Comments on: Capital Notions

By: Stefanie Murray

Stefanie Murray — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 09:45:15 +0000

dsquared: In case you care, Joe Raposo actually wrote a good many of the original songs (as in the earliest songs) on SS. “Bein’ Green,” “C Is for Cookie,” etc. But he also wrote “Sing (Sing a Song),” so he had a lot to make up for. Timothy Burke: Elmo has kind of forced most of the monsters, including Oscar and Cookie Monster, off-stage A friend of mine took her daughter to see “Sesame Street Live” last year, and when I asked her how it was she burst into tears. When she could talk again, she said that having Elmo up front and Grover relegated upstage as a minor character brought home as nothing else had how old she was and how much things have changed. Grover was her fave, and mine too, because of his klutziness and gameness and silliness. Though Bert would be a close second, purely for “Doin’ the Pigeon.”

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 07:59:05 +0000

I hear they cut the scene where Snuffy asks Big Bird if a fetus is alive, and Bird responds with a soliloquy about how, philosophical boundary issues and medical hair-splitting aside, Roe v. Wade has been such a cultural and legal landmark for so long that the answer must, out of deference to a productive realpolitik, be "no."

By: Belle Waring

Belle Waring — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 03:43:44 +0000

Ooh, posting on Crooked Timber is so exciting! Look at all the comments! I haven’t kept up because I’ve been asleep here in Singapore. I agree with everyone that the quality of Sesame Street has gone down, and Journey to Ernie is lame. Still, my daughter actually likes Elmo’s world a lot. I think it’s just for very little kids. Also, The Electric Company ruled, and there is a good cover of the theme song by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes you might want to check out sometime. The best ever Sesame Street song,besides the “I” song, is “Born to Add”, done a la Bruce Springsteen. I have it on LP. “They say adding one and one makes two/ makes us senseless, cruel, and bad/ but kids like you and me baby, we were born to add…” Finally, I lived at 132 W. 109, in ‘90-’92, at the time the last inhabited building on the south side of the street; all the rest of the brownstones were bricked up husks. I was coming over from eating with my aunt and uncle on the east side once, and picked up a cab in front of their doorman building on Park. When I told the cabbie, as we cruised over from Manhattan ave, “it’s up there, the first building with any lights”, he turned and laughed at me. I thought, great, my apartment is so crappy a NYC cabbie is laughing at me, that’s great. The neighborhood is much improved from those days, however.

By: Laura

Laura — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 00:41:47 +0000

What disturbs me most about SS these days are Maria’s face lifts. Stop with the Botox injections, Maria. A children’s entertainer really needs command of their facial muscles. Raising my kids in the hood, I really appreciate a kid’s show that is set in our environment. The kids love the closing credits with the children jumping off the subway and dancing on the roof of an apartment building. There is no question that SS used to be much more creative. We have a video, Ernie Counts or something like that, which shows clips of old episodes. One of my favorites has a Dylan-like folk singer singing, “How many elephants will fit in a room, before they fall through the floor. The answer my friend is… thump… one. One elephant falls through the floor.”

By: bonkydog

bonkydog — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 23:19:38 +0000

> Is the word “alive” alive? No, because it has only one I.

By: marlys

marlys — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 22:17:54 +0000

check out cookie monster and Martha Stewart-love it. http://www.toughpigs.com/anth02janpt3.htm

By: rea

rea — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 21:05:46 +0000

Of course, no discussion of Sesame Street would be complete without mentioning Bert’s unfortunate association with Osama bin Laden: http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/images/bert.jpg

By: marlys

marlys — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 20:31:12 +0000

I absolutely loved SS when I was a kid. I particularly remembered the pro-social indoctrination of the skits explaining and illustrating co-operation…

By: John Isbell

John Isbell — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 18:06:28 +0000

OK, we’ve got this far and no-one’s mentioned “It’s not easy being green.” What a song. I have a Sesame Street album, which is great if you’re tripping. Grover ends side one: “The record is OVER. Turn it OVER”, on endless loop. You really have to play it for a while. But no I Song, which I’ve never heard. Also, Elmo sucks balls. Maybe not if you’re three. You can see I don’t have kids.

