Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, And this is Sesame Street edition, which this has been a long time coming.
Chuck. Yeah, and I don't know if you plan this or not, but our selects episode like the week before this comes out, I believe is Jim Henson.
I did not plan it. What No, I really didn't.
Wow, amazing.
That's Kermit, I mean Kismet cursemet, right, that's really cool.
Yeah, if you haven't listened to those, I mean, really, a couple of our greatest episodes ever in Stuff you Should Know Lore are our Muppet episodes and our Jim Henson up. So those are good primers if you haven't heard those yet.
Yeah, because this definitely touches on Jim Henson, because Jim Henson was a huge driver for Sesame Street initially, as we'll see. Yeah, well, let's talk a little bit about Sesame Street.
We should say what it is.
Probably, Yeah, although I would be really surprised if basically everyone listening wasn't at least familiar. But for those of you who aren't, that's fine. Sesame Street is a long running children's television educational program that started way back in nineteen sixty nine, was season one, and has spread all
over the world. I think it's in one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy countries, depending on who you ask, amazing, and even more than that, in thirty of those countries at least, there are what are called co productions where they have basically taken the ball and said, we're going to make our own version of Sesame Street in conjunction with the people who make Sesame Street and just kind of adapt it to local customs and culture.
More so, it's a global juggernaut, and it's basically globally beloved too.
Yeah, I mean not by everyone. I'm sure some people hate it.
I hope you're wrong.
Oh, I was just kidding, Okay, good, I think I think everyone has a soft spot at least for Sesame Street. I watched it for sure as a kid, but I wasn't like, I don't remember years and years and years and years of watching it. I moved on to Electric Company, which was felt like a little bit older, much more intellectual. Yeah, maybe a little bit. So I moved on to that
pretty quickly. But I did love Sesame Street and the Muppets, and it was, you know, right in our wheelhouse, even though it was you know, I guess it started just a few years where I was born.
Actually, sadly, yeah, but again, it's it's one of the longest running television shows in the history of the United States. It's up there with like General Hospital, like it's just been going forever. It's in season fifty five right now. It's been continuous every year since it started, and it is at least in the United States, but I would suspect in a lot of parts of the world it's basically a right of early childhood. It's a right of passage.
Like you just kind of grow up on Sesame Street, and then, like you said, I think as you start to age out of it, you move on to other stuff that was also produced by people who produce Sesame Street. Oh. I hope I don't start saying Semesi Street because that's just not going to work.
That might be the name of it in some country.
He never know. As we'll see, they do have some great names for it.
Maybe we should talk a little bit, just out of the gate about some of the biggest characters, most iconic characters, and when they were introduced, because not all of them have been around for the whole run, but from the very beginning in the first season, we got Big Bird.
I know we've talked about it, but there's a great documentary on Big Bird that you should watch if you're into that kind of hang Grover was right away, Kermit was in season one, although as you learned, Kermit was already on TV and other areas such that people are like, Kermit's a little I don't know if we're over him, but maybe a little overexposed. So they actually removed him after season one for a little while, right.
Yeah, I think they were concerned that he was too commercialized, he was too associated with advertising and halting products that they were like, this doesn't really have a place here.
Yeah. We also got Burton Ernie in season one, Oscar the Grouch, our friend in the trash can, the Cookie Monster, and then a couple of years later we got Aloysius Snuffaluphagus snuffle Upagus. Excuse me not A nice little factoid for your next dinner party is that he does have a first name, and it's Aloysious.
What about the count seventy two? What about Telly Monster?
This was seventy nine. I must not have been watching it that much at at eight years old, because I did not remember Telly Monster.
I remembered him, but he wasn't a big deal to me, So I don't Yeah, I don't know. I guess we'd cross pads.
Who helped? Was Dave help us with this?
No? This was doctor claw Oh, well, Laura Clawson.
Laura might have been into Tellymonster, so maybe that's why she listed it.
Well, I know he's kind of a big one, but I think even more than Telly by far as far as recognition goes, Elmo came along way earlier than I thought. He came along in nineteen eighty. Yeah, but he was just kind of a background character. I don't even think he necessarily had a name or any big speaking parts. But he eventually kind of caught on and became one of the more beloved muppets of all time.
Stay tuned for X three to learn how that happened. Yeah, how about a cliffhanger there, yep.
And then I guess we'll talk a little bit about the origins. We'll come back to some of the Muppet characters later on.
Yeah, we should mention the hardware, though, because they have won a staggering two hundred and twenty one Emmy Awards. I'm not going to degrade it by saying, well, they're daytime Emmys, but they are daytime Emmys, and you can rack up a lot of those over the years, But to twenty one over fifty five seasons, I don't care how you slice it. That's super impressive.
Zero Emmys, as do I which I'm kind of surprised neither one of us has an Emmy for the work that we've done.
Eleven Grammys pretty good, sure, and then a bunch of peabodies.
