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Takara_Soong

Happy 40th Anniversary Sesame Street

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From USA Today:

 

At 40, 'Sesame Street' is in a constant state of renewal

By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY

 

QUEENS, N.Y. — It's the day before Halloween, and on the set of Sesame Street, the usual trickery is underway.

Caroll Spinney and Kevin Clash, the puppeteers who respectively give life to Big Bird and Elmo, are shooting a scene that requires Clash to lie beside a sofa, raising his furry red Muppet into view. Meanwhile, Spinney is helped into the feathery yellow headdress that hides his white hair and beard.

 

Frank Biondo, a camera operator with the series since it first aired on Nov. 10, 1969, looks on with amusement.

 

"When we started doing it, I asked, 'Who's going to watch this?' " says Biondo, 71. "Back then, Big Bird had a different type of head, and Oscar the Grouch was orange. Then they changed some things, and we all thought it made more sense."

 

Indeed we did.

 

As Sesame Street kicks off its 40th anniversary season Tuesday (PBS, check local listings), with first lady Michelle Obama and Broadway star Lin-Manuel Miranda as guests, it is indisputably the most beloved children's show in history, and one of television's biggest and most enduring success stories.

 

The series holds a record 122 Emmy Awards, not including a lifetime-achievement trophy, and has been adapted in more than 120 countries and territories around the globe. An estimated 100,000 Sesame products have been made available internationally, from T-shirts and costumes to high-tech toys such as Elmo Live. Toys R Us is re-introducing the original Tickle Me Elmo doll – a sensation in 1996 – for this holiday season.

 

"A lot of television characters are huge one year then die off the next," says Ira Mayer, publisher of The Licensing Letter. "But Sesame Street is an evergreen property. Teenagers and people who have grown up and have children of their own adore the products."

 

The other high-profile grownups appearing on Sesame this season – among them Cameron Diaz, Jimmy Fallon, Ricky Gervais, Sarah Jessica Parker, Adam Sandler and Tiki Barber – attest to the show's timeless hipness and its status as a pop-culture and educational icon. With humor and music, the show has taught generations of kids – its first young viewers now are in their 40s – the ABCs, numbers and lessons about daily life.

 

Being a guest on Sesame Street, whether you're a parent or a former kid, is "something you will never, ever forget," Fallon says.

 

Sesame's cross-cultural, multi-generational appeal has a lot to do with the specific age group it targets. "The bulk of our audience is in the 2s and 3s, though we shoot for 2 to 4," says executive producer Carol-Lynn Parente. At that early stage, says Spinney – who is 75, and has been with the show since Day 1 (he plays Oscar as well) – "children are basically the same, and have been through the years."

 

But if preschoolers' fundamental needs and sensibilities haven't changed much, the world around them has – not least of all on the media landscape, where Sesame Street now competes with many other kids' shows and an ever-expanding array of new media.

 

In 2000, the Children's Television Workshop, the organization through which creator Joan Ganz Cooney launched Sesame Street on PBS predecessor NET, changed its title to Sesame Workshop, to reflect its expansion into the digital, interactive age.

 

Rosemarie Truglio, vice president of education and research, notes the show's website is constantly updated with "content-themed games and video experiences."

 

Keeping things 'current'

 

Content and presentation continue to evolve on TV as well. The show's famously catchy theme song, Sunny Day, now has a hip-hop beat and a jazzier arrangement. Shows have been reformatted to suggest a typical broadcasting block, with host Murray the Muppet providing interludes between four longer segments. Another Muppet, Abby Cadabby, is now the star of Abby's Flying Fairy School, the first Sesame feature to use computer-generated-imagery animation.

 

Parente stresses that it's just as important "to keep our curriculum current. The ABC's and 123's are always there, but we stay relevant by incorporating other things that are interesting and meaningful."

 

This season marks the launch of a two-year science initiative on the show, "My World Is Green & Growing," to promote awareness and respect of the environment. In the first episode, Michelle Obama plants a vegetable garden with Elmo and several children.

 

Big Bird stops by and mistakenly assumes the first lady plans to eat the seeds. "Are you part bird?" he asks her, observing, "You and I are both really tall."

 

Making learning fun isn't always as easy as it seems, insiders acknowledge.

 

"Sesame Street is an ongoing experiment," Truglio says. "We're always trying to harness the power of television to prepare children not only for school but for life's lessons.

 

"We focus on all aspects of development – cognitive needs, social and emotional needs, health needs – and bring in advisers who are experts in each area, to make sure we're age-appropriate," she says. "But we never talk down to children, and we're not afraid to explore sensitive topics."

 

In fact, Sesame Street historically has taken more risks than a lot of grown-up fare on TV. Much of Cooney's previous work as a producer and writer "focused on poverty and civil rights," she says, and she wanted Sesame Street to be set in an inner city and appeal to disadvantaged young people.

 

In its first season, recalls Cooney – who is now 79 and remains the board chairman of Sesame Workshop – the racially integrated program was banned in Mississippi by a state commission. "They held out for a year and then relented, agreeing it was OK for children to see white people and African-Americans mixing on the street."

