Sesame Street

Sesame Street
Sesame Street logo
Format	Children's television series/Educational
Created by	Joan Ganz Cooney Lloyd Morrisett
Opening theme	"Sesame Street Theme"
Country of origin	United States
Language(s)	English
No. of seasons	40
No. of episodes	4,212 (episodes)
Production
Location(s)	Teletape Studios (1969-1992) Kaufman Astoria Studios (1992-present) New York City
Running time	60 minutes
Production company(s)	Sesame Workshop Jim Henson Productions Magnetic Dreams Animation (visual effects)
Broadcast
Original channel	NET (1969–1970) PBS (1970–present) Noggin (1999-2003) PBS Kids Sprout (2004-present) Channel 4
Picture format	4:3 (SDTV) (1969–2008) 16:9 (HDTV) (2008–present)
Audio format	Stereo (1969-1999) Dolby Surround (2000-2007) Dolby Digital 1.5 (2008-present)
Original run	November 10, 1969 – present
Status	Season 41 will debut on September 27, 2010.

Sesame Street is an American children's television series and a pioneer of the contemporary educational television standard, combining both education and entertainment. Sesame Street is well known for its Muppets characters created by Jim Henson. It premiered on November 10, 1969, making it one of the longest running children's programs on television.^[1] The show is produced in the United States by the non-profit organization Sesame Workshop, formerly known as the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), founded by Joan Ganz Cooney and Ralph Rogers.

The show was originally taped at Teletape Studios until 1992, when Reeves Entertainment went bankrupt. Since its 24th season, the show has been taped at Kaufman Astoria Studios.

History

Sesame Street's title card used since 2009, taken from Episode 4187, the first episode of the show's 40th season, which aired on November 10, 2009.

Sesame Street premiered on almost 200 public broadcasting television stations on November 10, 1969.^[1] It was the first preschool educational television program to base its contents and production values on laboratory and formative research.^[2] Initial responses to the show included adulatory reviews, some controversy, and high ratings. By its 40th anniversary in 2009, Sesame Street was broadcast in over 120 countries, and 20 independent international versions had been produced.^[3] The show was conceived in 1966 during discussions between television producer Joan Ganz Cooney and Carnegie Foundation vice president Lloyd Morrisett. Their goal was to create a children's television show that would "master the addictive qualities of television and do something good with them",^[4] such as helping young children prepare for school. After two years of research, the newly formed Children's Television Workshop (CTW) received a combined grant of US$8 million from Carnegie, the Ford Foundation, and the U.S. federal government to create and produce a new children's television show.^[5]

Sesame Street has undergone significant changes in its 40-year history. According to writer Michael Davis, by the mid-1970s the show had become "an American institution".^[6] The cast and crew expanded during this time, including the hiring of women in the crew and additional minorities in the cast. The show's success continued into the 1980s. In 1981, the federal government withdrew its funding, so CTW turned to other sources, including the magazine division, book royalties, product licensing, and foreign income.^[7] Sesame Street's curriculum has expanded to include more affective topics such as relationships, ethics, and emotions. Many of the show's storylines were taken from the experiences of its writing staff, cast, and crew. Most notable of these are the 1982 death of Will Lee—who played Mr. Hooper^[8]—and the marriage of Luis and Maria in 1988.^[9]

In recent decades, Sesame Street has faced societal and economic challenges, including changes in viewing habits of young children, more competition from other shows, the development of cable television, and a drop in ratings.^[10] After the turn of the century, Sesame Street made major structural changes, including a change from the traditional magazine format to a narrative format in 2002. Due to the popularity of the Muppet Elmo, the show also incorporated a popular segment after its thirtieth anniversary in 1999 known as "Elmo's World".^[11] The show celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2009 to much acclaim and recognition, including an Outstanding Achievement Emmy.^[12]

Educational goals

As author Malcolm Gladwell has stated, "Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them".^[13] Lesser went even further and stated that in order to teach children effectively, not only does their attention need to be caught and focused, it needs to be sustained.^[14] Sesame Street was the first children's show that structured each episode and made "small but critical adjustments" to each segment to capture children's attention long enough to teach them something.^[15]

According to CTW researchers Shalom Fisch and Rosemarie Truglio, Sesame Street was one of the few children's television programs that utilized a detailed and comprehensive educational curriculum, garnered from formative and summative research, in its content.^[16]

According to Lesser, one of the goals of the show's creators, which sprung out of the 1968 seminars, was "the fundamental purpose of preparing children for school".^[17] They were aware of the "individual suffering and frustration"^[18] of the child who is ill-prepared for the demands of school, so they thought that one of the ways to combat that was to instill in their young viewers an appetite for learning. Two related goals were providing basic skills, which Lesser insisted was of value to inner-city parents, and teaching children both what and how to think.^[19]

The show's creators decided to only include in their curriculum the range of skills of the three-to-five year old child, and not focus on skills they already had, or on skills beyond their reach.^[20]

As researcher Gerald S. Lesser, CTW's first advisory board chairman, reported, the focus on the new show was on children from disadvantaged backgrounds, but the show's creators recognized that in order to achieve the kind of success they wanted, they needed to encourage all children, no matter what their background, to watch it. At the same time, however, their primary goal was to make the show appealing to inner-city children, a group that did not traditionally watch educational programs on public television,^[21] so it would help them learn as much as children with more educational opportunities.^[22] As Lesser stated, "If the series did not work for poor children, the entire project would fail".^[23] Morrow called the new show's audience "concentric", with its targeted audience "the urban poor", within the larger circle of all preschoolers.^[24] As a result, the CTW organized an outreach to inner-city communities, which as Lesser stated, "would demand at least as much ingenuity as production and research".^[25]

The CTW devoted 8% of their initial budget to advertise the new show, especially in the inner cities.^[26] They hired Evelyn Davis from the Urban League as CTW's first Vice President of Community Relations; as head of their Community Educational Services (CES) division, Davis led a staff who worked with parents and local community leaders to get the word out about the show to minority children and their families.^[25] As Davis stated, CTW understood that a special effort had to be made to reach their target community because traditional methods of promotion and advertising were not effective with these groups.^[21] After Sesame Street's popularity became established after its first season, the CES' outreach efforts turned from promotion to the development of educational materials used in preschool settings.^[27] As Yotive and Fisch reported, the child-care community eventually became the CES' "core constituency".^[28] In the early 1980s, the CES developed into the Sesame Street Preschool Education Program (PEP), whose goal was to assist preschools, by combining television viewing, books, hands-on activities, and other media, in using the show as an educational resource.^[29]

CTW's outreach programs included providing materials to non-English speaking children and adults. Instead of following the traditional practice of translating their English materials into Spanish, for example, they employed what they called "versioning", or creating parallel sets of materials that conveyed the same content and messages in culturally and linguistically relevant ways.^[30]

As Lesser stated, television lends itself well to the use of modelling as a teaching tool. Children tend to imitate what they see on the screen, so many writing and production methods were used to directly model effective verbal communication. Indirect modeling, without explicit labeling, was used to demonstrate positive behaviors as well.^[31]

