Big Bird joins roster of TV’s cultural flashpoints

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Smokey Bear taught kids the importance of preventing wildfires. McGruff the Crime Dog warned them not to talk to strangers. And in 1972, Big Bird lined up on Sesame Street to receive a measles vaccine as part of a campaign to get more youngsters inoculated.

But when that same iconic, children’s character tweeted last weekend that he had been vaccinated against COVID-19, conservative politicians immediately pushed back.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, grilled Big Bird for what he called “government propaganda.” Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe described it as “brainwashing children” and “twisted.”

Sesame Street has long faced grumbles from conservatives unhappy with its connections to U.S. public broadcasting, which receives federal funding. Yet this latest fallout marked a new contentious flashpoint that has plagued previous rollouts of the vaccine, just as the shot becomes available to children.

Nearly 50 years ago, in its third season, Sesame Street encouraged kids to get the measles vaccine by showing Big Bird and children getting the injection. The move was similar to other public service campaigns that used beloved characters to help teach children life lessons, including discouraging littering, wearing seat belts and looking both ways before crossing the street.

“What Big Bird is doing is part of a long tradition. But what’s different now, of course, is that everything is political and everything is contentious,” said Thomas Doherty, an American studies professor at Brandeis University. “Something that we all wanted a year ago, the vaccine, is now this matter of great contention.”

Controversy at the intersection of TV and politics has popped up here and there for decades. In 1952, I Love Lucy didn’t use the word “pregnant” once in an episode that focused on Lucille Ball’s character having a baby. Executives thought that term was too scandalous.

The 1970s TV series Maude showed the title character opting to get an abortion. The storyline was aired a year before the U.S. Supreme Court made Roe vs. Wade the law of the land. Multiple affiliates refused to air reruns of the episode.

In the early 1990s, the sitcom Murphy Brown found itself in a high-profile tiff during the 1992 presidential campaign when Dan Quayle, vice president to George H.W. Bush, lambasted the unmarried Murphy’s pregnancy as a mockery of fatherhood and American morality.

In an episode of Ellen that aired in 1997, Ellen DeGeneres made history as the first prime-time lead on network TV to come out as gay. It was a huge cultural moment, but it also sparked attacks from religious groups.

ABC later placed a warning about “adult content” when DeGeneres’ character kissed another woman in a separate episode.

“When you get a mass medium as dominant and powerful as television ... that’s always going to be a battleground over what messages get out there,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.

Big Bird’s tweet ru±ed others’ feathers at a time when educational messages directed toward children are under increased scrutiny. Schools have seen an uptick in heated debates from frustrated parents and elected officials over how racial and social justice issues are handled in classrooms and instructional materials. Meanwhile, education officials have faced multiple conflicts on how they should handle mask and testing requirements during a pandemic. Some Republicans have pushed back against marketing the COVID-19 vaccine directly to minors.

“The whole Sesame Street embrace of diversity, inclusion, being nice, paying attention to people of poverty and of different colors, that is all a form of education directed at kids that most people would think is a really good thing and a great contribution. Then comes the vaccines,” Thompson said. “And now, this idea of getting a vaccine is no longer a celebration. It’s become something else.”