HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SESAME STREET!
A child’s-eye view of the popular show that’s celebrating its 50th anniversary
Sesame Street’s 50th Anniversary Celebration Airs Saturday, Global
Eeewww! I wish Mommy would just let me be done with these peas so I can watch Sesame Street! They look like those chocolate balls our bunny Thumper leaves in the living room, only green. I ate one of those chocolate balls once, you know. It tasted like poop.
Finally, time for Sesame Street! Bet I can sing louder than the blender Mommy’s using in the kitchen. “SUNNY DAY! Sweepin’ the CLOUDS AWAY!”
Mommy says Sesame Street has been on TV for 50 years, as of Nov. 10. I wonder if that’s even older than she is. They’re going to have a special episode Nov. 16 on Global to start the new season, which is going to air on Treehouse, and a guy named Joseph Gordon-Levitt is going to host it.
“We’re having a block party to celebrate 50 years of Sesame Street and we’ll have the most amazing mix of musical guests,” says Ben Lehmann. He’s the executive producer, which is a fancy name for someone who makes important decisions and has a big office.
“Patti LaBelle, who’s been on the show many times, will be there, Elvis Costello, Norah Jones. Meghan Trainor does a beautiful rendition of Count Me In, which is a song about inclusivity and diversity. Kermit even makes a brief appearance. And there’ll be many of the classic songs, like C is for Cookie and Rubber Duckie.”
In case you didn’t know, C is for Cookie and Rubber Duckie are songs people used to sing in the olden days. Back then, there were also a lot of people on Sesame Street who aren’t there now, like Bob McGrath (Bob), Sonia Manzano (Maria), Emilio Delgado (Luis), Loretta Long (Susan) and Roscoe Orman (Gordon). They’re all going to be on the special with Fran Brill and Caroll Spinney, who are really famous puppeteers.
Hey! I forgot I left these Goldfish crackers in the couch last week! I wonder how many I can fit in my nose?
Anyway, once upon a time, there was a person named Will Lee. He played Mr. Hooper, the man who owned the variety store on Sesame Street. But one day in 1982, Will Lee died.
“On some shows, they would be like, ‘Mr. Hooper went on vacation,’ and in next season he just never shows up. But the producers thought, ‘Why don’t we address this head on and make it a teachable moment to tell kids about death?’ Which was a very bold thing. So Sonia Manzano came out of retirement to do a guest appearance,” says that Lehmann guy.
“The storyline they came up with was that Big Bird has a drawing he wants to give to Mr. Hooper and he looks for him. Susan tells him Mr. Hooper’s gone, he’s not coming back. The message is direct, simple and on a level that kids can understand. But Sonia told me that Will was a dear friend they’d worked with for years, and doing that scene was incredibly emotional.”
That story makes me sad, but if I were Big Bird, I would want to know what really happened to Mr. Hooper — wouldn’t you?
Anyway, now there’s a new muppet named Karli, who’s part of the outreach work Sesame Street in Communities does. She’s Elmo’s friend, and she’s in foster care, and her mommy is addicted to some drugs called opioids. Some really important research people say there are 5.7 million kids in the U.S. whose mommy or daddy has a problem with different kinds of drugs, too. I wonder if The Count can count to 5.7 million. I can only count to 20, but my mommy says she still loves me.
“Kids in foster care are not necessarily a group that is being addressed or talked to, or that people are making content for, so we created Karli,” says that Lehmann guy. “We make those types of programs through our social impact team, and some get distributed on broadcast, some are for the web. Most of the feedback I’ve heard has been very positive.”
Some people think Sesame Street shouldn’t talk about stuff like that. They say it’s better to just let kids be kids and learn their ABCs and counting and new words. But that Lehmann guy says, “Sesame Street doesn’t talk down to kids — it treats them like full-fledged human beings. It’s there to impart an educational message and help them.”
Hey — I’ve been talking so much that I missed the first part of Sesame Street! There’s Big Bird and Snuffy, and Grover, and Zoe, and Abby, and Cookie Monster, and Bert and Ernie, and Oscar!
That Lehmann guy says they need thousands of muppets to help make Sesame Street, and they have a book to keep track of them all.
“We basically have this muppet bible that The Jim Henson Company updates for us, and we distribute it to anyone who’s involved in the show,” he says.
“For example, if we want a scene where Oscar is hanging out with a bunch of grouches, we need to
know how many grouches we have. So in the book, the grouches are all listed and you see their colours and how their eyes look. And there are notes, like ‘this one’s in great shape,’ ‘this one’s toast.’”
Oscar is my favourite muppet. Mommy says they had something called a parody about him on a show called Saturday Night Live a couple weeks ago that was funny. It was like if everyone on Sesame Street did really, really bad things.
“We love SNL and we’ve had the good fortune of having Cookie Monster being a co-host in the past,” says that Lehmann guy. “We didn’t know they were going to do these spoofs, but we take them in the spirit in which they’re done — which is that Sesame Street is such an important part of the culture that it’s something they like to spoof. We all think it’s in good fun.”
You know what else is fun? Making slime! I made some glow-inthe-dark slime yesterday with Mommy, but it got all on her computer and she had to take a timeout.
Anyway, Sesame Street is almost finished and I want to put two more Goldfish crackers in my nose before Mommy comes back. She always thinks that’s funny. OK, bye!