Since young children are easily distracted by peripheral details and are unable to selectively attend to the most useful aspects of what they observe, the producers gave special care to, as Lesser put it, "make salient what the child is expected to learn".^[32] They accomplished this by eliminating irrelevant and distracting content, thus providing the child with a precise focus on central content, without making it uninteresting, especially in repeated viewings.^[31] Because the content they were presenting to children was televised and their viewing of it was voluntary, they realized that the show had to have high appeal. The appeal of the program had to compete with the distractions that occurred as a result of viewing at home as well. They found, however, that the relationship between appeal and comprehension was more complicated than they initially thought, and discovered that young children probably do not attend to material that is presented at a higher level than they are ready to understand.^[33]

Coordinating "the clever use of Muppets and animation" with educational curriculum required what the CTW researchers called "careful thought"^[34] and influenced the show's structure. For example, they had to decide how to distribute the letters of the alphabet throughout each 130-episode season.^{[note 1]}

Repetition was a convention used often on Sesame Street. The creators understood that repetition gave young children opportunities to practice new skills and assisted them in bridging the gap between new and unfamiliar concepts. As Lesser stated, they observed that children seem to enjoy some material more after viewing them several times, and allows them to predict and anticipate the outcome of a sequence. Repetition made it easier to teach complex concepts or situations a child would not be able to comprehend from a single viewing. It allowed children to explore different facets of a subject.^[35]

Lesser: "All forms of television production for children must find functional ways to bind educational content and visual events".^[36]

Lesser stated that the educational television is "completely dependent upon the effective use of humor".^[37]

Lesser: "Slapstick comedy is a favorite with preschoolers; they find it more amusing than any other comedy form we have observed".^[38] Lesser also stated that in order for comedy to be an effective teaching tool, it must coincide with the lesson being taught.^[39]

"In addition to sustaining the attention of young viewers, humor serves the function on Sesame Street of enticing parents and older siblings to share the young child's viewing".^[40]

"One of the goals of Sesame Street and other educational programs for children is to teach social competence, tolerance of diversity, and nonagressive means of resolving conflict" (Huston et al., p. 133).

Format

Original format

From the first episode, Sesame Street's producers have used "different elements" of commercial television: "a strong visual style, fast-moving action, humor, and music". They also used videotaped spots, puppets, animation, live action, and music. Cooney was the first to suggest that they use "teaching commercials", or several twelve -to ninety-second shorts, and the repetition of several key concepts throughout an episode.^[41]

The producers and writers decided to build the new show around a brownstone or an inner-city street, a choice that was "unprecedented".^[42] They wanted to attract inner-city viewers, so they reproduced these viewers' neighborhoods as its setting—a realistic city street, complete with peeling paint, alleys, front stoops, and metal trash cans along the sidewalk".^[43] Stone, for example, was convinced that in order for inner-city children to relate to Sesame Street, the show needed to be set in a familiar place.^[8] Despite its urban setting, however, the producers decided to avoid depicting more negativity than what was already present in the child's environment. As a result, they decided to depict the world both realistically and as it could be.^[44] As Lesser stated, "With all its raucousness and slapstick humor, Sesame Street became a sweet show, and its staff maintains that there is nothing wrong in that".^[45]

Hal Miller, who played Gordon from 1972-1974, and Loretta Long (Susan), with Oscar the Grouch (Caroll Spinney). Sesame Street is a fully integrated television show: The producers, early in the show's history, decided to eschew the advice of experts and allow Muppets and humans to interact.

In addition, the researchers and producers made use of repetition and reinforcement throughout the show's segments. The format remained the same from episode to episode, but the content was varied so that new concepts could be introduced.^[46] The show was designed to encourage "coviewing" with the use of humor, which was written into the show so that children and their parents could appreciate it together.^[47] Cultural references were used, which included bringing celebrities to appear on it, that only adults would understand.^[48] Music was also used, since as Cooney observed, children have an "affinity for commercial jingles".^[49]

When Sesame Street premiered, research about children's viewing habits assumed that they did not have long attention spans, so they were concerned that an hour-long show would not hold their attention. As a result, each episode was structured like a magazine that would allow the producers to use a mixture of styles, paces, and characters. It allowed for flexibility and for segments to be dropped, modified, or added. As Lesser stated, "It is unlikely that any other approach would have provided enough room to present material on the wide range of goals we had selected".^[50] Lesser also reported that they found that if the segments within the show were sufficiently varied in character, content, style, pace, and mood, children's attention was able to be sustained throughout each episode.^[51]

The writers presented a story, dispersed throughout the hour-long show, broken up with segments, or skits, which usually totaled approximately forty each episode. Although the story, which occurred during what the producers called "the street scenes", usually lasted about ten-to-twelve minutes in length, it would take forty-five minutes to tell it.^{[52][53][note 2]} It was decided, by recommendation of child psychologists, that the Street scenes, which CTW researcher Edward Palmer called "the glue" that "pulled the show together",^[54] would never feature the human actors and Muppets together because they were concerned it would confuse and mislead young children.^[55] Before the show's premiere, the producers created five one-hour episodes for the purpose of testing whether children found them comprehensible and appealing. They were never intended for broadcast. Instead, they were presented to preschoolers in 60 homes throughout Philadelphia in July 1969. The results were "generally very positive",^[55] but they found that although children attended to the shows during the Muppet segments, their interest was lost during the "Street" segments. As a result, the appeal of the test episodes were lower than they preferred,^[56] so significant changes were made. CTW researcher Gerald Lesser called their decision to defy the recommendations of their advisers "a turning point in the history of Sesame Street".^[54] The producers went back and reshot the Street segments; Henson and his team created Muppets that could interact with the human actors,^[54][57] specifically "two of Sesame Street's most enduring Muppets: Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird".^[58] These test episodes were directly responsible for what writer Malcolm Gladwell calls "the essence of Sesame Street--the artful blend of fluffy monsters and earnest adults".^[54]

Michael Jeter (in 1992), who played "Mr. Noodle's brother Mr. Noodle" in Sesame Street's "Elmo's World" segment until his death in 2003.

Format changes of the 1990s and 2000s

Sesame Street's format remained intact until the show's later decades. By the 1990s, its dominance was challenged by other programs, and its ratings declined. New research, the growth of the children's home video industry, and the increase of thirty-minute children's shows on cable demonstrated that the traditional magazine-format was not necessarily the most effective way to hold their attention.^[59] For Sesame Street's 30th anniversary in 1999, its producers researched the reasons for the show's lower ratings. For the first time since the show debuted, the producers and a team of researchers analyzed Sesame Street's content and structure during a series of two-week long workshops. They also studied how children's viewing habits had changed in thirty years. They found that although the show was produced for three- to five-year-olds, children began watching it at a younger age. As a result, the target age for Sesame Street shifted downward, from four years to three years.

