PC now” refrain that really means “Stop complaining about things that don’t bother me personally.”
No, I wouldn’t want to see Sesame Street just reduced to bland mush, either, but I watched a lot of it just last year with the two-year-old I babysat for, and it was still delightful and entertaining for both of us. And, you know, showing something like a character smoking does help normalize smoking, sending an implicit message that inhaling carcinogens is fine. And if I had kids, I’d rather they didn’t get that message, the same way I’d rather their dolls didn’t give them the message that impossible beauty standards were normal.
And no matter how admirable Sesame Street‘s intentions have been since it started (in contrast, to say, the Disney movies’), the people there still have their own work to do. Maybe it was originally designed for kids living in the inner city, but when I was a little kid, I remember watching segments like the one from the point of view of the little white boy who went to visit his black friend’s family in the inner city, and he was so pleased to find how normal they were, and he really enjoyed eating a fried-chicken-and-greens dinner with them. It was just last year, 37 seasons in, that the people making the show decided that maybe there should be another regular Muppet character who was female, to bring the total up to 2. And in describing that change, the show’s creative director described the reasoning for the new character to the media by harking back to the example set in 1970 by the Mary Tyler Moore Show and acting as though it were a revelation that little girls watching the show might like to have some choice in identifying with a female Muppet character. I think I’m justified in finding that pretty ridiculous–but I also know there are lots of people–the large majority, even–who would just counter my reaction with a “Shut up; it’s just entertainment, and I loved Sesame Street as a kid.”
Sure, I don’t think things should be overly sanitized for kids. And when I babysat that toddler, I encouraged him to play in the dirt and let him run around such that he fell over sometimes (and got right back up). But in terms of what media messages kids are going to have broadcast at them, I’d rather there’d be more thought put into them than too little.
Sadly, it’s very possible that Sesame Street is now putting more thought into the hyper-capitalistic marketing-side of things now than into the “send the right message” side. But that’s a separate issue from a supposed “The kids these days are too coddled” problem. (And it’s also much more likely that that’s where bland mush comes from–producers want to make sure they don’t offend anyone because otherwise they’re likely to lose opportunities to sell things. It’s the same problem with high-school history textbooks, as much as right-wingers claim the problems is history education has become “too PC.”)
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Um, I get to watch Sesame Street 5 times a day thanks to the combined magic of tivo and 17 month olds, and I can tell you this is *really* not the case.
Thanks, Vanessa. That was my impression too – that is, that wiggles was reporting something that didn’t match my experience at all. However, we’ve switched almost completely away from current-run TV to videos/DVDs, so I wasn’t sure if this was maybe a very recent trend I’d missed. (In general, not just for kid’s stuff)
So being critical of them freaking out about the obesity “crisis” is the same thing as being nostalgic for racist cartoons?
The complaint is that they’re dumbing it down and sanitizing it, not that they’re becoming too PC. They’re not trusting anymore that kids can distinguish between behaviors you don’t want to follow (i.e., gobbling cookies and pipes and scenery and everything else) and behavior you don’t.
They’re not trusting anymore that kids can distinguish between behaviors you don’t want to follow (i.e., gobbling cookies and pipes and scenery and everything else) and behavior you don’t.
But that’s exactly the complaint folks put forth when people are critical of Barbie dolls. “Kids know it’s just a doll!”
Also, as a commenter noted above the portrayal of Cookie Monster started putting more explicit emphasis on healthy eating since at least the 1980s, not during the more recent hand-wringing about the obesity “crisis.” Cookie Monster started getting a lot more *attention* during the “crisis,” just as the media likes to hype up any story that could be seen to concern obesity.
Ernie and Bert are still seen together, but they use the old clips with less frequency. And I’m pretty sure it’s not due to any nefarious homophobic reason but rather due to the fact that Frank Oz won’t voice Bert against any other Ernie than Henson, so there is less new Ernie+Bert material. When I watch the show with my niece Ernie is mostly paired with Big Bird.
Whu? Not the same thing at all — the writers and actors can show through characterization that Cookie Monster is not someone to emulate, whereas Barbies are made of plastic and require a child’s imagination to animate. There’s no alternate message being sent with those to show that this is not a realistic body type.
So, no, not the same thing at all.
I highly recommend the book “Sesame Street Unpaved’- lots of groundbreaking stuff in there and some really fascinating info on the writers. (sorry, I’m a huge muppet fangirl) But the show really was brilliant for a while in a way children’s tv seldom is and it certainly is not brilliant now. Down with focus groups!
“It was just last year, 37 seasons in, that the people making the show decided that maybe there should be another regular Muppet character who was female, to bring the total up to 2.”
Where are people getting this 2 number from? Telly and Snuffy both have younger sisters who used to appear frequently. The awesome pack of girl Grouches used to be everywhere. Prairie Dawn was in every scene. The girls were always there, but the 2nd gen of writers let them all dissapear, to the point that they have to “affirmative action” some new girls in- I guess the old female characters didn’t ‘test’ well enough. Or maybe they weren’t pink and princessy enough.
ZOMG that first clip?! My FAVORITE PART of Sesame Street EVER. I’m 39 years old and I just sang along with the numbers…I am so getting that for the kid. Along with Schoolhouse Rock. And maybe Zoom.
There’s also Zoe and Rosita that pre-date Abby. And they’re regular characters, too.
My 2 year old son loves Sesame Street, any my husband and I are considering the early seasons as a gift for him. The show has changed so much, and not always for the better.
