Sesame Street at 40 Sing! the Music of Sesame Street Jim Henson & Friends
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To read Michael Davis’s book Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street is to be reminded how radically different the media landscape was back in 1966, when Joan Ganz Cooney, a producer for New York’s educational Channel 13, and Lloyd Morrisett, a vice president for the Carnegie Corporation, bonded over the idea for Sesame Street at a dinner party. Carnegie bankrolled a fact-finding tour on which Cooney interviewed teachers, pediatricians, psychologists, and child development specialists about how TV might teach learning concepts to preschoolers. CBS and NBC both passed on the proposed show, but the winds of the Great Society were at the producers’ backs: after President Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and authorized $9 million for programming (with another $1 million coming from Carnegie), Cooney and Morrisett were able to cobble together enough funds from the government and various foundations to create the nonprofit Children’s Television Workshop as a laboratory for their new show.
Sesame Street was radical for its time because, in contrast to the dry, classroom-bound programs of 60s public television, the new show would put across numbers and letters by exploiting the energy of commercial TV. The show’s nearest predecessor was CBS’s gentle Captain Kangaroo, but the creators were also enamored of ABC’s campy Batman, which appealed to both kids and hip adults, and NBC’s racy Laugh-In, with its wild mix of filmed skits and comic blackouts. Morrisett had noted his preschool daughter’s alacrity at memorizing TV jingles, which became the model for the show’s many talented songwriters (their catchy music is highlighted in Sing! The Music of Sesame Street). From the start the creators conspired to give ideas the punch and brevity of a product pitch. Every episode of their show would open with a mock commercial such as: “Sesame Street has been brought to you by the letter T and the number 8.”
By the time Sesame Street‘s 25th anniversary rolled around, the media landscape was much different from when the show began. For the past few years its ratings had been eroded by PBS’s cloying, Dallas-produced Barney & Friends, which was pitched to a younger audience. Viewership of Sesame Street was trending younger too, and for the show’s anniversary in 1994, David Britt, who’d succeeded Cooney as CEO of CTW, ordered an overhaul. Called “Around the Corner,” it expanded the Harlem street of the original set to include—just around the corner—a suburban playground similar to the spaces Barney the dinosaur and his little friends frolicked in. Child actors would replace the real kids whose interactions with the Muppets had provided some of Sesame Street‘s most charming moments. CTW also rolled out a new Muppet character, Zoe, to be performed by Fran Brill (who will attend the coming week’s screenings of Sesame Street at 40 and Jim Henson & Friends). Zoe was meant to satisfy the demand for a female role model on the show, but as Davis puts it, the character was “a plush toy in search of an identity, a carefully considered product that would be tested for its appeal with children in focus groups.”
Jim Henson & Friends: Inside the Sesame Street Vault Sun 11/14, 2 PM, and Sun 11/28, 4 PM
Sing! The Music of Sesame Street Sun 11/28, 2:15 PM, and Wed 12/1, 6 PM
Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, Chicago, 312-846-2800
The Reader is providing a reception following the Saturday, November 13 event, hosted by Fran Brill, Emmy Award-winning puppeteer, and Zoe, her muppet.