In 1998, a new 15-minute long segment that targeted the developmental age of the show's newer viewers began to be shown at the end of each episode. The segment, called "Elmo's World", used traditional elements (animation, Muppets, music, and live-action film), but had a more sustained narrative,^[60] followed the same structure each episode, and depended heavily on repetition. Unlike the realism of the rest of the show, "Elmo's World" took place in a stylized crayon-drawing universe as conceived by its host.^[61] Elmo, who represented the younger audience, was chosen as the host of the closing segment because younger toddlers identified with him^[62] and because he had always tested well with them.^{[63][note 3]}

In 2002, Sesame Street's producers went further in changing the show to reflect its younger demographic. They decided, after the show's 33rd season, to expand upon the "Elmo's World" concept by "deconstructing"^[64] the show. They changed the structure of the entire show to a more narrative format, making the show easier for young children to navigate. Arlene Sherman, a co-executive producer for 25 years, called the show's new look "startlingly different".^[64]

Production

"The CTW Model"

As Cooney has stated, "Without research, there would be no Sesame Street".^[65] In 1967, when Cooney and her team began to plan the show's development, combining research with television production was "positively heretical".^[65] Shortly after beginning to develop Sesame Street, its creators began to develop what came to be called "the CTW Model", a system of planning, production, and planning that did not fully emerge until the end of the show's first season.^[66] According to Morrow, the CTW Model consisted of four parts: "the interaction of receptive television producers and child science experts, the creation of a specific and age-appropriate curriculum, research to shape the program directly, and independent measurement of viewers' learning".^[66] Truglio and Fisch called the CTW Model the "unique, ongoing integration of curriculum development, formative research, and summative research into the process of production".^[67]

Cooney credited Harvard professors Gerald Lesser, whom the CTW hired to design the show's educational objectives, and Edward Palmer, who was responsible for conducting the show's formative research, for bridging the gap between the show's producers and researchers.^[68] As Cooney stated, "From the beginning, we—the planners of the project—designed the show as an experimental research project with educational advisers, researchers, and television producers collaborating as equal partners".^[69] In the summer of 1968, Lesser conducted five three-day curriculum planning seminars in Boston and New York City .^{[70][71][note 4]} The purpose of the seminars was to ascertain which school-preparation skills to emphasize in the new show. The producers gathered professionals with diverse backgrounds in order to obtain ideas for educational content. They reported that the seminars were "widely successful",^[71] and resulted in long and detailed lists of possible topics for inclusion in the Sesame Street curriculum.^[71]

Sesame Street was the first children's television program that included a curriculum "detailed or stated in terms of measurable outcomes".^[2] There was little precedent for incorporating research into television production.^[72] There was some concern that this goal would limit creativity, but Stone understood that there were an infinite number of ways to express the curriculum on screen. The Muppet characters were created to fill specific curriculum needs. For example, Oscar the Grouch was designed to teach children about their positive and negative emotions.^[73] It was decided from the beginning to have a research presence while the series was being filmed in the studio.^[74]

Sesame Street came along and rewrote the book. Never before had anyone assembled an A-list of advisors to develop a series with stated educational norms and objectives. Never before had anyone viewed a children's show as a living laboratory, where results would be vigorously and continually tested. Never before in television had anyone thought to commingle writers and social scientists, a forced marriage that, with surprising ease and good humor, endured and thrived".

—Michael Davis, Street Gang^[75]

The producers of Sesame Street used laboratory-oriented research to test if what they were producing held children's attention. The researchers involved with the show found that preschoolers are more sophisticated television viewers than originally thought.^[76] Edward Palmer, Sesame Street's original researcher and the man Cooney called "a founder of CTW and founder of its research function",^[77] was recruited by the CTW to test if the curriculum developed in the Boston seminars were reaching their audience.^[78] Palmer was also tasked with designing and executing CTW's in-house research and with working with the ETS.^[68] His research was so crucial to Sesame Street that Gladwell asserted, "...Without Ed Palmer, the show would have never lasted through the first season".^{[78][note 5]} Palmer was one of the few academicians in the late 1960s who was doing research on children's television.^[78]

Palmer and his research team utilized the concepts in the field of formative research, or "research conducted to inform the process of production".^[58] They were strongly influenced by behaviorism, which was a prominent movement in psychology in the late 1960s, so many of the methods and tools used were primarily behavioral.^[79] For example, Palmer developed "the distractor method",^[78][80] which he used to test if the material shown on Sesame Street captured young viewers' attention. Two children at a time were brought into the laboratory; they were shown an episode on a television monitor and a slide show next to it. The slides would change every seven seconds, and researchers recorded when the children's attention was diverted away from the episode.^[72][81] They were able to record almost every second of Sesame Street this way; if the episode captured the children's interest 80-90% of the time, the producers would air it, but if it only tested 50%, they would "go back to the drawing board".^{[82][note 6]} Palmer reported that by the fourth season of the show, the episodes rarely tested below 85%.^[82]

In research done in later seasons of Sesame Street, verbal measures began to be introduced, which strengthened their results and would "yield a richer picture of children's knowledge, reactions, and responses" than behavioral measures alone.^[79] The distractor method was modified, under CTW researcher Valeria Lovelace, into an "eyes-on-screen" method that collected data from larger groups of children simultaneously. Lovelace's method also tested for more "natural" distractions, or the distractions that other children provide in group viewing situations. More recent measures included a "engagement measure", which recorded children's more active responses to an episode, like laughing and dancing to the music.^[83] Throughout the history of Sesame Street, its research staff and producers conducted internal reviews ^[84] and regularly scheduled curriculum seminars to ensure that their curriculum goals were being met and to inform future production. As of 2001, ten seminars were conducted specifically to address the literacy needs of preschool children.^[85] Curriculum seminars prior to Sesame Street's 33rd season in 2002 resulted in changes to the show's structure and format.^[64]

Writing

The show's research team developed an annotated document, or "Writer's Notebook", which provided extended and developed definitions of the researchers' curriculum goals. The notebook assisted the writers and producers in translating their educational goals into televised material.^[86] Suggestions in the notebook were free of references to specific characters and contexts on the show so that they could be implemented as openly and flexibly as possible.^[34] As Lesser stated, the Writer's Notebook served as a bridge between the show's curriculum goals and script development.^[87] The research team, in a series of meetings with the writers, also developed "a curriculum sheet" that described their goals and priorities for each season, which were divided into four categories: symbolic representation, cognitive processes, the physical environment, and the social environment.^{[note 7]} After receiving the curriculum focus and goals for the season, the writers met to discuss ideas and story arcs for the characters, and an "assignment sheet" was created that suggested how much time was allotted for each goal and topic.^[87][88] When a script was completed, the show's research team analyzed it to ensure that the goals were met. Then each production department met to determine what each episode needed in terms of costumes, lights, and sets. The writers were present during the show's taping, which for the first twenty-four years of the show took place in Manhattan, and after 1992, at the Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens, New York, to make last-minute revisions when necessary.^[89][90]

The Kaufman Astoria Studios, where Sesame Street is taped.

