Sesame Street Test Pilot
Grumpy Mr. Hooper
After Bob buys the last newspaper on the shelf and then divides it up between all of his friends, each of whom is interested in a different page–in one of the dated gender moments in this episode, he instantly hands Susan the “ladies’ page”; another one is a song sung by Listen My Brother, an African American group, in which they sing about how a man builds a house, while a woman bakes a cake!–Mr. Hooper changes his mind, demanding that the last paper of the day is always his, forcing Bob to take the various pieces of paper back from all his friends and give it back to him, in a crumpled ball.
Why be such a jerk, Mr. Hooper? If you need your own copy, set one aside at the beginning of the day. Don’t just expect customers to not buy the last one on the shelf. And if they do, don’t think you can take it back after selling it to them. Sheesh. There’s a bit cantankerous, and then there’s just being a total ass.
But back to things that actually would make their way onto the show and/or are very similar to things that would, the pilot also includes a number of musical counting films, one of them being the classic recurring series that always ends with a baker tumbling down a flight of stairs, carrying cakes in his hand, another being the classic counting-from-1-to-10 cartoon with racecars and spies, which was actually sung by Jefferson Airplane‘s Grace Slick. Others include the short film about “round” things that appeared in the pitch reel, a film about pairs of baby animals, the rocket launch countdown cartoon from the pitch, a film about a baby reindeer, and a cartoon about triangles versus squares.
This one is particularly clever because it works on multiple levels. In it, we have a cool, jazzy triangle, who demonstrates how he can change the size of his various 3 sides and still be a triangle, whereas the “square” square always has to be the same old boring shape. However, the square tells the triangle that he likes the way he is, teaching both shapes and, more subtly, pride in oneself despite outward differences from others.
Buddy and Jim
There’s also an odd film in which two human guys, Buddy and Jim, attempt to hang a picture but have various mishaps, because they can’t quite figure out how to reorient the tools they need. For example, they hold a nail up to the wall with the head facing the wall and the point facing them, and the only way they can think of to solve the problem is to, rather than turn the nail around, move it to the opposite wall. They have a similar problem with the direction the hammer is facing. When watching this, I expected it was something that would have disappeared after the pilot but apparently these sketches recur throughout the first season, being replaced by another silly pair, Larry and Phyllis, in season 2, and then Wally and Ralph in season 3 before the concept was phased out all together.
A film that never made it to air was a TV spy parody starring Gary Owens, who would later become famous as the announcer on Laugh-In and for vocal performances on many classic cartoons. It’s called The Man from Alphabet and is about a serious-seeming but actually silly Maxwell Smart-ish spy known only by his eponymous codename, who tracks down various criminals in each episode. Apparently, 4 of these were filmed, the others of which appeared on other test pilots, and they all basically failed miserably to connect with the audience. The kids found them long, boring, and confusing, and couldn’t follow their point about problem-solving.
I personally found it an interesting curiosity but could completely understand why a kid would be bored to tears. Sesame Street‘s stock in trade would be sophisticated humor for adult viewers that would sometimes go over kids’ heads but which the kids could still enjoy due to the colorful puppets and such. But here, you have a parody that isn’t that funny (seeing the criminals, Dibgy Dropout and Dunce steal all the newspapers in the world is amusing but that’s about it) and is quite long–about 7 whole minutes, which is practically endless in kid time–and has no puppets or anything really dynamic to entertain the kids visually. So it’s clear why it had to go.
The best part of it actually occurs right before the film starts and Bert and Ernie squabble over whether they’ll watch it or Batman, until Batman appears on the screen to tell them that since Ernie chose to watch him yesterday, today they should watch The Man from Alphabet, to be fair to Bert, and then they can watch him tomorrow!
Carol Burnett because why not
I also have to mention an absolutely bizarre bit where Carol Burnett appears out of nowhere in a nightmarish Bob Mackie outfit shortly after the failed rocket launch cartoon, says “Well, back to the old drawing board!” and disappears, with no explanation or reappearance.
The episode closes on Gordon showing us an adorable baby raccoon eating a grape…just because. In a funny flub, he says the raccoon is “only 3 and a half years old”. Later on, he refers to it as “months,” but doesn’t correct himself at the time and I wonder if no one noticed it, or didn’t have the time/inclination to reshoot because it was just a test show. But more importantly, before the credits roll, Susan’s voice tells us the classic Sesame Street send-off of “Sesame Street has been brought to you today by the letter, ‘D,’ and the number, ‘2’”! Again, some of it is overwhelmingly familiar, while a great deal more clearly required a lot more workshopping until it became the show we know and love today.
If you’d like to take a look at this piece of television history yourself, you can buy the Sesame Street: Old School Volume 2 DVDs. And tomorrow, I’ll take a look at the first aired episode to see what changes were implemented from the beginning and which took a bit longer to develop…