By: bob mcmanus

bob mcmanus — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 18:01:26 +0000

I am still trying to figure out what the heck Joyce meant in that quote (yes a Joyce reader, that has got to be out of the “Circe” section). The soap, among other things, represents Bloom’s security in his marriage, kept in his back pocket as he flirts and fantasizes throughout the day. So I can determine how subversive the SS writers may have been.

By: BP

BP — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 17:54:51 +0000

I grew up with SS too. One of the songs on it was ‘One way’, about a biker who couldn’t visit his girl because the sign said ‘One way’, and his girl lived in the other direction. Recently I heard ‘Leader of the pack’ by the Shangri Las, and the moment of recognition was electrifying. (Damn I’m getting old too).

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 17:31:10 +0000

I remind you of the song, ‘Monster in the Mirror:’ If your mirror has a monster in it, do not shout, That kind of situation does not call for freaking out; Just don’t do anything you would not see him do, That monster in the mirror just might be you… Yes, Sesame Street wasn’t/isn’t perfect. Name a single other entertainment entity that over a quarter century threw up occasional bits of disorienting depth with so much good humor and so little mean-spiritedness.

By: Russell Arben Fox

Russell Arben Fox — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 17:00:16 +0000

Tim: You’re right—”Between the Lions” is wonderful. Caitlyn (our second) adores it. I disagree that Cookie Monster was/is the primary “adult” voice among the muppets; that had to be Kermit. I mean, for heaven’s sake, the frog had a real job, a fairly swinging pad (a couple of skits visited Kermit at home), and a constant slow burn going on regarding all his fellow muppets. Scott: I think you have some urban legends mixed in there. (If Grover was your local got-his-act-together earnest cult kid, why on earth was he such a total clutz and doofus? Rather insulting, if you put it that way.) But basically, I think there was at least a certain amount of that kind of ideological patterning sensibility behind the creation of the case. I think your observation about Big Bird is interesting. Makes me even more poignant for the days before Mr. Snuffleupagus became just a normal, everday resident of the Street. (Oh, and yeah: I miss Mr. Hooper too. He was Jewish, by the way. The classic old Sesame Street Christmas special showed that.)

By: Rv. Agnos

Rv. Agnos — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 16:56:13 +0000

Point of information to dsquared. Tom Lehrer wrote songs for Electric Company, not Sesame Street. Specifically, the “Silent E” song (“He can turn a Man, into a Mane, he can turn a Can into a Cane . . .”) and the “LY Song” (“Your in the public library, and you fall and scrape your knee, but the sign says Quiet Please so how to you cry? Silently, silently, Silent. L-Y.”

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Tue, 24 Feb 2004 16:46:16 +0000

You do know that Sesame Street was explicitly intended to be an inner city environment? The whole concept behind the show was as a sort of televised Headstart programme for underprivileged urban kids whose parents couldn’t be relied on to get them into useful social programmes but who at least had TV in the house. The concept was that the show was fast paced enough to keep kids watching and educational enough to give them the basic literacy and numeracy that middle class kids were getting at home. The environment was intended to be identifiable to young children in the ghetto. Cookie Monster is the local junkie. Oscar the Grouch is the irritable, slightly nuts homeless guy. Big Bird is the strange person in your building who has mental health problems and sees stuff that isn’t there (like Snuffleupagus). Bert and Ernie are the not-quite-closeted gay couple. Grover is the earnest young Elijah Muhammed look-alike with his bow-tie. And the real people on Sesame Street are all disproportionately “people of colour.” These are the people in your neighbourhood. I don’t know how widely this knowledge is spread. The CTW never puts it in those terms these days, but when Sesame Street came out they did interviews where they made their intentions plain. I’m not kidding. When I explain this to adults, grown-ups sometimes go into denial about it. To what degree Ernie and Bert were particularly intended to be gay is debateable, but the muppet cast of the show was intended to fit exactly that kind of role. Sesame Street has seen better days. The show is being cancelled in Canada. Frankly – and I know how old this makes me sound – it’s been downhill since Mr Hooper died. As for its educational goals, it’s been a spectacular failure. The reasons why are hard to determine. Literacy is up in the American underclass since the 60’s, and Sesame Street may be part of the reason why. The problem is that already privileged kids watch Sesame Street too, and took at least as much from it as underprivileged kids. So, the pre-school gap never did close.