I believe that the last time they got an Emmy, the producer accepted it, just yawned on stage, and.
Water just threw it in a big room.
The rest of them, yeah, on the pile. So we should talk about the origins of all this because Sesame Street and the whole idea behind it grew out of two developing things in the mid nineteen sixties. One was President Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society, which was this ideal policy movement toward ending poverty and inequality, getting rid of crime, helping the environment, making a great society. As far as progressives were concerned, that was one thing that was going on.
So there was much more of an awareness. There was a little like they literally declared a war on poverty, so there was much more of an awareness of a difference between the advantage and the disadvantage, especially among children
in the United States at the time. And then on the other side of the coin, there was this growing awareness among psychologists and other educators that what had been previously neglected and ignored, which was the early childhood years, say between three and five, were really crucial to the
intellectual development of a kid. And so there came this idea to create television programming that was geared toward disadvantaged kids between ages three and five to help them, to give them kind of a leg up before they started schooling. That's pretty much the premise of where this whole thing came from.
Yeah, which I mean talk about a noble cause they were on board from the beginning, and well, as you'll see, you know, shortly they really put their money where their mouths were as far as doing actual research and studies to make sure they were doing what they intended to do precisely as the story goes. In nineteen sixty six, as far as origin, a woman named Joan Ganz Cooney and a dude named Lloyd Morrissett were at a dinner party and they started talking about TV and like, maybe
TV could educate kids. Cooney was in the newspaper biz. She started producing TV and then as soon as New York City he got a educational television station. She came on board and started working for them. And I think a documentary on a Harlem pre school was her first job and it really just got her hooks, got its hooks center as far as like, hey, TV can do something.
Different, Yeah, she said in a documentary called Street Gang. I think Colon Howie got to sesame Street. It was from twenty twenty one that she wanted to find out what television would do if it loved people instead of trying to sell the people.
Amazing.
Yeah, and this is a time where the FCC chair back in nineteen sixty one under JFK, his name was Newton Minno. He made a name for himself historically by saying that television was a vast wasteland. And I mean he was kind of right, there was some good stuff on at the time, but also there was some really bad stuff too, And it was I think what he
was ultimately saying. Though he wasn't critiquing the smartness of the sitcoms at the time, he was basically saying, like, there's nothing to be gained from, Like this is all just dumb escapism and advertising essentially is what TV is. And we hadn't really come a very long way for a long time.
Well we haven't. We have it one step forward, two steps back maybe.
Hey man, when they did away with the after school special, TV took a nose dive as far as I'm.
Concrete, As far as Morisset goes, he was a VP at the Carnegie Corporation, very smart guy. He had a PhD in psychology from Yale, and his sort of lore goes that he was watching his daughter, his young daughter, watch TV test patterns before you know broadcast started early one morning and he was like, oh my god, kids like they'll really watch anything if it's on a screen. This is not good.
No, he said to Joan Ganz Cooney. Isn't it ironic, don't you think?
Is he related?
No? I think she has an e at the end of her name.
No, I think you're right. I just wondered though, because she was in kids television.
Yeah, you can't do that on television.
Yeah, I was like, Oh, I wonder if there's a tie there, but I guess not.
She got slimed.
So they started doing a little research, and they got a grant through the Carnegie Corporation because Morissette was a VP there and he wrote a report about, you know, using TV is a good thing for preschool kids. They got another grant to develop like a more in depth pitch.
Basically did a lot more research. Again, they weren't just sort of writing from the dome, and in nineteen sixty eight they presented a proposal called Television for Preschool Children, and again on the premise that like, hey, all we're doing is like trying to sell stuff to people, Like what if TV treated them with respect and love instead?
Yeah, And I mean TV was a great way to get to kids already by the mid sixties I saw that. I think, oh, I don't remember what year it was, but around the time that these guys were starting, kids were averaging fifty four hours a week in front of the television. That's almost eight hours a day. That's a full workday of watching TV for kids. Yeah, so, I mean they were already tuned in. So the idea of like getting to them through the TV in a way that you're like you were trying to help them, to
educate them. That I mean it was radical for the time, but it also is just totally sensible. But like you said, they weren't just going on this idea like of course it's going to work. They tested this inside and out and what became the Children's Television Workshop, which is now
called SESAME Workshop. This collaborative of like writer producers, directors for the show, but also child psychologists, sometimes religious leaders, educators and also of like different races, ethnicities, all coming together to basically say, like, here are some things we can we like, here's goals we want to achieve in educating kids. We want them to learn cognitively, we want them to learn social graces, and like I think if we try this way or that way, we can actually
achieve that. But let's try this way and try that way and test them both and see which works best.
