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Sesame Street today - not for kids

Now this is sick -- a perfect example of how PC today's society has gotten and how wrong it is... From Slashdot comes this story: Sesame Street DVD Deemed Adult-Only Entertainment

"The earliest episodes of Sesame Street are being made available on DVD, but the NYT notes Volumes 1 and 2 carry a rather strange warning: 'These early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child.' So why are they unsuitable for toddlers in 2007? Well, in the parody 'Monsterpiece Theater,' Alistair Cookie � played by Cookie Monster � used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. 'That modeled the wrong behavior,' explained a Sesame Street executive producer, adding that 'we might not be able to create a character like Oscar [the Grouch] now.'"

The link at the Slashdot story goes to this article by Virginia Heffernan at the NY Times:

Sweeping the Clouds Away
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.

They even redacted and altered some episodes:

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.

Kids are not that dumb - they don't need the protection of the helicopter parents. Read the original Grimm's Fairy Tales - that was meant for kids to read and is really deep and scary. One of the commenters at Slashdot summed it up nicely:

This castration is why my children were never able to become interested in Sesame Street - while as a 5-year-old in the late-sixties, I loved it.

In subtle ways, it began to condescend and pander. The muppets, in particular, suffered from the loss of Kermit and Henson.

Posted by DaveH at November 18, 2007 5:56 PM