Joey Mazzarino, head writer in 2008, has described the writing process as a "collaboration".^[89] Cooney has called this collaboration an "arranged marriage".^[65] The show's staff work to ensure that the relationship between producers and researchers is not adversarial, but that each side contributes "its own unique perspective and expertise".^[91] The production staff recognized early in Sesame Street's history that having access to researchers to gather children's reactions and to inform production was a valuable resource. Researchers and production staff were viewed as a team working together to ensure the best possible product. As CTW researchers Shalom Fisch and Lewis Bernstein stated, researchers, as experts, acted as "advocates" for children while the show's writers and producers brought their instincts and past successes with entertaining children through television.^[92]

Sesame Street has tended to use many writers in its long history. As Dave Connell, one of Sesame Street's original producers, has stated, it was difficult to find adults who could identify a preschooler's interest level. Fifteen writers a year worked on the show's scripts, but very few lasted longer than one season. Norman Stiles, head writer in 1987, reported that most writers "burn out" after writing about a dozen scripts.^[8]

Music

According to Lesser, music had a wide range of functions on Sesame Street. It was used to encourage children's dual-attention abilities, allowing them to attend to the show's action even when not actively watching. Auditory cues in the form of music or sound effects signaled the entrance of a character or the end and beginning of a sequence. The show's creators understood that music and sound effects provide a direct means of teaching children basic skills, and realized that it is easier to learn something new when it is accompanied by a song.^[93] In order to be effective, however, Lesser stated that because music and sound effects naturally evoke physical participation, they needed to be carefully integrated with visual movement. As a result, they avoided pairing music with static visual presentations.^[94]

Many of the songs written for Sesame Street have become "timeless classics"^[95] In order to attract the best composers and lyricists, CTW allowed songwriters like Joe Raposo, the show's music director, and Jeff Moss, a "gifted poet, composer, and lyricist",^[96] to retain the rights to the songs that they wrote. The writers earned lucrative profits, and the show was able to sustain public interest.^[97]

According to Davis, Sesame Street's signature sound grew out of sessions with a seven-piece band consisting of a keyboardist, drummer, electric bass player, guitarist, trumpeter, a winds instrumentalist, and a percussionist.^[98] Jon Stone reported that a typical recording session with Raposo was "an on-the-fly, off-the-cuff experience".^[99] Raposo was especially inspired by the goals of Sesame Street, especially in the early days of the show's production, and responded by composing "a stack" of curriculum-inspired songs.^[100] According to researcher Gerald Lesser, the variety in the compositions Raposo created for Sesame Street was enormous, but their distinctive flavor gave the show its cohesiveness.^[25]

Joe Raposo, Sesame Street's first musical director.

Raposo wrote Sesame Street's theme song, which Davis has called "jaunty" and "deceptively simple".^[101] Stone, although he (along with writer Bruce Hart) is listed as the song's lyricist, considered the song "a musical masterpiece and a lyrical embarrassment".^[98] Raposo enlisted jazz harmonica player Jean "Toots" Thielemans, as well as a mixed choir of children, to record the opening and closing themes.^[102] "Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street" has since become a "siren song for preschoolers".^[99]

Raposo's "I Love Trash", written for Oscar the Grouch, was included on the first album of Sesame Street songs, recorded in 1970. One of Raposo's best-known compositions for the show was Rubber Duckie, and it was originally performed by Henson for Ernie. The song was recorded for the first Sesame Street album in 1970, performed by the Boston Pops in 1971, and became a hit in Germany in 1996.^[103]

Raposo also wrote Bein' Green in 1970, again performed by Henson, but this time for Kermit the Frog. Davis calls this "Raposo's best-regarded song for Sesame Street",^[97] and it was later recorded by Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles.^[104] Raposo's other notable songs written for the show include "Somebody Come and Play", "C is for Cookie", and "Sing", which became a hit for The Carpenters in 1973.^[105]

Entertainment Weekly reported that by 1991, Sesame Street had been honored with eight Grammys.^[106]

Animation

Animation is another tool Sesame Street has used throughout its history. Lesser states that one of purposes of animation is to create incongruity, or what he called "illogical surprises"^[107] the CTW discovered children enjoy and learn from. Animation is used to teach letter recognition. Abstract symbols are able to be brought to life, which permits them to become part of the dramatic action.^[108]

The first piece of animation commissioned by the CTW for Sesame Street was "the J commercial", in 1968. It was used to teach children letter recognition, and was extensively tested with both inner-city and middle class children at three New York City daycare centers in early 1969. CTW researchers found that before exposure to "the J commercial," most of the children they tested were unable to recognize the letter "J", but that after repeated viewings, the majority learned to recognize it.^[109]

Cast and crew

Bob McGrath (in 2007), who has been a member of Sesame Street's cast since its premiere.

Shortly after the CTW was created, and Joan Ganz Cooney was named as its first executive director in 1968,^{[note 8]} she began to assemble a team of producers, all of whom had previously worked on Captain Kangaroo. Jon Stone was responsible for writing, casting, and format; Dave Connell took over animation; and Sam Gibbon served as the show's chief liaison between the production staff and the research team.^[110] Cooney recruited researcher Edward L. Palmer, whom she called "a founder of CTW and founder of its research function"^[77] Palmer's research was so crucial to Sesame Street that Gladwell asserted, "...Without Ed Palmer, the show would have never lasted through the first season".^[78] Jim Henson's involvement in Sesame Street began when he and Cooney met at one of the curriculum planning seminars in Boston. Stone, who was familiar with Henson's work, felt that if they could not bring him on board, they should "make do without puppets".^[111]

"Sesame Street is best known for the creative geniuses it attracted, people like Jim Henson and Joe Raposo and Frank Oz, who intuitively grasped what it takes to get through to children. They were television's answer to Beatrix Potter or L. Frank Baum or Dr. Seuss."

-Author Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point^[112]

Although the producers decided against depending upon a single host for Sesame Street and to cast a group of ethnically diverse actors,^[50] they realized that a children's television program needed to have, as Lesser put it, "a variety of distinctive and reliable personalities",^[113] both human and Muppet. Jon Stone was responsible for hiring the show's first cast. He did not audition actors until Spring 1969, a few weeks before the five test shows were due to be filmed. He videotaped the auditions, and Ed Palmer took them out into the field to test children's reactions. The actors who received the "most enthusiastic thumbs up" were cast.^[114] For example, Loretta Long, was chosen to play Susan when the children who saw her audition stood up and sang along with her rendition of "I'm a Little Teapot".^[114][115] It was Stone's goal to cast white actors in the minority.^[8] As Stone said, casting was the only aspect of the show that was "just completely haphazard".^[116]. Most of the cast and crew found jobs on Sesame Street through personal relationships with Stone and the other producers.^[116] Stone also hired Bob McGrath to play Bob, Will Lee to play Mr. Hooper, and Matt Robinson to play Gordon.^[117]

Sesame Street's cast became more diverse in the 1970s. The cast members who joined the show during this time were Sonia Manzano (Maria), Northern Calloway (David), Emilio Delgado (Luis), Linda Bove (Linda), and Buffy Saint-Marie (Buffy).^[118] Roscoe Orman succeeded Matt Robinson, the original Gordon, and Hal Miller, in 1975.^[119]