Yeah, for sure, And they they had to get kids to watch though, like all of this hard work would be it would be really really sad if kids just didn't tune in because you know, as we'll see, like PBS and its precursor, the National Education Television I guess network was you know, maybe not a lot of people watched it at the time, so they knew they had
to get eyeballs in front of it. So from their initial eight million dollars in funding from different foundations and some from the federal government, they spent nine hundred thousand dollars of that eight million to promote the show, which is a pretty staggering percentage out of the gate, and they had a bunch of all you know, they went to you know, regular media outlets of course, but they
also hit head start programs and churches and daycares. I think you found out that when like the week before the premiere, they hired trucks with like loudspeakers to just drive around you know a lot of urban neighborhoods, you know, advertising that it was coming on. And like you mentioned it from the onset, mister Jim Henson, coming aboard was also a big part of getting people to watch because the Muppets were already a thing.
Yeah, like we said, Kermit was already so commercialized he basically was removed from the show. But they've been around since the fifties. I think Jim Henson's first puppet gig was out of high schooler during high school, and he developed this stick pretty quickly, but it wasn't it wasn't
associated with kids. He would take it on like the Steve Allen Show or the Jack Parr Show, like late night TV and do like puppet skits that weren't at all geared toward kids, and very quickly started doing advertising with them as well. They just became a think muppets. People knew muppets before there was Sesame Street, so did land Jim Henson. He wasn't like some mega star, you know, he was no C. C. Deville at the time, but
he was well known. So it was kind of like they landed a bit of a whale by getting Jim Henson fully involved in developing and executing or I should say, producing Sesame Street initially.
You know what, I think I got the poison reference wrong in that episode recently.
That's why I said that CC.
Deville is a guitarist. Ricky Rockett was a drummer.
You got that straight finally.
Talk dirty to me.
One of the reasons why, also, Chuck, it was so big to bring Henson on was because from that research, and today this seems totally normal, But this grew out of the children's television workshop. Research was that puppets and animation really got kids going. It really jazzed them. You really got their attention. And as we learned from the editorial cartoon episode, that's because they're super stimuli. So the
jet kids up. And then weirdly, some of the child psychologists involved in the development of the show, we're like, Okay, that's fine, we need puppets, but the humans and the puppets can never interact, they can never communicate. It will scare the Bejesus out of the children if they do. And I guess somebody was like, that's a pretty ridiculous thing, and that got thrown away even before the pilot episode ran.
Well, no, they actually tested it with kids and learned that the kids were not interested in the adult only sections. Yeah, so they actually had real, real data. So they tried it out and it just didn't work.
No, And they should have known too. I mean, this, like Sesame Street, was pretty groundbreaking in that it was an educational show, But there are already kids shows like Mister Rogers had been around for a year before it debuted,
Captain Kangaroo had been around since nineteen fifty five. But what made it different is that those shows were generally like anti school and they encourage kids to explore a life of crime, whereas Sesame Street was like, no, let's go to school and be the best kind of people we can.
Now, can we take a break? Yes, all right, great, we'll come back and talk a little bit about what happened on November tenth, nineteen sixty nine, right after this, all right, so I promised a specific date in mind, November ten, nineteen sixteen, again a year before, roughly before PBS came out, a show like this would air on something called the National Education Television And that's when it aired, Tada, and it was a hit right out of the gate,
almost seven million viewers in season one. Ernie had a big hit song with rubber Ducky actually charted at number sixteen on the Billboards in September nineteen seventy and was nominated for a Grammy. And they used to do a ton of these episodes. They had one hundred and thirty episodes a season for a while, and then further reduction in funding kind of over the years trimmed it down and by the time they hit the two thousands, they were down to thirty episodes a year. But you know,
I mentioned test pilots and James Earl Jones was. You know, it kind of depends on who you talked to. He was in one of those test pilots. So some people say he was the first celebrity guest on Sesame Street, but the actual real episode one season one was featured as the first guest.
Yes, and Carol Burnett was laughing while she was counting to ten. James Earl Jones was just staring at the camera doing the alphabet in almost a really creepy way. Have you seen it? Oh yeah, it's great.
Yeah, And that pilot was called the title of it was Gordon introduces Sally to Sesame Street. And the other I mean, in my opinion, oddball human that appeared in episode one season one was magician James Randy. Oh really, yeah, pretty cool?
That is cool. Was he just doing magic or teaching kids to be skeptics?
I think he was just doing magic, Okay, I didn't watch the whole episode, but I just thought that was kind of fun.
But the reason James Earl Jones was on there and shortly after Harry Bellefonte and a lot of other black celebrities very early on, was because, again the show initially was geared toward a disadvantage inner city black kids who had just been totally overlooked and forgotten. So they wanted to show people that looked like them on TV and
so they could learn from them. So it was really kind of, I don't want to say, like geared toward black kids, but there was way more for the average three or four year old black kid growing up in America at the time that they could find anywhere else on TV. The thing is it was also designed for everybody, for every kid, so any kid could come along and
enjoy it, and that was actually seen. Apparently Sesame Street is based on Harlem, I guess, And they originally had one name for it, which was I think was it one two three B Street or b Avenue? No, No, I think it was, And so people were like, that sounds really New York and it's going to turn off everybody outside in New York. Everyone in New York will love it. But you know, so they expanded it to Sesame Street eventually so that everybody could could appreciate it more.
Yeah, and part of the racial diversity was a problem in some places in the United States at the time. Their human characters, Gordon and Susan were a black couple, and the state of Mississippi said, not in my state, that's not going to be on television. And because it is a you know, PBS is a public thing, the state kind of shut that down. The State Commission did and banned it. It only took twenty two days for
that to be reversed. But take heart that a local NBC affiliate stepped up during that three weeks and aired those episodes even in Mississippi.
I think that's so cool, man, Yeah, that's great.
So.
Yeah, the first the original human cast were Gordon and Susan, a black couple, and then mister Hooper and Bob, both of them were white, and mister Hooper ran the store. Bob was a music teacher, Gordon was a science teacher, and Susan originally started out as a housewife, developed into a nurse, and then finally became a working mom later on.
Yeah, It took a couple of years to get Latina representation because initially, in the first couple of seasons, Chicano activists and Puerto Rican activists were like, hey, where are we in this show? And so by season three we got Maria and Luis. You did mention Gordon. Originally that was a guy named Matt Robinson, but he left the show kind of co created this character with Jim Henson named Roosevelt Franklin, and he was purple, but he was sort of a black coated muppet because he spoke using
African American vernacular English. And while some people was like, no, this is great as a role model and it's real, other people were like, no, that's a negative stereotype. You know. I think it would be different today, but for the time that didn't go over so well.
No, and the fans of Arrested Development will probably recognize Franklin Joe Blust's puppet. He was based on Roosevelt Franklin. And because of that, I was when I started to watch clips of Roosevelt Franklin, the origin the muppet, I was like, this is gonna be awful. It was not. It's actually quite ridiculous that they got rid of him because he was a really well developed black character. Yeah, it's just perplexing that they cave to that because he was a good character.
Yeah, did you say Job or gob Bluth? Oh?
Yeah, I said Job. Didn't I go just stop the listener mails right now. No, it's Job.
I thought it was Gob No no, or Is that just one of the jokes.
Yeah, yeah, because his his that's it's an acronym, George something Bluth.
Okay, I thought there was a joke on there at some point about gob, but I might just be wrong on that.
It's been a man, It has been a while, so you could be right too.
Don Music was another character they got rid of that was a Don Music was a composer. It would get frustrated and bang his head on the piano keys and parents are like, hey, my kid is banging their head on piano keys and stuff, and we got to get this character out of there. So they got rid of Don Music pretty early on a hiss way.
Well poor Don. Yeah, so there's as this is like nothing unusual for Sesame Street. They started doing that from the outset right like they started like there. It started off with a black and white cast, and I mean that was still kind of strange or unusual for TV in America, but they keep doing it. And what's kind of saddening is every time they do it, it's like, Oh my god, I can't believe how great this is
that they're including this character. And then there's another segment of the public who's like, I can't believe they're including that character. It's just sad either way. I think it's both kind of sad because what they're doing. What Sesame Street does is they say there's a group of people out there who are being neglected, that kids that were talking to interact with, and we need to bring them on just to normalize and because they're just normal people
and we need to show that. So they've they've introduced a number of characters that proved to be controversial over the years. What I like about Sesame Street, with the exception of Roosevelt Franklin, they basically just stay mute on it and they're like, you guys, sort it out. We're going to just do our thing over here.
Yeah, for sure. And this is you know, pretty early on too. In nineteen seventy eight, they had a character with down syndrome who was in Preschool's name was Jason Kingsley and was the son of a writer, Emily Kingsley for Sesame Street, and so all of a sudden they started having more kids with you know, challenges and disabilities. They've had kids that are hearing impair, They've had kids
in wheelchairs. Over the years, recently they've kind of brought it into the modern age for you know, issues that kids face sadly more and more of these days. One character had food insecurity and eventually homelessness.
Yeah, that's Lily.
Yeah. And another whose father was in prison, and then another kid who was in foster care because her mother is battling opioid addiction. So they're I mean, they've never been afraid to bite off some really really tough stuff that sadly, kids have to deal with, and they know they have to deal with this stuff, so they're not backing away from it.
Yeah. One of the other things that Susame Street does when it introduces like a muppet like this is shine a light on the fact that this is an actual thing, Like they're not like what obscure terrible situation can we find and base them uppet on. Apparently in the United States, two point five million children are homeless at any given time, two point six one million children have a father or a parent who's in prison, and another one point four
million have a parent addicted to opioids. So it's not like these are niche topics that niche puppets are built on. These are real challenges that a lot of little kids in the United States face, Whether yeah, you consider it tasteful or not.
Yeah, for sure. You know, we mentioned that they put their money where their mouth is as far as continuing to do research and study about you know, its effect on kids and potential outcomes, because that was, you know, that was the mission statement from the very beginning. So they couldn't just be like, we're doing a great job,
so we're good. They got into Educational Test the Educational Testing Service to do a study after just season one, and they sampled nine hundred and forty three kids from urban areas and then one rural area. And the kids there were, you know, disadvantaged kids in urban areas and
rural areas. There were Spanish speaking kids, there were advantage suburban kids in this study, and they found that kids really did learn from the show, and that the more you watch the more they learned and the more they knew, which was pretty great.
Yeah, that was that was season one, right. Yeah, so they went back and said, let's figure out if this worked. There was a twenty thirteen study that kind of recreated it intentionally or otherwise, but rather than looking at the United States, they took it on an international scale, and it was a meta analysis of twenty four studies that had been on the effects of Sesame Street and all combined.
This meta analysis looked at ten thousand children in fifteen different countries, so it was a pretty robust study, and they found the same thing, that there were significant positives associated with kids watching Sesame Street, and that kids who watched more perform better in school, and that this effect carried no matter the income level of the country, low income,
middle income, high income country, doesn't matter. The effects were the same, and it hit three different outcomes cognitive outcomes, learning about the world, and social reasoning, and basically it just turned every single one of these ten thousand children into a superchild.
Yeah, there was one, well, just why they have the s on their.
Chest right Testame Street Superchild.
Another study. I thought this one was pretty striking to me because they could actually do a fairly direct ab comparison. The American Economic Journal, for Melissa Kearney and Philip Levine did at because they were like, hey, wait a minute. In those early years, there were UHF stations in VHF stations, and some areas had some, and then you know, a couple of neighborhoods over another, you know they may not
have the same access. So they could literally compare districts in elementary schools and outcomes with people who did not have the show at all and people who had it, and they found it the show actually did improve outcomes, and that the positive effect of the show was particularly pronounced for boys and black, non Hispanic children and children who grew up in other counties who had economic disadvantage.
So it was literally helping and targeting the kids that they were hoping to target while also being good for everyone overall.
Yeah, and one specific outcome I saw, just for an example, and that study was that the kids who watched Systame Street were fourteen percent more likely to be in an age appropriate grade in middle school or high school, so they hadn't been held back, or they were fourteen percent likely to have not and held back then kids who didn't watch it.
Yeah, it's pretty great.
Yeah, it's statistically significant.
Yeah, this is a pretty good quote too. The New Republic. Their quote is that Sesame Street was essentially the first MOAK massive online open course, providing educational content to viewers for free, and a twenty fifteen white paper from the Early Childhood Education Group said it's one of the largest and least costly interventions.
Yeah, and you might be like with New Republic, it's a pretty liberal rag of course. Of like sesame Street. We found a quote from the National Review, which is about what conservative and the National Review called sesame Street the one great thing accomplished by lbj's Great Society, which is a hilarious quote, and that was in twenty twenty one.
Just one thing, right, Hey, it's good for sesame Street though.
Yeah, that's what I was saying. Everybody loves Sesame Street. So I guess we'll press on chucking plug into the rest of the world, because, like we said, shows up in one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy countries, and there's at least thirty co productions around the world, and it turns out they're really fun to read. About and talk.
About they really are, because, like you said, you know, depending on the country, they're going to tailor it for their country and have characters that reflect things kids might recognize. So if you go to Israel and watch Oscar the Grouch, you'll see that Oscar's name Moisha Ufnik. Pretty good name. It means grouch and Hebrew.
Yeah, but you probably won't see Oscar the Grouch or Count von Count in Afghanistan. Afghanistan has its own co production called My Best Attempt is boch E Simpson, and they have cultural taboos against trash and vampirism. So Oscar and the Count don't really translate to the Afghani version of Sesame.
Street the simsims right, I wonder if that's the theme.
Yeah, there's the sesame in Arabic or Arabic like languages or Arabic related languages, simpsim or sumsum has it seems to be what sesame is.
Yeah, I think so.
So if you ever run across a trivia question that says what is sesame and Arabic, you'd better say simsim.
Yeah, sims i am if spelling counts one word. If you go to the UK, and you said cookie monster, they'd say, I think you mean biscuit monster, of course, because biscuits are cookies over there. And if you go to Latin America, you might not see Big Bird, but you might see Abe Lardo, who is Big Bird's cousin. It's a giant parrot.
Yeah. So you've got like different characters or the same characters with different names, or characters that just don't show up. But there's also characters that are just totally new, and they kind of follow the original Sesame Street's program of like, let's include people who are stigmatized or left out. And so the South African version of Sesame Street Takalani. Yeah, I don't know why I had trouble saying that. Takilani
sesame delicious. Yeah. They included a character named Kami. Kami is based on the word kamogello, which means acceptance in some South African indigenous languages like Zulu. And the reason they did that is because Kami is an HIV positive orphan of a mother with aides who died. And this is a muppet who is basically playing with other muppets to show little kids that you don't have to be fearful of having a friend who is HIV positive. It's
not dangerous to play with them. And in South Africa that was very controversial because a lot of people have HIV in South Africa, but it's still very stigmatized. So of course Sesame Street in South Africa was like, let's get Kami in there.
