Sesame St S1: Songs, Etc.
After watching a few early episodes of Sesame Street over the past few days, today I’m taking a look at a number of famous clips from throughout the first season, since obviously, watching all of 4,552 currently produced episodes isn’t an option! I got the first group from the “Classic Cuts” bonus feature on the Sesame Street: Old School, Volume 1 DVD set.
The first is of Ernie in the bathtub, singing his signature song, “Rubber Duckie,” his ode to his very favorite, squeakiest bathtime companion. What is wonderful about the song is that, besides being beautifully representative of Ernie’s openhearted, emotive, whimsical nature, it also doesn’t serve an explicitly educational point other than to encourage children to make use of their imaginations and perhaps to encourage them to enjoy bathtime. But, again, it’s so fun that it doesn’t feel like a lesson at all. In fact, like Kermit’s “Bein’ Green,” it gained cultural popularity far beyond that of a typical children’s show song, hitting No. 16 on the Billboard single charts (and not in a children’s category) and even being nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Recording for Children in 1970! And it only lost to another Sesame Street album, The Sesame Street Book & Record, which it was also on, anyway!
The next clip on Old School is that of a shockingly young James Earl Jones counting up to 10, which is cool because it’s a shockingly young James Earl Jones counting up to 10. What more do you want? And then yet another classic number, “ABC-DEF-GHI Song,” in which Big Bird impresses Susan with his ability to read a variety of street signs, until he is perplexed by one which he believes to be a word that he valiantly attempts to pronounce: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!
Besides being a fun, bouncy song, what might be most interesting about the scene is that it captures Big Bird in the middle of his evolution from hapless clown to 6-year-old. He still looks a little dopey and Carroll Spinney makes his voice sound a little duller than it does today, but he definitely comes across as brighter than he did at the beginning, and while the gag here is still clearly that he’s made a mistake, there’s more of a naive alertness to the character than the joke being that he’s a brainless fool. His mistake here is one that a kid could make and therefore it helps inch the show closer to unlocking the key to his character, which is, again, that he’s a child, like the target audience, not an idiot.
And next we have Oscar‘s signature song, “I Love Trash,” in which he extols the virtues of all of his favorite, crusty possessions. As with “Rubber Duckie,” it doesn’t have obvious educational value besides being fun. I guess the fact that he’s singing about various objects and taking them out, identifying each one in the process, might be part of its education value, but if so, it’s certainly not overly obvious about it. And this early clip is particularly fun because Oscar sings it while still orange, which remains bizarre to behold today. At the very least, unlike in the first episode, he finally has hands now, with which to take out all of these beloved items.
Next up is baseball legend Jackie Robinson reciting the alphabet, and then a Batman cartoon, illustrating the importance of paying attention to street signs and traffic lights when crossing the road. Robin wants to run into the road to chase the Joker, but Batman makes him stop until the lights allow it. The Joker, on the other hand, who went right out into the street, nearly gets hit by a car. That’ll show him! Incidentally, Batman and Robin’s dialogue and behavior here is nearly as flamboyantly gay as in the Adam West show, making this even funnier and weirder.
Then we have a film of a gibbon swinging on monkey bars at a zoo, followed up by a scene in which Big Bird meets Little Bird, who, as you may recall, we first saw in Easy Bake Oven commercials. This sketch is intended to teach kids that two things can be the same even if they’re very different sizes. Of course, when dopier Big Bird meets Little Bird, he can’t figure out what the little guy could possibly be. First, he barks at him, trying to communicate as a dog would. When that doesn’t work, he meows. “That’s as silly as going moo,” Little Bird cracks, causing the literal-minded Big Bird to conclude that he’s a cow!