Sesame St S6: Highlights
Speaking of music, next, we have Sam Pottle and Grace Hawthorne’s Sesame Street song, “The Subway,” which is incredible to watch today not only because of its dated elements (which include its early-disco style as well as its line about buying tokens versus today’s Metrocards) but because of how very New Yawk it is. Rather than making the subway seem like a fun, friendly place to be, as you might expect from Sesame Street, instead they make no effort to obscure what a crowded, dingy-verging-on-hellish environment it is.
At the start of the song, an old lady Muppet walks into a young guy Muppet in her rush to get down the stairs, both behaving rudely in response to their presence in each other’s ways. A girl Muppet sings about how since “there’s no room in this town,” the trains have all been put underground. And then we’re on the train itself, which is full of people pushing and shoving each other and being forced to squeeze together (“Packed inside a train, it’s too crowded to complain”). Meanwhile, other classic subway annoyances are highlighted in the lyrics, such as the importance of holding the strap if you don’t want to be thrown to the ground, along with the practically hidden maps. Kermit, in his reporter get-up, complains in his line about how the express train always goes “right by your local address,” making you miss your stop. Which is so true. To this day, New York trains are notorious for randomly becoming expresses with no warning, zooming 20 stops past the one you need in the blink of an eye. “My stop just went by!…Your thumb is in my eye!” various Muppets sing.
Not only is it an amazing time-and-place relic that also manages to capture the subway as it often is today, but it’s blessed with a dark, really cutting sense of humor, as well as a clever subversion of the song-writing trope about people enthusiastically singing about a cool, hip place. Here, they’re all enthusiastically singing about a method of urban transportation that’s a headache for millions of New Yorkers daily, without a drop of condescension to children!
Then, we have a musical appearance by Jose Feliciano, a film I recall from childhood of a baby chick hatching from an egg, and then yet another Sesame Street Newsflash, with Kermit this time around interviewing Jack Be Nimble of jumping-over-a-candlestick fame. The niftiest thing about this one is that said Jack is depicted as a hip musician with dark glasses, fedora, a mustache, and an eternally cool, husky voice, brought to life by Jerry Nelson and foreshadowing his famous Electric Mayhem character, Floyd vocally, visually, and in attitude.
Kermit interviews Jack Be Nimble.
And reminiscent of Grover in his first appearance (where he was green in more ways than one), this hep cat doesn’t know the meaning of the spatial word he’s meant to be demonstrating, as first he goes under the candlestick, and then runs around it. “Get off my case, frog!” he complains when Kermit points out his error, and Kermit scolds him in response, saying “If you wanna work in a world-famous nursery rhyme, you gotta do it right!” Then finally, he jumps over and, also in Grover style–Super Grover, specifically, this time–crashes hard to the ground, claiming to have broken every bone in his body. As he hobbles away, he threatens to sue Mother Goose, until encountering a plummy, Richard-Hunt-voiced cow who tells him, “You think that’s bad, honey? You should try jumping over the moon some time!” Ba dum dum sisss.
Next, a painfully Helen Reddy song in which Helen Reddy sings about how everyone grows, then a cartoon I vaguely recall about a young boy sweeping up a floor and imagining himself as a pirate, a hockey player, and a knight, and finally a song in which a female farmer Muppet sings about her life in the country, while a hip, Greenwich-Village-type male Muppet sings about his life in the city, the cutest bit being the very end when what seems to be an edited-together split screen of each of them in their respective environments is revealed to be a single set when the two briefly swap positions by crossing over the line dividing their “two locations”.
And that’s it for Old School this time around. Meanwhile, Sesame Street: 40 Years of Sunny Days had 3 unique Season 6 clips, beginning with another Super Grover scene about what the word “exit” means–just as a song in episode #666 was–and following along the lines of the previous one I watched today, in which Super Grover is simply no help, rather than being an impediment. Once again, this boy–who is “trapped” in a gated playground area–looks up at the sky and points with excitement until that enthusiasm deflates: “Oh…it’s only Super Grover,” and once again, we have a supposed victim solving his own problem, this time around locating the “Exit” sign and using it to push the door open, just as Super Grover (who crash-landed just outside of the gate) is attempting to bend the unyielding iron bars, finally managing to do so just in time to see the boy walking away. “Please don’t thank me, I am here to serve,” Super Grover says, but it seems a touch half-hearted, as if he actually does realize how little help he was this time around. And a moment afterwards, he gets his head stuck in the bars, meaning he’s now in need of greater assitance than the boy was in the first place!
The Typewriter types “N” for “nose”.
The second clip is of a cartoon anthropomorphic typewriter that I had completely forgotten existed until suddenly the memories all came flooding back. For those who don’t remember, he would tend to write a letter on a piece of paper, and then an action would occur around him linked to that letter. In this case, he types an “N,” and then a giant nose appears and basically blows him away with a sneeze.
And then we come to our final clip of the day, another Lefty/Ernie sketch. It’s been a while! This time around, Lefty is trying to sell Ernie an “invisible ice cream cone,” arguing that if the great ice cream thief, Louie the Lip, happened to be walking down the street, then Ernie could rest assured that he’d never know what Ernie was carrying. At which point Ernie decides to have a little fun, although he doesn’t make it immediately apparent that he’s onto him. First, he selects the most obscure ice cream possible to be the one he’d buy from him: a Banana Royale Tootie Frootie. And although that throws Lefty for a moment, he fakes finding another invisible ice cream of that exact flavor in his stash, and so Ernie takes it, happily paying him…with an invisible penny! Cue Ernie laugh! Awesome work on his part. I always love when gullible-seeming Ernie reveals he’s much more canny after all.
And with that, we’re done with these 2 sets of clips. Coming up later this week, an entire post devoted to Kermit’s season 6 Sesame Street Newsflashes!