They could probably have an American version of that same character, or at least in the eighties they could.
I read that there was a letter written by a small panel of Congress people to PBS basically saying, don't even think about it. Oh boy.
Since ninety eight there was a there's been an Israeli Palestinian co production which is super unique obviously called Rekoff some some oh yeah, or Shars Simson, like you said, and this is pretty great. It's Israelian Palestine Palestinian kids together and we they're from separate streets, but they get together and hang out and play and talk. And when they do, the language, you know, either Hebrew or Arabic,
has translated in subtitles into the other language. And they weren't just like, oh, we'll just pat ourselves on the back for this. They were trying to accomplish something. So they measured outcomes again and did studies, and they found that watching the show made kids in that area more likely to use positive terms to describe kids on the other side of that conflict.
And Sesame Street, we should just say that after every every great thing we talk about them.
Yeah. And you know, actually there's a quote that kind of goes along with that. Andrew S. Nazios, who led us AID under George W. Bush, he said the Arabic language version of the show was the quote biggest weapon against al Qaeda and Islamic extremism.
Yeah. I thought about that too, that like, you're using Sesame Street to spread essentially global good, basic human values in places where those are sometimes in short supply. You know, Yeah, I think that's cool. And then that one, the Arabic version you just mentioned it, it's called Alain Simpson. They use that in Syrian refugee camps because little kids in Syrian refugee camps schools were canceled because the government dropped
chemical weapons on their town. But they're still getting to watch this Arabic version of Sesame Street to make sure that they're not left behind.
Yeah, and you know, since we're here, before we break. We might as well mention that the Sesame Workshop is a nonprofit that gets part of their funding through the US federal government through the USAID program, and just I think a couple of months ago, the current administration announced that obviously Usaid and by the way, episode coming up on that soon on, that organization is being cut at the behest of the Department of Government Efficiency. So Sesame
Street is going to lose a lot of funding. And the current president said the Arabic language version was part of hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud. But the good news is is that it accounts for only four percent of their total funding. So hopefully, I mean, they were pretty much called off guard and are scrambling a bit, but hopefully that it's not like the end of Sesame Street.
No. I saw it as in real dollars, about five million dollars. But the problem is that's still a significant Like they're operating at a deficit, so they basically need every dollar they can get, so it's still hitting them four Yeah, So I think in March twenty twenty five, they announced that they were having to lay off employees, which is not something that happens all the time at Sesame Street, although I'm sure they've tackled it plenty of times.
Yeah, maybe there was an episode about it.
Probably should we take a break. I just want to throw out one more. We talked about the Afghani version of Sesame Street. In twenty sixteen, they have featured they debut a girl mupet named Zari who goes to school wearing a h job. Yeah pretty great, yep, take that Taliban.
All right, Well we're gonna take that second break, and we're gonna wrap it up here right after this fish.
So chuck. Before we broke, I was talking about how Sesame Street probably has tackled the episode of being fired parent being fired right. The reason why is because they have a long history of tackling tough topics that date back pretty far. I think in nineteen eighty two. That's usually where people trace the origin of Sesame Street, just taking on very adult themed episodes that kids sometimes have to deal with head on. With the death of mister Hooper who brand Hooper's.
Store, Yeah, I mean I have a hard time even talking about this one. It was nineteen eighty two. Actor Willie who played mister Hooper passed away in irl, and they were like, let's not replace him, Let's use this as an opportunity to teach kids about death and grief and Big Bird. They aired it on Thanksgiving, so parents, you know, were more likely to be home. They got together like with again, they weren't just like, hey, let's
just the white writers whip something up. They got together with religious leaders and child psychologists kind of figure out the best way to do this, and they decided on Big Bird kind of taking the lead in saying very sadly, I want to give mister Hooper a picture that I drew when he comes back. And that's when they're like, big Bird, I've got some bad news for you, my friend.
Yeah, Gordon famously rolled his eyes.
Yeah, he's not coming back. Death is permanent. And it was a huge, huge deal for not just Sesame Street, but just how we talk to kids about this kind of thing, you know.
Yeah, because it took kids seriously, as you know, thinking feeling individuals, because they taught they discussed replacing him with a new mister Hooper and just pretending like it wasn't a different actor, or saying mister Hooper retired and he's not coming back, but he's retired, not dead, and they're like, no, let's use this opportunity. It is really tear jerking to watch.
Yeah, in nineteen eighty five, another big lesson came along. When you know, if you haven't seen the show, mister Snuffalopagus is this sort of big I don't even know what you call it, kind of a big, long haired monstery thing.
But it got to touch a bully mammoth I think.
Yeah, But big Bird, Snuffalupagus was Big Bird's imaginary friend, and the adults like, couldn't see this imaginary friend. And in that episode he was seen by the rest of the cast and they were like, hey, maybe this can inspire kids who are maybe child abuse victims that you don't need to fear that adults won't believe you if you reveal something to them. And so, you know, they tackled it through Snuffalopagus all of a sudden becoming a real thing to the adults on the show.
Yeah, because he always had been real, but anytime Big Bird tried to introduce some people, he would just not be there for some reason or another. So he was real and when they apologized to him, I think Bob the music teacher said, we'll believe you whenever you tell us something. From now on Big Bird, Like they really kind of drove it home, beat the little kids over the head with this.
They also tackled nine to eleven, not in a direct way by like talking about the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, but it was a show very clearly centered around kids and you know, dealing with like a big sort of shared tragedy and how they might go about that.
Oh, let's see what else. Another part of that too is there was a fire at Hooper's store. They didn't show the fires just offscreen. They mentioned it, they referenced it happening, and some firefires show up to put it out, and Elmo is just freaked out by this. So the firefighters stop and like comfort him and tell them it's okay, and they helped deal with that kind of I don't know. I think the message was listen to firefighters because they're all.
Right, yeah, great message. Kids left fire trucks anyway, so they're halfway there, right. They also dealt with like kids who have parents in the military that are off at war. At one point, they've had episodes on hurricanes and like dealing with a natural disaster like that. And they even dealt with the COVID nineteen pandemic in twenty twenty because kids were at home watching a lot of TV, and you know, their parents are pretty stressed out. So they had a special episode all about COVID.
Yeah, including when the vaccines came out. Big Bird and I think everybody else got vaccinated. Big Bird had a band aid on his wings, So my wing hurts a little bit. But other than that, I'm okay. Yeah.
So you mentioned the problems with the funding. It started in the mid eighties. They had reports that expenses were going to outpace revenues. Perhaps they do a lot of licensing. I think about two thirds of their revenue comes from lining licensing to like books and toys and things. The Monster at the end of this book is a classic children's book with Grover as the center character.
My favorite Grover book. One of my favorite books growing up was Grover and the Everything in the World Museum. Did you ever that one?
Uh uh?
It might have been after your time, but I love that book. It's drawing in there is so great, and it's just it's all Grover.
Yeah. They've been talking about, you know, the recent cuts are one thing, but they've been talking about, you know, reducing funding and have funding somewhat over the years for a long time, though I believe twenty fifteen they were operating at a loss, maybe for the first time, and so HBO stepped up and said, hey, you know what, if you give us a jump on PBS, we'll pay you some pretty good money. So they got the episodes
nine months before PBS. But in December of last year of twenty twenty four, Warner Brothers Discovery said, you know what, We're not gonna We're not gonna do that deal anymore. We can license back episodes still, or we want to still, but the deal has concluded, and I think that also put them in a bit of a money bind.
Yeah, so I guess HBO Max agreed to take season twenty or six season fifty five, which is currently out now, but they're not taking season fifty six and the Sesame workshops, like, well, we're still going to make a season fifty six. Who wants to buy new episodes, brand new episodes of Sesame Street? So it's up for up for auction right now. I didn't see any interested buyers, but I mean the idea of Sesame Street is going away because no one's going
to put it on the air. Is mind bogglingly sad to me, and I just don't think it's going to happen.
The stuff you should know production there you go.
Do you have pool or money together?
One hundred million bucks or something? What would that cost?
I don't know, but I'll bet we could get it out of Jerry. I don't know. I don't think it's going to be one hundred million bucks because that's like all of their operating costs for a year. And I mean they get a lot of their money from licensing toys and pajamas and all that stuff. So when you buy those things, you're actually directly helping Sesame Street.
That's where I get my pajamas.
Yeah, I'll bet we could get it for twenty million right now. The problem, Mischuck is we don't have anywhere to show it. I think that's a big obstacle we would have to overcome as well.
Oh, we could cut a deal.
Okay, Well god knows how much that's going to cost us, but we can. We'll figure it out.
Maybe we should finish up with some sort of random sort of factoids that you might want to share with your friends. Here's a pretty fun stat The characters on Sesame Street are some of the most recognizable in the world and certainly in the US. Seventy five percent of people under fifty five told a Yuga poll that they even have a favorite character.
Do you want to know the top ten in order? Sure? Yes, who's your favorite? We never said who our favorites were?
Uh, I don't remember. I used to like the Count.
Yeah, he was great. Oooh that's a good count. Cookie Monsters number one, yeah, almost number two, Big Birds number three, I guess makes sense. Grover number four. Grover is my favorite, The Count, mister stuffle up against Ernie, and then Bert and then Abby, which is a newer character. I think I'm not sure when she came along, and then the last one. Number ten is other.
