Sesame Street Ep #666
Rodeo Rosie bares her fangs…I mean, teeth.
The next sketch worth discussing is yet another terrifying one but, in this case, one that I’m pretty sure was only inadvertently so. A bunch of adults are hanging out at Hooper’s (as I mentioned before) when suddenly they’re interrupted by a bragging cowgirl named Rodeo Rosie. Which wouldn’t necessarily be so bad, but just get a look at her face. Her upper row of gleaming, perfectly even teeth look so unnerving in her otherwise typically-Muppety face that it sent shivers down my spine. Add to that an unpleasantly shrill, piercing voice and you have one of the worst Muppets ever. More than a little abrasive, she proves to be one of Jerry Nelson’s rare misfire characters. She apparently only appeared in Season 6, and I’m not sure if she showed up more than this once, which, believe me, is more than enough.
The basic gist of her character and the sketch is that, to impress people, she always exaggerates how huge everything is back where she’s from, compared to how puny and small Sesame Street is. Why, even the ants are huge, according to her! At which point David, Maria, Susan, etc., set her straight, explaining that sometimes when someone makes a new friend, they feel the need to…embellish a bit in order to impress them, but that she doesn’t have to do that with them. They’re her friends already–a nice thought, although I wouldn’t entirely discredit the possibility that they’re as afraid of her as I am and are just desperately hoping she won’t murder them. I have to admit, though, that while I completely predicted the end, in which Big Bird shows up just as Rosie is playing up how big the animals are out West, I didn’t expect her reaction: “Big Bird? You call that big? Why, back were I’m from, we’ve got birds twice your size!” And so I have to give credit where credit is due. I totally thought his appearance might actually have put her in her place, but this is a much funnier button for the scene. Now let’s never speak of it or her ever again.
Roosevelt Franklin teaches about Africa.
Next up is an installment of Roosevelt Franklin Elementary School, a running sketch featuring the controversial African-American-coded Muppet, Roosevelt Franklin. Although he was only a kid himself, the conceit in many of these sketches is that he would sneak into a classroom and take over the role of teacher. Here, he is teaching the inner city kids that, although people only think of Africa as a jungle due to the Tarzan movies, it actually has many different terrains, including cities, deserts, lakes, beaches, and more, thus proving the smart aleck, Smart Tina, wrong. Not the best, funniest, or most interesting sketch, but it is cool to see Sesame Street disproving a commonly held misconception about such a famous continent, particularly amongst characters whose ethnicity originated there. It’s also fun to recognize various Sesame Street adults playing the various voices, particularly for Smart Tina, who is clearly Sonia Manzano (Maria).
And speaking of Maria, the next sequence is a fun little musical bit in which she sings an impassioned version of “3 Whipped Cream Pies on the Wall” (a take-off, of course, on “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall”), while wearing a glamorous black evening gown:
Behind her, Bob, Louis, and David play various classical instruments as her musical accompaniment, but as she reaches the end of each verse, she plants one of the cream pies directly into each of their faces, one at a time. At the end of the number, however, she gets her comeuppance when she herself is pelted by a bunch of pies from an offstage audience clearly sympathetic to her musicians’ plight. While I’m fairly certain I hadn’t seen this particular scene before, it does remind me a great deal of some other “classic movie” and/or “movie musical” bits that Maria would do in later years, including Luis and her Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers routine to their classic song, “Hola,” and her Charlie Chaplin routines.
Shortly afterwards, we get an even better musical sequence in the form of “What’s the Name of That Song?,” a really terrific meta number that easily could have come from a Broadway show, in which Bob and then a number of other characters try to hum along to a song whose lyrics they can’t remember, desperately trying to figure out which one they’re thinking of: