Daniel makes stuff, and, in his spare time, writes about things like movies, kid culture, and geek stuff.
How "Sesame Street" Has Cleaned Up Over the Years

Any essay that starts out like this immediately gets my admiration:

In the early days of “Sesame Street” — that is, B.E. (Before Elmo) — Sesame Street was a pretty grimy place.

The brownstone at 123 Sesame Street looked like it needed a serious power washing, the storefront of Mr. Hooper’s shop was intentionally dingy and the Fix-It Shop’s window was cluttered with toasters. It was gritty, but gritty in a magical way.

Katie McLaughlin recounts for CNN how PBS’s “Sesame Street” – incidentally celebrating 40 years on the air this week – has “cleaned up” over the years. Cookie Monster no longer smokes a pipe, kids ride bikes with helmets, and the Street itself is a lot more sparkly-clean now – just an overall sanitation of the show which many adults remember as a much grittier, dirty world during it’s first two or three decades of existence.

It’s certainly true, there’s been a lot of changes to the show over the years. It’s hard to say whether the changes have been made because childhood itself is different today – or because we just think differently about childhood. Of course it’s never strictly one or the other, but my own inclination (especially after reading Michael Davis’s excellent “Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street”) is that the balance has skewed much more toward the latter as motivation for the changes, in a very unfortunate way.

Nov 07, 2009 :: Tagged under: , , :: #