My favorite. So the title, if you're wondering where that came from, it was from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Open Sesame. Cooney is on record saying that that was probably the least bad title, and we thought, you know, open Sesame. We felt like we were opening children to knowledge and education. So it's kind of a kind of a weird little origin, but it just I can't think of it as anything else.
Yeah, and lucky for them, it translates pretty well in Arabic.
Simpson, what was the what was the Mexican version called that had a great.
Name, Plaza Sesimo? I love that? Yeah, I do too.
Can you tell me how to get there?
Though? Well that I'm glad you brought that up. I was looking up stuff about the theme song. It turns out there's not much interesting about it other than it debuted on the first episode and has been you know, toyed with or altered here there over the years. But it's the same theme song in every episode of Sesame Street. Yeah, ten million episodes.
We got a shout out the writers, the music by Joe Riposo and lyrics by Riposo and Johnstone and Bruce Hart.
Nice. Pretty nice of you. And then did we talk about Tickle Me Elmo?
Well, no, this is the third actor reveal.
Okay, so we talked about Elmo by suddenly becoming very famous. The reason why is because in nineteen ninety six the Tickle Me Elmo doll became like the must have Christmas toy. And I know we've talked about it in one of our Christmas episodes. But let's just briefly mention it again.
Yeah, I mean thank you Rosio o donald for this one. Tickle me Elmo came on Rosio o' donal, and it was a big, big deal. This may have been a black Pridy episode thing too, because trying to buy those Elmos at the time was a thing. There was stampeding, people went to the hospital. There were people selling them on the black market for like really high prices. So Elmo was a overnight sensation, like you know, sixteen years after or I guess twelve years after his debut.
Yeah, fourteen years ted come it. Also, Elmo is the only non human to testify before Congress. That's right on behalf of music education in school. I got two more things. Just want to call out Julia, a four year old muppet with autism who's been around since twenty seventeen. And then apparently this year season fifty five, one of the big themes that they're tackling are big feelings and kids
dealing with them. And they're even debuting a new muppet who's teaching kids like breathing techniques to call themselves down.
That's great.
And then last thing I have is if you want a little dose of nostalgia, go watch the full common compilation of the Pinball count songs. Remember those three four pots, six, seven, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
Well, I don't remember that.
I came out in seventy six, so yeah, you probably have moved on to Electric Company by then. You're like, that's baby stuff. It's great, you should watch it. The animation in it is beautiful, beautifully seventies. It's great.
Yeah, I love it.
Anything else.
Yeah. In two thousand and five, that was a bit of a stir because Cookie Monster, you know, was known for just ravaging cookies and stuffing them in his face and crumbs flying everywhere, and that's the beauty of Cookie Monster. But people were like, you know, maybe it's not such a good idea to have a character that's just binge
eating sugar, right and sweets and treats. So they use Cookie Monster as an impulse control model for moderation, and a cookie became a sometimes food from Cookie Monster, And of course people are going to be like, what are you kidding me? Is this gonna be Veggie Monster next? And there were letter writing campaigns and there was a petition and all this stuff and Veggie Monster was never
gonna be a thing. They were just I guess they just filed those complaint letters in the circular file and it's like settled down, everybody.
I got one more I overlook, do you want to hear it? Sure? This is our Kane. But Telly remember Telly Monster we talked about, Yes, but no, Okay, So Telly has a hamster named Chucky Sue and he used to have a stuffed animal horse named Clark.
Oh how about that?
Yeah, pretty neat. Huh Yeah, total coincidence too, is from the nineties, both of them.
Yeah, just like that. Hints and up just coming out.
Yeah, lots of Kermit kurs since I said Kursman, of course, everybody. That means it's time for listener mail. Yeah.
This is a little bit on libraries from name reducted. Hey, guys, love the many on alternative libraries. I'm a member of the board my local library and my wife is a school librarian. I want to salute and celebrate our librarians who are largely thought of as old ladies with buns and cat eye glasses, but they are actually on the front lines of the fight for the first Amendment in many ways. My local library has a teen room whose librarian is collecting the LGTBQ books discarded by other libraries
because of certain bad actors. The librarian at the high school I work has sent red cards telling our heavily immigrant population what to say if ice immigrants show up at their door or stop them on the way to school, and apparently his wife. The librarian has to really get involved in reference searches these days because of like you know, book banning and just getting rid of certain educational proposals. So one of our favorite t shirts says, what is
more punk than the local library? So thanks guys for all you do and keep it up. And that is from name reducted.
Thanks name redacted. I know we talked about that some in our band on Books episode. Yeah, but yes, you can't say it enough. God bless librarians for making sure that people are educated as we can be for free.
That's right, perfect fit for this episode.
Two. Yeah, I thought so too. Well, if you want to get in touch of this, like name or d acted did, you can tell us your name or not doesn't matter, We'll clearly protect you. You can send it via email, probably encrypted if you want to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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