Sesame St S4: Highlights #2
Today, I finish my coverage of Sesame Street Season 4 with a number of clips that I found via the show’s official YouTube channel. First off, another Martians clip, this time with our two intrepid explorers happening upon a grandfather clock:
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Sesame St S4: Highlights
Today kicks off Part 1 of my coverage of highlights from Sesame Street‘s fourth season. I watched all of these on the Sesame Street: Old School Volume 1 and the Sesame Street: 40 Years of Sunny Days DVD sets, and most of them I was also able to locate on Sesame Street‘s official YouTube channel, so I’ve embedded those here.
We begin with Old School and what is very possibly my very favorite series of Sesame Street sketches of all time, namely Sesame Street Newsflash, in which Kermit would “interrupt” the show in order to report “breaking news” “live”. Most often, these scenes would involve him being on the scene for moments from various fairy tales, which he would expect to go by the book, so to speak, but which would always end up being twisted and fractured in some crucial way. For example, this clip, in which Kermit reports on Rapunzel, which just so happens to be one of my very favorite Newsflashes (as a kid, I actually had a video compilation of most of these, and I remember this one extremely vividly):
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Sesame Street Ep #406
Grover and Big Bird demonstrate the end of the alphabet.
Today, we come to November 24th, 1972, the date of the 4th season premiere of Sesame Street (available on the Sesame Street: Old School Volume 1 DVD set). I’ve gone over many times before how Sesame Street in these early years didn’t have much of/any story structure holding the episodes together and given this, although I’ve done more thorough step-by-step recaps of entire episodes up to now, I feel that until I reach more cohesive episodes, it’s not really worth it for me to take the time to go over every single thing that happens in them. I think we’ve all more than gotten the point!
So instead, I’m just going to hit on the episode’s moments of genuine significance and/or any bits that stood out as being particularly interesting
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Flip greets Ernie and Bert.
Before continuing on with the fourth season of Sesame Street tomorrow, today I took a look at two guest appearances various characters from the show made in September and October of 1972, shortly before it began. The first, from Sept. 14th, is the Muppets’ 4th and final episode of The Flip Wilson Show. Whereas Big Bird, Oscar, Kermit, and some Anything Muppets visited Flip on previous occasions, Bert and Ernie show up this time around, and even reference a guest spot Flip had made on their show the previous year, although unfortunately I wasn’t able to track down that footage.
After a short prelude in which Bert is a bit nervous to perform, until Flip and then Ernie reassure him, and then Flip compliments Ernie on his
Read MoreThe Muppets 1.09: Going, Going, Gonzo
Gonzo and Uncle Deadly listen to Kermit.
As much as I loved The Muppets‘ first episode, the show still started off with a few growing pains that revealed themselves more in ensuing episodes, mostly in regards to finding the right Muppety tonal balance. Initially, the show seemed so concerned with establishing itself as something closer in anarchic spirit to the earlier Muppets versus the kid-friendlier versions of the years since Jim Henson’s death that it neglected some of the warmth and heart that was also always intrinsic to the Muppets. And at the same time, that anarchy still felt as if it was being kept a bit in check, with nary a chicken or dancing penguin in sight and a sometimes-too-conventional framework.
While even more zaniness could still help things further, in the past few
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