But one of the things that gets to me about children’s television as a whole these days is how rarely they do a show that is generally funny. Light bits of humor in many shows, but there’s so much focus on educating kids that it seems like they’re all either educational and not that funny, or some sort of superhero show that also isn’t funny. We have our kids hooked on old Warner Bros. and Muppet Show DVDs because they actually laugh at them. Almost never happens with current television.
See, I’m betraying my age that I think of Zoe and Rosita as ‘new’ characters. But yeah, they are regular, main characters. It’s a real stretch to accuse Sesame Street of being a bastion of sexisim and racisim.not that it’s perfect,but if all tv was that sexist and racist we would be pretty lucky, imo.
As someone who is not yet 30, I have noticed some coddling in many areas of a child/adolescent’s/young adult’s life. I have found, however, that this was mostly an upper/upper-middle class phenomenon.
One instance of this is to hear my older upper-middle class cousins and co-workers frequently react with horrified shock when in passing conversation I mentioned that it was commonplace for 7 year old kids to walk to/from school in my working class urban neighborhood in NYC without parental oversight. They said they would never allow even a 10-13 year old child to go to/from school by themselves even though they live in safe upper-middle class suburbs where they did not have to contend with the consequences of the “drug war” such as finding parks strewn with discarded crack vials, pipes, and needles as my childhood classmates and I did.
Moreover, I don’t even think all current parents are coddling as still see plenty of elementary school kids as young as 6 heading to and from school alone in the NYC and Boston areas without anyone raising much of a fuss.
Unfortunately, as a commenter noted before on another topic, the MSM loves to take the upper-middle class model on everything including raising children and attempt to use that as the baseline upon which to judge all parents.
That is not always the best baseline for parenting judging by the complaints I’ve heard from TA friends whose Profs had to deal increasingly with irate upper/upper-middle class parents over grading disputes when their overentitled micromanaged child is anguished at receiving their first B or C in college. Those friends and I found that odd as we would never think to bring our parents into such matters…we dealt with it ourselves.
louise,
Completely agree….especially when I’ve seen too many instances where a young child/adolescent managed to give the supposedly more erudite older adults a good run for their money.
Being older does not necessarily endow an individual with more wisdom than a younger person. The many postings on this website along with the news provides plenty of germane examples.
There’s also the fact that children, like adults, need, like, and identify with characters who do not follow rules of good behavior precisely because those characters do not follow rules of good behavior. Cookie Monster and Oscar are great characters because they act out the desires that children are barred from acting out. Kids are not allowed to smash everything in their way to get cookies or to tell annoying adults to scram, get out of here, leave me alone. The fact that it’s now being seen as a threat for them even to have imaginary figures who do this speaks volumes to me about adult anxieties about controlling children.
We have Old School vol. 1 (1969-1974), which I bought for my son about a year ago, when he was 2 1/2. By this time, I have most of the episodes and the bonus clips memorized because he watches random bits during breakfast. I thought that the “not intended for today’s preschool child” was based on two fairly inocuous things: one, that kids are learning letters and numbers sooner–my son pretty much knew the alphabet when he started watching SS, and he was younger than their target age–and two, that preschoolers in the 2000s have shorter attention spans than preschoolers in the 1970s. I could be wrong on both counts, but that’s what I thought. My son loves them, although it takes second place to Mary Poppins. There are some parts that I think it would be better off without, like a segment where Bob, Ernie, Bert, and some children are sitting around and Bob says, “Let’s think of some things that everyone does.” And the first example is, “Everybody walks.” And Bob agrees with that. I don’t think that would have been put in today. Also I have a feeling there are more man-girl interactions than there are woman-boy. I can think of two of the former, but none of the latter. Perhaps that’s not significant. There’s a bit where Big Bird crosses the street in the middle of the block and almost gets hit, and Gordon really hollers at him. He sounds really angry and a little mean.
Anyway, I bought this for my son to watch and can’t imagine that adults without children would want to buy them. Borrow, perhaps, but not buy. I took the “intended for adults” disclaimer as so much blather.
Loved old sesame street, still like new sesame street. I don’t get why having characters who are caring and consider the consequences of their actions is a bad thing. My daughter is over 3 and still likes SS just fine. Of course, she’s not one of the “mature” 3-going-on-13-going-on-30 kids that I see a lot of parents rush their kids into. It’s fine for her if the characters don’t run around being mean to each other. I know that that will come w/time, but for now and for her age, it’s great that new SS cares about modeling great behavior. SS is awesome, especially compared to the dreck on broadcast TV. Having grown up with reruns of the 3 Stooges, Little Rascals and WB Cartoons, I don’t think she’s missing much by not watching characters beat each other on the head.
Heh. That reminds me of thing I did, once. A couple years ago, I was sitting for two sisters, a four-year-old and a five-year-old, and all of a sudden, the four-year-old let go of my hand and ran across the street. It was a very small street, practically an alley, but I was…horrified. When I caught up to her I told her off very, very strictly and told her she was never, ever to do that again. After a minute she pulled on my hand and said “EG, you’re being scary.”
I thought about that for a minute and finally said, “That’s because I’m scared, sweetheart. It frightens me to think that you could get hurt.” Then I apologized for frightening her.
Completely out of nowhere I just got the reference to one of the things the butterfly says in The Last Unicorn. Never understood what that was supposed to mean until now.
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