According to CTW's research, children preferred watching and listening to other children more than puppets and adults, so they included children in many scenes. These children were nonprofessionals, unscripted, and spontaneous, so many of their reactions were unpredictable and difficult to control. The adult cast learned to handle the children cast's spontaneity with their own spontaneity, even when it resulted in departure from the planned script or from the planned lesson.^[120]

Reception

Ratings

When Sesame Street premiered in 1969, it aired on only 67.6% of American televisions, but it earned a 3.3 Nielsen rating, or 1.9 million households.^[121] It reached 7 million children a day by the end of its first season.^[122] Sesame Street's high ratings increased into its second season, and Nielsen reported high audience loyalty.^[123] Lesser reported rumors about the show becoming a fad among college students.^[124]

By the show's tenth anniversary in 1979, 9 million American children under the age of six were watching Sesame Street daily. Four out of five children had watched it over a six-week period, and 90% of children from low-income inner-city homes regularly viewed the show.^[125] According to a 1993 survey conducted by the US Department of Education, 6.6 million and 2.4 million kindergartners regularly watched it. 77% of preschoolers watched it once a week, and 86% of kindergartners, first-, and second-grade students had watched it once a week before starting school. The show reached most young children in almost all demographic groups, most significantly economically disadvantaged children; 88% of children from low-income families and 90% of both African-American and Latino children watched the show before entering kindergarten. Over 80% of children from all minority language groups watched it before starting school. Children from the poorest communities were most likely to be regular viewers, as were younger children. Children whose parents did not read to them regularly were less likely to be regular viewers, and children of highly educated parents stopped viewing earlier than children from disadvantaged households. . ^[126]

The show's ratings significantly decreased in the early 1990s, when the ways children viewed television and the television marketplace had changed. In 1969, the choices in children's programming were limited, but the growth of the home-video industry during the 1980s and the boom in children's programming during the 90s on cable channels like Nickelodeon, which were directly influenced by Sesame Street, resulted in lower ratings for Sesame Street. As The New York Times reported in 2002, "learning to click the remote control has become a developmental milestone, like crawling and walking".^[53] The producers responded to these societal changes by making large-scale structural changes to the show.^[127]

By 2006, Sesame Street had become "the most widely viewed children's television show in the world", with 20 international independent versions and broadcasts in over 120 countries.^[128] A 1996 survey found that 95% of American preschoolers have watched the show by the time they are three years old.^[67] In 2008, it was estimated that 77 million Americans had watched the series as children.^[129] By the show's 40th anniversary in 2009, it was ranked the fifteenth most popular children's show on television.^[130]

Influence

As Davis has stated, Sesame Street is "perhaps the most vigorously researched, vetted, and fretted-over program".^[131] As of 2001, there were over 1,000 research studies regarding its efficacy. impact, and effect on American culture.^[68] The CTW conducted research in two ways: summative research during the show's first season that measured the show's educational effectiveness,^{[132][note 9]} and in-house formative research that informed and improved production.^[2]

The CTW solicited the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to conduct its summative research.^[133] The ETS hired and trained coordinators, testers, and observers from local communities to conduct their studies.^[134] The most direct tests of the show's effectiveness were comparisons between children who watched it regularly and those who did not. After the first season, however, Sesame Street was so widely watched that it was difficult to make this distinction, to the point that the ETS began to have problems finding enough subjects for their non-viewing groups, which weakened their experimental design. They solved this problem by selecting control group households from areas that did not broadcast the show,^[135] Mielke reported that future large-scale studies, instead of using groups of viewers and nonviewers, used statistical designs and methods for estimating cause-effects relationships.^[136] ETS's two "landmark"^[136] summative evaluations, conducted in 1970 and 1971, demonstrated that Sesame Street had a significant educational impact on its viewers.^[137] According to Mielke, these studies provided the majority of the early educational effects of Sesame Street and have been cited in other studies of the effects of television on young children.^{[136][note 10]}

The ETS reported that the children who watched the show the most learned the most.^[138] Children scored the highest in the skills, such as letter recognition, the show focused on the most. Three-year olds who watched regularly scored higher than five-years who did not, and children from low-income households who were regular viewers scored higher than children from homes with higher incomes who watched the show less frequently. Similar results were shown with children from non-English speaking homes. Although adult supervision was not required for children to learn the material being presented, the children who watched and discussed it with their parents gained more skills than children who did not.^[139] Children viewing the show in the informal home setting learned as much as children who watched it at school under the supervision of a teacher.^[140] When school adjustment was tested, they found that regular viewers scored higher; they also had more positive attitudes towards school and better peer relations.^[141]

Contrary to the CTW's concern that the show would widen the gap between children from advantaged backgrounds and children from disadvantaged children, there was no evidence that it occurred. As Lesser reported, the gains made by disadvantaged children were "at least as great"^[142] as advantaged children. CTW researcher Keith Mielke reported that the show's positive general effects, as found by the ETS, occurred across all subdivisions of children (gender, age, geographic location, and socio-economic status).^[140] Mielke reported that studies seem to suggest that the show can "exert a significant impact on children's social behavior",^[143] although the evidence is not as strong as it is for cognitive effects, nor has there been as many studies researching these areas.^[144]

In 1995, a longitudinal study was conducted at the University of Kansas, the first large-scale evaluation of Sesame Street's cognitive effects in over twenty years.^[145] Their findings supported previous studies that early viewing of educational children's television appears to contribute to children's school readiness. They found that children from disadvantaged backgrounds learn as much as advantaged children per hour of viewing, but that they do not watch enough to gain the show's maximum benefit. When they compared the effects of watching Sesame Street with watching other programs, they found that watching commercial entertainment cartoons has a negative effect, and that watching Sesame Street daily did not increase children's viewing of other categories of television or make them likely to participate in other educational activities.^[146]

A 1973 survey of households living in four major cities found that the large majority of mothers thought that watching Sesame Street had helped their children in school.^[147] Focus groups conducted by the CTW in 1995 showed that, as researcher Nicholas Zill reported, most American parents are "generally quite happy with Sesame Street.^[148]

In CTW's early formative studies with "the distractor", they found that viewing the show resulted in more learning when children watched carefully or when they participated by singing or talking along. In re-tests four weeks later, CTW found that children had retained most of what they had previously learned.^[149] After the first three weeks (15 episodes), they compared viewers and nonviewers and found few differences in learning, but when they tested both groups after six weeks, larger differences began to appear, with viewers scoring higher than nonviewers.^[150] In 1995, during a study conducted over two seasons by the CTW, they found a "significant increase"^[151] in letter recognition.

