Sesame Street Ep #56
Oscar makes a strange request of Mr. Hooper.
Today’s episode of Sesame Street aired on January 26th, 1970, about 2 months after the previous one, and, if you’d like to view it yourself, is available on iTunes and Netflix under the name “An Orange Grouch and a Green Grover”. I thought it would be cool to watch an episode a little further into the run, to see how things developed since the premiere. In some ways, it’s still very much the same show. The plotting and connective tissue is still rudimentary at best, however there are a number of linked sketches which, at least at the start, hold this episode together a bit better than the last, although that falls away as it proceeds.
Unlike the first episode, this one actually opens with a Muppet, Oscar (who is still orange but now has hands!), introducing the hour, and features the Muppets much more prominently than the premiere. We no
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Ernie, Bert, Susan, and Gordon welcome the new kid to the block.
And here we finally are, at the very first episode of Sesame Street, which aired on November 10, 1969, and would prove to be not only an immediate hit–in fact, it was profiled in an article in Life Magazine before its debut and got mostly stellar initial reviews–but go on to be one of the most successful shows in children’s television history, as well as television history, period, currently running 45 seasons and counting. You can watch the episode yourself on the Sesame Street: Old School Volume 1 DVD set.
Now, there are some immediate differences between the test pilots and the first episode that finally aired, a number of which are immediately apparent when the episode begins. For starters, the longer, Bob McGrath-
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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
Read MoreSesame Street Pitch Reel
Rowlf explains the show to Kermit.
“I think there was a kind of collective genius about the core group that created Sesame Street, but there was only one real genius in our midst, and that was Jim.”–Joan Ganz Cooney, co-founder of Children’s Television Workshop
And now, we finally come to the origins of one of the most seminal programs not only in Jim Henson’s career but television history, period: Sesame Street, a show that debuted near the end of 1969 and to this very day continues to educate pre-school children, while entertaining both them and their parents with warmth and intelligent humor, managing to make learning feel not didactic but fun and endlessly imaginative.
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