Sesame Street Test Pilot
Ernie and Bert
After the success of the Sesame Street pitch reel, the public television heads of NET (which actually had already become PBS by the time the first episode of the show aired in November 1969) wanted the Children’s Television Workshop to produce a number of test pilots to experiment with the format for the upcoming show, and so the CTW and Jim produced 5 complete trial episodes in June 1969, each with different segments, in order to see how children would respond to them, and–in a truly awesome move–the producers of the Sesame Street: Old School Volume 2 DVD set decided to include the first one as a bonus feature, which is what allowed me to watch it for this post.
What might be most fascinating as well as strange about it is how overall familiar it seems and yet with some significant differences, making it simultaneously feel warmly recognizable and alien. Many of the elements that Sesame Street would become known for are present right from the beginning, others very not.
We start off with the classic Joe Raposo-penned theme song, “Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street?,” along with footage of various children frolicking around New York City and being pointed in the direction of the street (and, again, it’s important to note that, from the start, as in the pitch reel, we see children of different colors and backgrounds playing together, which was a huge statement just one year after the Civil Rights Act was passed), the major difference being that it’s sung not by a chorus of children but Bob McGrath–known as simply “Bob” to generations of Sesame Street viewers–and it includes some verses that were excluded from later versions of the opening (but present on at least some of the albums, if I recall correctly).
The theme then cuts to the Sesame Street set, which looks very similar to the one I knew as a kid growing up in the ’80s and I assume, to some extent, today (I haven’t seen the show in a long time but I would guess that, despite some sprucing up, the basic layout would be similar). The building, 123 Sesame Street–where Gordon, Susan, Bob, Bert and Ernie live, and later on, Maria, Luis, etc., with its classic stoop–is there right in the middle, as usual. To its left is the paved area where kids play, and nearby, Mr. Hooper’s store. To its right, we have the walls–in a slightly different orientation, but they are there–that would later lead to Big Bird’s home. There are even some trash cans where Oscar’s will later be.
123 Sesame Street
But from how I used the words “would” and “will,” you should probably already be able to guess the first huge divergence, which is that the pilots don’t feature Big Bird or Oscar. They weren’t invented yet. In fact, Bert and Ernie, who we meet a little later, are the only new Muppets who were designed for the pilots, and Rowlf and Kermit, who were in the pitch reel, don’t appear at all. Furthermore, we never see Bert and Ernie on the street exterior but only in their apartment. Now, granted, Bert and Ernie, at least when I was growing up, were usually not seen on the street with the others anyway (this was because Jim and Frank Oz, who performed them, were busy with other projects–during the later 70s, this would be The Muppet Show, which filmed in London, so they’d fly to New York and film a season’s worth of Bert and Ernie sketches over the course of a week or so, which would be dispersed throughout the season), however here it really sticks out because we see very few puppets at all throughout the hour.
And there was a reason for this. At the beginning, some educational advisors cautioned against having puppets appear on the street due to the belief that preschoolers couldn’t always tell the difference between fantasy and reality, so their idea was to have the outside of the street essentially be the “real world” and to then present the puppet and cartoon segments as “imagination,” like going from Kansas to Oz, or the English countryside to Narnia. And so the street segments in this pilot, as well as the others, feature only humans and they suffer because of it. Without the human/puppet interaction, we’re just seeing a bunch of people hanging around a street, talking about letters and numbers, and it somehow feels more like a lesson than the few times we see a human and puppet together in one of the studio scenes.
Add to this that none of the people are giving the most dynamic performances. The guy playing Gordon–the Sesame Street character who would change faces numerous times, being Garrett Saunders in the pilots, Matt Robinson in Seasons 1-3, Hall Miller in Seasons 4-5, and finally Roscoe Orman from Season 6 all the way until today–who is basically presented as the lead here, feels downright wishy-washy. No wonder the children in the test groups were so bored during these segments. Apparently, the kids were (unsurprisingly) extremely antsy while watching all of the street scenes but would then perk up for all of the cutaways, like the cartoons and the Muppets, which is what would led the CTW and Jim to decide to add Muppets to the street–namely, at the beginning, Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch–by the time the official first episode was finally produced.
The first Gordon and kids.
And so, as I was saying, the street looks familiar. The opening even sounds familiar, with the classic harmonica instrumental of the theme song underscoring the first (and eventually last) few moments of the episode. Gordon seems a little strange today, although, granted, to a kid of the ’80s, there are still three more Gordons to go until he’ll feel right. But Gordon’s wife, Susan–who spends most of the episode sitting in the window of her apartment, reading a book–is the Susan we know and love, Loretta Long, who is still part of the cast today, although not on as often as she used to be (ironic that the show that, at first, shied away from Muppets is now almost entirely Muppets). And later on, we’ll meet Bob, who is basically the same old Bob, except here called a shop teacher rather than the music teacher he’d be on the regular show.
But then we meet Ernie, who might provide the biggest shock to the system so far. His personality is definitely the expansive, excitable one we know today, but in his first scene, his voice is in Jim’s deep, husky register, meaning he sounds like a cross between Rowlf and Dr. Teeth, which is a bit jarring to say the least. Perhaps not quite as jarring as the times Richard Hunt performed Miss Piggy’s voice in the first season of The Muppet Show, but pretty close! Interestingly, in later scenes in the same pilot, it sounds a bit softer, though, so it seems like Jim was either already experimenting with it and/or hadn’t yet settled on how he wanted Ernie to sound. Frank Oz basically has Bert down from the start, although he doesn’t speak at all in his first scene.