How long sesame street been on

The show looked like someone had randomly cut together outtakes from an underground film festival. Eventually, the children who absorbed the Sesame Street style as preschoolers would go on to make MTV, Nickelodeon cartoons and viral videos.

But what Sesame Street was doing was thinking about how best to reach its audience, in ways the rest of TV at the time was slower to account for. Laugh-In was the hippest show on the air in , and it petered out by From its early years to now, the show has taken its cues from one of its most memorable songs: Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?

Simple human dignity, what people do all day and why. These are useful things for anyone to understand, at any age. And for comic relief? Pre-Sesame, Henson and his team had been working in television for over a decade, delivering whimsical humor to commercials and variety shows.

But they were even better at getting laughs, with their spindly-limbed slapstick and funny voices. Remember the baker with an unwieldy pile of cakes? The old guard was beginning to leave the show. It is a commonplace that a person cannot serve two masters, but for its first 30 years or so, Sesame Street really seemed to do exactly that. The show had always been steered by both a strenuous commitment to evidence-based testing and a crew with a shared vision for what the show should be.

But over the course of the s, Sesame Street began to lose its institutional memory. The keepers of that oh-so-important vision started to disappear, replaced with a new generation. This new generation had grown up on the program in many cases, and many of them were quite talented.

The new millennium has not been especially kind to television, generally. Consumers have expanding media options with the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets. Seemingly trying to fight these broader trends, Sesame Workshop made newer Muppet monster characters more central to the program.

Like Elmo, these characters tended to skew younger than the original Muppet cast. As Elmo, Zoey, Rosita and Abby Cadabby gained more screen time, older human cast members appeared less. Orienting the show toward a younger audience has also had the seemingly unintended consequence of making the human actors play their parts even more broadly than the original cast did.

In the current cast, Chris Knowings and Suki Lopez often seem to be mirroring the immature house style of the Disney Channel.

In , the Sesame Workshop announced that it would partner with HBO , granting first-run rights to the pay cable network for a six-month window. Many were saddened to see a show that had been a staple of PBS since its beginning retreating behind a paywall, but it was also a savvy decision.

It brought in money and, hopefully, new eyeballs. The new programs are only a half-hour, a more friendly chunk of time in the contemporary economy of streaming and screen time. The show that Sesame Street has become is, as I said before, gentrified.

The set used today lacks the signs of use, wear and damage. It uses more brightly colored paint that has proven more eye-catching to young children. The contrast between the original set and the contemporary set is dramatic. It is also a much less recognizable, organic-feeling urban community. Hooper, an ethnically Jewish working-class shopkeeper with a distinct accent who had clearly lived there all his life, let his customers put groceries on their tabs and tried to learn Spanish as he worked on his GED at night school.

Muppets can be marketed; Muppets can be sold. At the end of the day, the show needs toy and merchandise sales to stay viable, and young children want stuffed monsters. My daughter has a stuffed Elmo that she loves, almost as much as my sister Antoinette loved her stuffed Grover at the same age.

All of these shifts, as I look at them, seem logical. But all of this still makes me sad, not just because of nostalgia, but because it means that the new Sesame Street looks a lot less like the neighborhood I am raising my daughter in. I grew up in an almost exclusively white town of under 5, in rural Ohio. My neighborhood did not look at all like Sesame Street. But I kind of wished it did. Because far more than any other media I can recall from my youth in the early s, Sesame Street presented an aspirational vision of a utopian urbanism and did so when most cultural representations of urbanity were viscerally dystopian.

There was a superabundance of hope on Sesame Street. And cooperation, and love. And counting. And I want my daughter to be able to watch episodes of Sesame Street where she can see a neighborhood that looks like the one she is growing up in: where the actors look like our neighbors, and the street looks a bit like our street.

And thanks to YouTube video archivists, she can. The fashions are a bit dated, a few of the technological references are pretty outmoded, but at the end of the day, Sesame Street has aged very well. The lessons, from letters and numbers to accepting and loving your neighbors, sharing, being patient — these things are timeless. But that in no way detracts from her enjoyment of the old episodes. She gets to live in a world with multiple Sesame Streets. But I have to ask myself — could Sesame Workshop maybe do better?

But what if it made the 50 years of quality educational programming more widely available? Access has to be an important part of the archival mission, along with collection and preservation. Sesame Workshop has been the beneficiary of so much public and charitable funding. PBS and HBO both want rights to the recent years, and it seems that contracts with Amazon and Hulu would likely preclude anything after the year And what if they further were able to secure full or even partial rights on some of their many international co-productions?

Suddenly you would have a multilingual one-stop Sesame shop. Sesame Workshop tried to capitalize on these early episodes during the run of Sesame Street Unpaved on the Noggin network, but their partnership with Noggin was dissolved. Similarly, they have packaged DVDs of old episodes, but we seem to have entered an age of streaming for the foreseeable future.

With no obvious plans to capitalize on the back catalog, why not make it freely available for all to stream? She also wanted to use TV as a way to help underprivileged 3- to 5- year-olds prepare for kindergarten.

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