As Lesser stated, the early tests conducted, both formative and summative, "suggested that Sesame Street was making strides towards teaching what it had set out to teach".^[152] According to Lesser, children with cognitive impairments, who were considered incapable of learning, were learning how to recite the alphabet, recognize letters, and count in sequence from watching Sesame Street. Parents of children younger than the show's intended audience were also learning from it.^[153]

Other research studies have been conducted about the cognitive effects of Sesame Street. In 1990, a two-year longitudinal study found that viewing the show was a "significant predictor"^[154] of improved vocabulary, regardless of family size, parent education, child gender, or parental attitudes towards television.^[155] Another study, also conducted in 1990, looked at the effect of Sesame Street home videos, and found that there were gains in children's vocabulary, letter and word recognition, and printed word identification. They also found that the videos encouraged discussion with adults that may have helped reinforce the educational messages and content.^[156]

In 1994, research was conducted in a study entitled "The Recontact Study", funded by the Markle Foundation, that looked at the effects of Sesame Street on adolescents who had watched the show as young children. The subjects had participated in previous studies as preschoolers.^[157] When the study's research subjects were statistically equated for parents' level of education, birth order, residence, and sex, it found that adolescents who had watched Sesame Street as preschoolers were positively influenced by it. Compared with children who had not watched it regularly, they had higher grades in English, math, and science; read for pleasure more often; perceived themselves as more competent; and expressed lower levels of aggressive attitudes. The effects were stronger amongst adolescent boys than adolescent girls, and there was no evidence that the show had a negative effect on creativity.^[158]

Lesser believed that Sesame Street research "may have conferred a new respectability upon the studies of the effects of visual media upon children".^[159]. He also believed that the show had the same effect on the prestige in the television industry of producing shows for children.^[159]

As critic Richard Roeper states, perhaps one of the strongest indicators of the influence of Sesame Street are the enduring rumors and urban legends surrounding the show and its characters, especially about Bert and Ernie.^[160]

Critical reception

Sesame Street was praised from its debut in 1969. Newsday reported that several newspapers and magazines had written "glowing" reports about CTW and Cooney.^[121] Although the series had been on the air for less than a year, Time Magazine featured Big Bird, who had received more fan mail than any of the show's human hosts, on its cover and declared, " ...It is not only the best children's show in TV history, it is one of the best parents' shows as well".^[122] David Frost declared Sesame Street "a hit everywhere it goes".^[122] An executive at ABC, while recognizing that Sesame Street was not perfect, stated that the show "opened children's TV to taste and wit and substance"... and "made the climate right for improvement".^[122] By the end of the show's first season, ratings were high, the song "Rubber Duckie" was on the music charts for nine weeks, and Big Bird appeared on The Flip Wilson Show. Also in 1970, Sesame Street won a Peabody Award, three Emmys, and the Prix Jeunesse award. President Richard Nixon sent Cooney a congratulatory letter.^[122] Dr. Benjamin Spock predicted that the program would result in "better trained citizens, fewer unemployables in the next generation, fewer people on welfare, and smaller jail populations".^[161] By 1995, the show had won two Peabody Awards and four Parents' Choice Awards. In addition, it was the subject of retrospectives at the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of Modern Art.^[48]

"Sesame Street is...with lapses, the most intelligent and important program in television. That is not anything much yet".

-Renata Adler, The New Yorker, 1972^[162]

Sesame Street was not without detractors, however. In May 1970, a state commission in Mississippi voted to ban Sesame Street. A member of the commission leaked the vote to the New York Times, stating that "Mississippi was not yet ready" for the show's integrated cast.^[163] Cooney called the ban "a tragedy for both the white and black children of Mississippi".^[130] The Mississippi commission later reversed its decision, after the vote had made national news.

According to Children and Television, Lesser's account of the development and early years of Sesame Street, there was little criticism of the show in the months following its premiere, but it increased at the end of its first season and beginning of the second season. Lesser put the early criticism into four categories: educational goals, how the goals were chosen and obtained, the show's possible unintended effects, and its portrayal of minorities and women.^{[164][note 11]} For example, social scientist Urie Bronfenbrenner criticized the show for being too wholesome, stating, "The old, the ugly or the unwanted is simply made to disappear through a manhole".^[122] Scholar Robert W. Morrow speculated that much of the early criticism, which he called "surprisingly intense",^[165] stemmed from cultural and historical reasons in regards to, as he put it, "the place of children in American society and the controversies about television's effects on them".^[165]

According to author David Borgenicht, upper-middle-class members of the black community viewed the Muppet Roosevelt Franklin, created by Matt Robinson, as a negative cultural stereotype.^[166] In spite of what Davis called "vigorous opposition"^[167] from Sesame Street's black performers, the CTW acquiesced to this criticism and took Roosevelt off the show.

Since federal funds had been used to produce the show, more segments of the population insisted upon being represented on Sesame Street. For example, Latino groups criticized the show for the lack of Hispanic characters during its early years.^[130] A committee of Hispanic activists, commissioned by the CTW in 1970, called Sesame Street "racist" and said that the show's bilingual aspects were of "poor quality and patronizing".^[165] Davis reported that organizations like the National Organization for Women (NOW) expressed concerns that the show needed to be "less male-oriented".^[122] Members of NOW were, as Davis put it, "rankled by the portrayal of Susan, whom they saw as a subservient, powerless dispenser of milk and cookies".^[168] The show's producers satisfied these critics by making Susan a nurse and by hiring a female writer.^[122] As an interesting contrast, Sesame Street was also chastised by a Louisiana critic for the presence of strong single women on the show.^[8]

In 1995, journalist Kay Hymowitz called Sesame Street "a triumph of appearance over substance"^[48] and credited its success not with quality, but with "a combination of savvy timing, sophisticated image making, and vigorous promotion".^[48] She held the show partly responsible for the declining verbal abilities of American students, and accused the show of affirming negative stereotypes about women. According to Hymowitz, the show's creators discouraged children's natural curiosity about the world. She criticized the show for, instead of transforming television, being "devoured"^[48] by it. She took issue with its use of cultural references, stating that the show taught young children to embrace the negative values of commercialism, celebrity, and anti-intellectualism. She insisted that by using television's production values, the producers of Sesame Street emphasized their "jazzy medium"^[48] more than the educational content they were supposed to convey. Hymowitz took issue with the show's educational claims, stating that Sesame Street diminished young children's readiness for reading by limiting their abilities to engage in analytical and creative thinking. She reported that most of the positive research conducted on the show has been done by the CTW, and then sent to a sympathetic press. She charged that the studies conducted by the CTW "hint at advocacy masquerading as social science".^[48]

Lesser, anticipating the criticism regarding Sesame Street's use of dialects, stated that the CTW found no evidence that presenting language models other than standard English confused young children or taught them to learn English incorrectly. Instead, the natural diversity of language presented on the show reflected the natural diversity of its characters.^[169]

In 2003, one of Sesame Street's international co-productions, Takalani Sesame, caused some controversy in the US when the first HIV-positive Muppet, Kami, was created in response to South Africa's AIDS epidemic. It marked the first time AIDS and the goal of confronting the disease's stigma was included in a preschool curriculum. According to the documentary, "The World According to Sesame Street", the reaction of many in the US surprised Sesame Workshop. Some members of Congress attacked Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop, and PBS. According to co-producer Naila Farouky, "The reaction we got in the US blew me away. I didn't expect people to be so horrible... and hateful and mean".^[170] The controversy in the US was short-lived, and died down when the public discovered the facts about the South African co-production, and when Kofi Annan and Jerry Falwell praised the Workshop's efforts. Kami went on to be named UNICEF's Champion for Children in November 2003.^[171]

