Same Street, Different World: ‘Sesame’ Turns 40

Same Street, Different World: ‘Sesame’ Turns 40
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: November 3, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/arts/television/08stan.html?th&emc=th


IT is almost too perfect that the first African-American president of the United States was elected in time for the 40th anniversary of “Sesame Street.” The world is finally beginning to look the way that the PBS show always made it out to be.

So it is to the credit of this daunting cultural landmark — a program that has taught generations of children to count, countless parents how to teach and is seen in 125 countries around the world — that Tuesday’s anniversary is not a frenzy of preening self-celebration. Episode No. 4187 is as child-centric and respectful of routine as any other.

The special guest — the first lady, Michelle Obama — doesn’t make her appearance alongside Big Bird until midway into a show crammed with the usual preschool didactics. The letter of the day comes first — H, as in help and hug and healthy.

The only real difference is that on this day, viewers have to count to 40.

The pedagogy hasn’t changed, but the look and tone of “Sesame Street” has evolved. Forty years on, this is your mother’s “Sesame Street,” only better dressed and gentrified: Sesame Street by way of Park Slope. The opening is no longer a realistic rendition of an urban skyline but an animated, candy-colored chalk drawing of a preschool Arcadia, with flowers and butterflies and stars. The famous set, brownstones and garbage bins, has lost the messy graffiti and gritty smudges of city life over the years. Now there are green spaces, tofu and yoga.

It’s still a messianic show, but the mission has shifted to the more immediate concerns of pediatricians and progressive parents, especially when it comes to childhood obesity. “Sesame Street” takes the Muppets, rhymes and visual verve that were developed to instill tolerance, racial pride and equality, to preach exercise and healthy eating.

Put it this way, Mrs. Obama’s message on the anniversary episode isn’t an exhortation to future soldiers, scientists and presidents to be all that they can be, but to tiny consumers to eat the freshest food they can find. “Veggies taste so good when they come fresh from the garden, don’t they?” Mrs. Obama tells a rainbow coalition of children gathered around a soil tray, an echo of her White House kitchen garden. “If you eat all these healthy foods, you are going to grow up to be big and strong,” Mrs. Obama says, flexing her fists. “Just like me.”

That foodie focus is a reflection of the times and current fads, but also of a tension in the mandate of “Sesame Street,” as it straddles the two imperatives of being a public service in the broadest sense of the word — serving the underserved — while also competing with all the other shows and satisfying the public television donor base.

It is an urban myth that Cookie Monster was turned into Veggie Monster to appease nutrition Nazis, however — that was a blogosphere rumor in the Paul-Is-Dead school of whispering campaigns. But Cookie Monster’s palate was refined during Season 36 as part of the show’s “healthy habits for life” campaign. He now also gobbles fruits and vegetables, which are labeled by the show as “anytime” foods while cookies are held in reserve as “sometime” food. And almost every episode has a subliminal message about exercise and nutrition, along with a fruit bowl.

So much carb consciousness raising makes it all the more incongruous that McDonald’s is a “Sesame Street” corporate sponsor — perhaps the most overt sign of changing mores. It was a financially driven decision, made in 2003 after public television loosened its restrictions on sponsors’ promotional efforts.

“Sesame Street” no longer has a monopoly on growing minds; if anything, it is an endangered species. There are now scores of preschool shows, and some of them also are shown without ads, like “Playhouse Disney.” Not surprisingly, fewer children are watching “Sesame Street,” but most children are watching more television than ever: a recent Nielsen Company study showed that on average children ages 2 to 5 now spend nearly 25 hours a week watching TV and an additional 7 hours either watching taped shows and DVDs or sitting in front of a computer. The top-rated show in that age group in the month of September, according to Nielsen, was “Go, Diego, Go!” on Nickelodeon. “Sesame Street” trailed far behind.

To help cover costs “Sesame Street” reached out to family-friendly sponsors like Beaches resorts and Earth’s Best organic baby foods.

The inclusion of McDonald’s, however, horrified some, including Commercial Alert, a nonprofit group founded by Ralph Nader, which couldn’t reconcile healthy content with fast-food promotions and weren’t lovin’ it. It should be noted that unlike many fast-food ads aimed at children, these spots do not entice children with displays of a happy meal or an M&M McFlurry. Instead they showcase a child doing an art project — a little boy tracing the golden arches.

Oddly enough McDonald’s presented that distinctive trademark in 1969, the year that “Sesame Street” made its premiere on public television. It was a tumultuous time. The Children’s Television Workshop, the nonprofit production company that is now known as the Sesame Workshop, was introduced to the public in 1968, when “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” referred to Technicolor cartoons, not race. The top-rated series on television was “The Andy Griffith Show.”

By 1969 mass culture had swerved: “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” was the No. 1 show in the nation; “Mod Squad” was a hit, and so was “Julia,” the first network series to star an African-American actress in a nonstereotypical role. “Sesame Street” took its breezy magazine format and sock-it-to-me comic style from “Laugh-In,” but its commitment to “relevance,” in the parlance of the times, was in tune with the most serious social issues of the era.

The show’s original intent was to present enjoyable and beguiling preschool education to poor children who did not have access to decent preschools while bringing diversity to children’s programming. “Sesame Street” wasn’t the only children’s show with a social message. (Rocky and Bullwinkle are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year. Some of the earliest cartoons, back when the show was still known as “Rocky and His Friends,” were way ahead of the times; a 1962 retelling of “The Ugly Duckling” on “Fractured Fairy Tales” is a screed against cosmetic surgery.)

But it was the mixture of whimsy, pop music and didactic rigor that distinguished “Sesame Street” from everything else. It has arguably had an even greater impact overseas, especially in places like Kosovo and South Africa, where the show is made in partnership with local television producers and tailored to local concerns. Kami, the world’s first H.I.V.-positive Muppet, made her debut on the South African version in 2002 when the government of Thabo Mbeki was still questioning the value of anti-viral drugs.

Peace in the Middle East can be measured by the status of “Sesame Street.” For a while, in the more hopeful 1990s, there was an adaptation that catered jointly to Israeli and Palestinian preschoolers — in Hebrew and Arabic. That entente died in the first Intifada, and now Israelis have one version, Palestinians another.

Even in this country the smallest innovations on “Sesame Street” resound as cultural markers. The addition in 2006 of Abby Cadabby, a pink and sparkly fairy with a button nose and long eyelashes was taken as yet another sign of the ascent of third wave feminism — or a concession to the commercial appeal of Disney-style princess paraphernalia. New technologies abound: this year, for the first time “Abby’s Flying Fairy School” will be in CGI.

Past episodes on the anniversary DVD boxed set serve as a kind of time tunnel to lost eras: In 1971 the Rev. Jesse Jackson, natty in an afro and a gold medallion, prompted little children to recite “I Am Somebody.” In 1998 Tony Bennett serenaded a worm who yearned for outer space with the song, “Slimey to the Moon.” Disco, rap and hip-hop have all had their “Sesame Street” moment.

This season has an Om sensibility. “My mom takes me to yoga class, I love doing yoga,” a little girl in pigtails says in an episode that ran in October. She is narrating a short film that shows a pixieish teacher and her pupils folding into the downward dog position. After class her mother arrives with a plastic water bottle. “She says it’s important to drink water when you exercise,” the girl explains. “When I grow up I want to be a yoga teacher.”