 

The show has maintained a socially progressive bent and a sensitivity to the disparate concerns of the many cultures it represents. In the South African version, Takalani Sesame, Kami, an HIV-positive Muppet, was added in 2003 to address the AIDS pandemic. In the USA, Gina, a human character played by Alison Bartlett O'Reilly, adopted a baby to become a single mother in 2006.

 

Such decisions have brought negative feedback from some viewers.

 

"We get letters all the time," Truglio says. "My response is always this: Sesame Street is this wonderful, multicultural place where we celebrate differences as well as similarities. I want to make sure – and I've inherited this mission from our founders – that when kids watch this show, they can all see themselves."

 

Not all educators are fans

 

Sesame has had its critics in the academic community as well.

 

"The press loved us right away, but there were some famous scholars who thought it was too hip or fast-paced," Cooney says.

 

For Mary Lynn Crow, a clinical psychologist and professor of education at the University of Texas-Arlington, "shows like Sesame Street lack the potentially deep, personal emotional imprint that can and should occur between a student and teacher in an early educational experience."

 

On the other hand, Crow considers Sesame Street "a beautiful model of what I call high-tech learning. They can teach children about letters, numbers, color and size through repetition in ways traditional education can't, and provide early information about attitudes, values and relationships."

 

Truglio estimates there have been close to 1,000 studies on Sesame Street's educational influence. "The most recent longitudinal study I know of was done in the early '90s and published in the early 2000s," based on a low-income neighborhood in Kansas City, and showed a positive effect on the vocabulary and math skills of preschoolers who watched an average of two hours a week.

 

Cast and crew agree on one point: The show's educational value is expanded when a child watches with a parent or caretaker. "There are people who use the show as a babysitter, but that's not what it should be," says Emilio Delgado, who has played Luis Rodriguez, another human cast member, since 1971.

 

"The best way to extend learning beyond the hour of viewing is to have a parent co-viewing," Parente agrees. "That's why we have to have the best writers, true comedy writers who can also speak to the kids."

 

Adult-friendly references are key. Clash points out that when he first joined the show, in the early '80s, "We did a song with a Billy Idol Muppet. Now we just shot a takeoff on (HBO series) True Blood, called True Mud. We'll do a parody of whatever song or show is hot, to keep it topical."

 

The A-list celebrities who are regular guests also attract the post-preschool set. "Most often the kids don't even know who they are," Parente says. "We make sure we get all kinds, from sports stars to cultural figures. Sometimes we'll be able to introduce an adult as well as a child to, say, classical music."

 

Billy Joel knew a thing or two about classical music before tuning in with daughter Alexa Ray, now 23 and an aspiring singer/songwriter. "It was her favorite show, and we would watch it together," Joel says. "So when I had the opportunity to appear on it, I brought her with me. She was thrilled to meet all the Sesame Street characters."

 

Other luminaries who have stopped by Kaufman Astoria Studios, where Sesame has been shot since 1992, confirm that the Muppets are the true stars here.

 

Fallon still sounds a little awestruck describing Oscar's imprint on his younger self: "I loved him and wanted him to be nice so that people would like him. I rooted for him." Queen Latifah says joining Elmo on a Sesame Street special focusing on military families "was one of my most memorable TV experiences."

 

Clash remembers "walking down the hallway here once when I heard someone yell out my name: 'Kevin Clash!' It was Reese Witherspoon. That happens a lot; people in the entertainment industry will come on the show and then tell their friends about meeting us. It still blows me away."

 

The man who made Elmo an international icon isn't surprised by the Muppets' enduring appeal to grown-ups. Clash cites the work Jim Henson, the late Muppet mastermind, did before Sesame Street, "in commercials and on The Ed Sullivan Show. The Muppets were actually very rebellious characters; the stuff they did was pretty crazy, visually. They never felt like just a kiddie act."

 

The human characters have their own avid following. "There are generations of little ones who have grown up with us," Delgado says. "People will run into me on the street who are in their 30s or 40s, and it's, 'Luis! Luis!' "

 

Sonia Manzano, who plays Luis' wife, Maria, remembers "when Ray Charles would come on the show and it would be, 'Oh, my God, it's him.' Now I have these famous people coming up to me saying, 'Oh, my God, it's Maria!' "

 

"When Mrs. Obama visited us, we expected her to speak about her children's love of the show," Parente says. "But the first thing she did when she got here was to make a beeline for Roscoe Orman," who has played Gordon since 1974. "She saw this person from her own childhood, and wanted to give him a hug."

 

Cooney is clearly tickled, four decades on, to see a president and first lady whose childhoods were affected by her series. "I met President Obama at a fundraiser before he was elected, and he told me he would watch Sesame Street while babysitting his little sister."

 

Cooney chuckles. "I like to say, immodestly, that we got Barack Obama elected, because we were the first show to really deal with integration, certainly as it affected children. We've done things that no children's show had done before, in terms of showing life more as it is. We've dealt with all kinds of issues, without being too grim, and I think parents are grateful for that."

 

I really like the Google tributes that have been on their main page. In case you haven't seen them:

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