Sesame: Life on the Street
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
Raymond Chandler was, of course, describing Kermit the Frog.
Certainly, the current landlords of Sesame Street might disagree, according to an article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine:
Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street� are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.
Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School� is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.�
Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?� asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.
Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.
Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official� and “two billion in credit over the next five years� — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.
The old “Sesame Street� is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World� started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street� might hurt your feelings.
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,� how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.� Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior� — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.�
Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street� that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,� she said.
Note that the evil liberal media elite writer thinks that maybe the producer may be overreacting a tad.
I do too, to put it mildly. I’m hoping my clone, James, will be able to be properly traumatized by old school Sesame Street, and have placed both DVD sets on his Amazon wish list, along with equally damaging classic Looney Tunes, Fraggle Rock and the Dini/Timm Batman, Superman and Justice League cartoons.
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Great Chandler quote… I used to keep that one pinned to a corkboard over my desk… Good stuff.
And damn, Sesame Street… You used to be a tough old bastard.
J
Comment by John — November 21, 2007 @ 14:43