Sesame Street Lives!

Abstract

Sesame Street Lives! Carol Billman (bio) Though I doubt that anyone will question my title's assertion, a few corroborating facts might be welcome. Sesame Street, the program itself, has been on the public broadcasting airways for over twelve years—the first broadcast was during morning prime time in November 1969—and has as well been aired internationally, thanks to the powerful Communication Satellite Corporation (COMSAT). (I shall say more later about the Latin American variant, Plaza Sesamo.) At home, sure evidence of a show's success is its ability to reproduce: Sesame Street has spawned The Muppet Show and such specials as John Denver and the Muppets, shown this past Christmas season. These spinoffs suggest that Sesame Street has crossed not only national but generational lines, as do cartoons about the show that have appeared in magazines like The New Yorker and Saturday Review. Muppetmania has captured the wide screen as well as the small one. There is a Sesame Street Magazine. And like the Disney characters and the Ice Capades, the plush muppets created by Jim Henson and his associates are a traveling show that plays to audiences in civic arenas around the country. That they are an entrenched part of American "kid culture" can be verified by your own tour through any department store or chain retailer: toys, clothing, lunch boxes and other school paraphernalia that "quote" the show abound. Indeed, we literally consume the program. I have come across, without really looking, two local bakeries in Pittsburgh (one literally in the competition's—Mister Roger's—neighborhood) featuring elaborate Cookie Monster cakes. Reviews, articles, dissertations, and books galore have discussed the program over the past decade, and almost any writing on the broader subject of children's television includes the obligatory comparison with Sesame Street.1 Q.E.D., Sesame Street is more than popular. It has become a staple in our cultural heritage. Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch have a place in our common mythology, alongside Peter Pan and Tinkerbell, Alice and the White Rabbit, Dorothy and the Wonderful Wizard. The obvious question, in light of the show's attractiveness to critics as well as kids, is: what is left to say or do in yet another essay about Sesame Street? I have found three justifications for writing this essay and will spell them out, to suggest what you might expect to learn from what follows. First, because of the number of studies that have been conducted and described, it is useful to have a synthesis of the critics' reviews, and—more tellingly—of what aspects of the show they have attended to. Second, Sesame Street has changed over the years, and it is worth noting how the 1982 version compares with offerings of ten years ago. Third, and for me this is the crucial reason to revisit Sesame Street, serious analysis of television is only now beginning, and it behooves those of us interested in media and children to consider what theorists and scholars of television, using concepts and methodologies borrowed from such disciplines as linguistics, history and anthropology, psychology, art history, and literary theory, have said that can help us better understand the form and content of Sesame Street. No television program has been more thoroughly planned, researched, developed, and evaluated than Sesame Street. In Children and Television: Lessons from Sesame Street,2 the original Educational Director for the show, Gerald Lesser, chronicles the project from its inception when the Office of Education, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and several private foundations provided the original funds on March 15, 1968. He reports on the vast array of planning sessions held by the Children's Television Workshop as academics from Harvard and elsewhere, television professionals, and researchers at the Educational Testing Service honed the goals and strategies of the show. The emerging aims were elaborations of those Joan Ganz Cooney had summed up succinctly in her proposal for funding the Sesame Street project: "to promote the intellectual and cultural growth of preschoolers, particularly disadvantaged preschoolers."3 Most assessments of the program that has now become an institution have focussed on the approaches taken by Sesame Street's creators to teach basic intellectual skills...