As of 2009, the series has received 118 Emmy Awards, more than any other television series.^[12]

Media information

Broadcast history

The show is broadcast worldwide; in addition to the U.S. version, many countries have locally produced versions adapted to local needs, some with their own characters, and in a variety of different languages. In Canada, beginning in 1970, 15-minute shows called Canada's Sesame Street were broadcast, and by 1972 an edited version of the one-hour American program was airing but with specially filmed Canadian segments, which featured the French language. In 1995 the American version was replaced by a half-hour long all-Canadian version of the series entitled Sesame Park. Since the original Sesame Street was still accessible to Canadians, and more familiar, the format change didn't find acceptance with audiences and was taken off the air in 2002. Broadcasts in New Zealand and Australia began in 1971.

In the United Kingdom its introduction was controversial. The ITV network company London Weekend Television first showed the series in the London region in the early 1970s to much criticism (generally regarding its Americanism). In time the show was subsequently broadcast by other ITV regions in the early 1980s, after which it moved to Channel 4, where it was a lunch-time fixture for many years through to the early 2000s. Later broadcasts of the show featured the hour-long episodes in a format of two ½-hour episodes. 120 countries have aired the show, many of which partnered with Sesame Workshop to create local versions.

In recent years Sesame Street has made what area educators consider to be critical advances in its international versions. In the late 1990s versions appeared in China and Russia as these countries shifted away from communism. In Israel there was a spin-off called Rachov SumSum (רחוב שומשום). More recently, there is also a joint Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian project, called Sesame Stories, which was created with the goal of promoting greater cultural understanding. The show along with 123 Sesame Street and Sesame Street Unpaved aired on Noggin (originally a joint venture of Sesame Workshop and Viacom) until 2005.

Spin-offs

Spin-offs of Sesame Street include: The Muppet Show, Play With Me Sesame, a half-hour "interactive" program featuring new and old material;^[172] Sesame English, an English as a Second Language teaching tool, created in 1999 with Berlitz International;^[173] Elmo's World,^[174] Global Grover,^[174] and Global Thingy^[175] all originated as segments on the main series, split off for separate syndication; and Bert and Ernie's Great Adventures, a clay animation series created for international markets, and later shown as part of the parent series.^[176][177] Selected "classic" episodes of the series were shown nearly unedited as Sesame Street Unpaved^[178], and segment-only show Open Sesame also has aired on various international channels.

Jennifer Monier-Williams, Vice President, Worldwide Television Distribution at Sesame Workshop commented "The expansion of the Sesame brand through wonderfully interactive shows like Play With Me Sesame and Elmo's World give children around the globe new ways to experience fun and learning in the way Sesame does it best."^[179]

Videos and specials

Christmas Eve on Sesame Street scene with Oscar (in garbage can) and Big Bird at the 86th Street New York City Subway station.

A series of Sesame Street telefilms have featured the characters on day trips or in foreign countries. Don't Eat the Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1983) saw the cast locked in the gallery overnight; Big Bird and Snuffy help a cursed boy pharaoh. NBC's Big Bird in China (1983) followed Big Bird, Barkley, and their new friend Xiao Foo traveling through China to find Feng Huang, the phoenix bird. In Big Bird in Japan (1988), the titular character gets lost. Out to Lunch (1974) features the cast of Sesame Street and The Electric Company taking over ABC News. Big Bird turned six in Big Bird's Birthday or Let Me Eat Cake (1991), despite being referred to as four years old previously. CinderElmo (1999) was a FOX special, with Keri Russell as the princess looking for her match in the kingdom. Telly fears what the New Year will bring in Sesame Street Stays Up Late! (1993, DVD in 2004).

Various strictly musical programs have been made. Julie Andrews and Perry Como performed with the Muppets on Julie on Sesame Street (1974).^[180][181] Special episodes of the PBS series Evening at Pops variety show have featured Sesame Street characters. The Sesame Street Special (1988) also included many guest performances.

Holiday special Christmas Eve on Sesame Street (1978) won an Emmy Award, while another special that year, A Special Sesame Street Christmas (1978), has mostly unfavourable reviews. Elmo Saves Christmas is a movie special in which Elmo uses a magic snowglobe to wish that Christmas were every day, and must go back in time to correct his mistake. Anniversary specials include A Walking Tour of Sesame Street with James Earl Jones (1979), Sesame Street: 20 And Still Counting (1989), All-Star 25th Birthday: Stars and Street Forever (1994) and Sesame Street Jam: A Musical Celebration (1994), and The Street We Live On (2004). Jon Stewart is set to host a "live" retrospective on the series on ABC, but is accidentally locked in his dressing room with the tapes. Elmo attempts to salvage the show, improvised, in Elmopalooza! (1998).

In 1987 and 1992, episodes of Shalom Sesame were produced, focusing on introducing Jewish culture, customs, and language to Jewish-American children.^[182] Some international co-productions of Sesame Street have created many of their own specials as well.

The characters have made appearance on television series including: Scrubs (2009), Between the Lions (2001), The Colbert Report (2008), The Electric Company (1972, 1975), Emeril Live, Paula's Party (2005), Fanfare, The Flip Wilson Show (1970), The Frugal Gourmet (1992, 1995, 1997), Hollywood Squares, Jeopardy!, Deal or No Deal, Martha (2006), Martha Stewart Living, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (1981), Soul Man (1998), The Torkelsons (1991), The Muppet Show (1976), The West Wing (2004),^[183][184] What's My Line?, and numerous talk shows and mornings shows, ranging from The Ed Sullivan Show to The Today Show.

Behind the scenes video of Sesame Street was never allowed until 2000 when PBS affiliate WLVT in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, aired, for the very first time, footage of the cast and crew as they rehearsed and recorded an episode. Emmy award winning photojournalist Bill Mason captured actors and Muppeteers rehearsing lines and blocking scenes as part of a news magazine story celebrating Sesame Street's 30th anniversary. The only restriction placed on the video was that the Muppets and their respective Muppeteers could not be shown together in order to avoid confusing children viewers.

On November 10, 2009, Sesame Street celebrated its 40th anniversary that included a segment with First Lady Michelle Obama interacting with the Muppets.^[185]

Feature films

Two theatrical wide-release feature films based on the series have been made.

Co-produced with Warner Bros., the 1985 film Sesame Street Presents Follow That Bird revolved around a social worker forcing Big Bird into adoption. Big Bird gets homesick and tired of his adoptive parents, and heads back to New York, when he is kidnapped by evil carnival leaders (played by Dave Thomas and Joe Flaherty); the residents of Sesame Street launch a cross-country search to find him.^[186]

In the second Sesame Street theatrical film, co-produced with Columbia Pictures, 1999's The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland, fourteen years after Follow That Bird, Elmo spends time with his favorite blanket. After Zoe accidentally tears the blanket, when Elmo refuses to share, the blanket winds up in Grouchland, ruled by the Queen of Trash (Vanessa L. Williams). Elmo ventures forth, to rescue his blanket from the villainous Huxley (Mandy Patinkin). Soon, the rest of the Sesame Street gang follow in pursuit, but end up in Grouch prison.^[187][188]

Big Bird also appeared in a cameo in The Muppet Movie. As Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear headed west to Hollywood, they met Big Bird heading East, explaining he was on his way to New York "To try to break into Public Television". In The Great Muppet Caper, Oscar the Grouch appears in what he calls "a very brief cameo." Miss Piggy tries to get a ride with a truck driver, but the driver won't let her ride with him. So, Miss Piggy throws the driver into a pile of trash where Oscar is disturbed by all the noise. In the wedding sequence of The Muppets Take Manhattan, several Sesame Street characters appear including Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster, Bert, Ernie, and Oscar. In 2009, Oscar the Grouch made a cameo appearance in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, where he and Darth Vader want to join the group of villains led by Kanmunrah to take over the world. But Kanmunrah doesn't see Oscar as the villain type, just grouchy.

The Follow that Bird movie poster. The film was the first movie featuring the Sesame Street characters.

Brand licensing

In 1970, the CTW established a department overseeing the development of "nonbroadcast" materials based upon Sesame Street. Its goal was to assist the CTW in becoming, as Cooney envisioned, a "multiple media institution".^[189] The first material they published was Sesame Street Magazine, in 1970, which attempted to incorporate the show's curriculum goals.^[190] As with the show, formative research has been conducted surrounding the magazine, initially by CTW's research department, and then by the Magazine Research Group in 1975.^[190]

In 1971, the Western Publishing Company, publishers of Golden Books for children, began selling a successful series of books based upon Sesame Street. As of 2001, there were over 600 books available in the Sesame Street library.^[191] The books were based upon the show's curriculum, as well as upon its themes. For example, the death of the Sesame Street character Mr. Hooper was dealt with in a book entitled I'll Miss You, Mr. Hooper, published shortly after the show dealt with it in 1983.^[192]

International co-productions

Shortly after Sesame Street debuted in the US, the CTW was approached independently by producers from several countries to produce versions of the show in their countries.^[193] Cooney remarked, "To be frank, I was really surprised, because we thought we were creating the quintessential American show. We thought the Muppets were quintessentially American, and it turns out they're the most international characters ever created".^[170] She hired former CBS executive Mike Dann, who left commercial television to become her assistant, as a CTW vice-president. One of Dann's tasks was to field offers to produce versions of Sesame Street in other countries. Dann's appointment resulted in television critic Marvin Kitman, referring to the May 1970 Mississippi state commission decision to ban the show,^[130] stating, "After he [Dann] sells [Sesame Street] in Russia and Czechoslovakia, he might try Mississippi, where it is considered too controversial for educational TV".^[194] By summer 1970, Dann had made the first international agreements for what CTW came to call "co-productions".

The earliest international versions were what CTW vice-president Charlotte Cole and her colleagues called "fairly simple",^[193] consisting of dubbed versions of the show with local language voice-overs and instructional cutaways. Dubbed versions of the show continued to be produced if the country's needs and resources warranted it.^[195] Eventually, a variant of the CTW model was used to create and produce independently produced preschool television shows in other countries.^[193] By 2006, there were twenty co-productions.^[170] In 2001 there were over 120 million viewers of all international versions of Sesame Street,^[196] and by the show's 40th anniversary in 2009, they were seen in more than 140 countries.^[197] In 2005, Doreen Carvajal of The New York Times reported that income from the co-productions accounted for US$96 million.^[198] As Cole and her colleagues reported in 2001, "Children's Television Workshop (CTW) can be regarded as the single largest informal educator of young children in the world".^[196]

Funding

Funding for Sesame Street is derived from a variety of public, private, and corporate sources. Beaches Family Resorts, McDonald's, Earth's Best Organic, New Balance, American Greetings, The Good Egg Project, PNC Grow Up Great, and EverydayKidz.com are considered "Sponsors" of the show, receiving ad-like spots before the program, when it is shown on PBS.^[199] The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, United States Department of Education, Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York^[200], a Ready to Learn grant,^[201] and contributions to PBS stations are also credited.^[202] Local entities can fund the series regionally.

When in 1988 Sesame Street joined the PBS standard of acknowledging underwriting, consumer advocate Ralph Nader criticized the program. Nader accused Discovery Zone's sponsorship of the program as "exploiting impressionable children."^[203][204] Producers defended the spots by noting that they help keep the show on air, despite cuts to PBS funding, and are aimed at parents, not kids.^[204]

As a result of Cooney's initial proposal in 1968, the Carnegie Institute awarded her an US$8 million grant to create a new children's television program and establish the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW).^[5][205] Cooney and Morrisett procured additional multi-million-dollar grants from the US federal government, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Ford Foundation.^[4] As Lesser reported, they procured their funding from a combination of government agencies and private foundations, which protected them from the economic pressures experienced by commercial networks, but caused challenges in procuring future funding.^[206]

After Sesame Street's initial success, its producers began to think about its survival beyond its development and first season and decided to explore other funding sources.^[207] The 1970s were marked by conflicts between CTW and the federal government; in 1978, the US Department of Education refused to deliver a US$2 million check until the last day of CTW's fiscal year. As a result, the CTW decided to depend upon licensing arrangements, publishing, and international sales for their funding.^[7] Henson owned the trademarks to the Muppet characters, and he was reluctant to market them at first. He agreed when CTW promised that the profits from toys, books, and other products were to be used exclusively to fund CTW. The producers demanded complete control over all products and product decisions; any product line associated with the show had to be educational, inexpensive, and not advertised during the show's airings.^[208]

Web site

Since 1998 Sesame Workshop has provided additional content on its website^[209] and others such as Random House.^[210] The content is targeted at parents and children ranging in age from birth to school-age, and includes information on dozens of topics, such as appropriate parenting techniques, dealing with children's fears, development of literacy, and maintenance of good health.

Sesame Street's Web site was one of the first to include educational materials, for both parents and children. "There are downloadable games plus number- and alphabet-coloring pages for the children. Their parents can consult references covering everything from how to comb their baby's hair to how to play with their 4-year-old."^[211] The Web site has been recommended by academic journals.^[212] It receives over 1 million visitors daily.^[213] On August 11, 2008, a new site debuted with new features such as videos and games. On December 7, 2009, Sesame Workshop announced availability of free browser-based eBooks on their website, including The Monster at the End of This Book - the best-selling Sesame Street title to date. The initial list of five free books will be updated every week. Sesame Workshop also plans to launch paid eBooks on their website in Spring of 2010.^[214]

Footnotes

Notes

References

• Borgenicht, David (1998). Sesame Street Unpaved. New York: Hyperion Publishing. ISBN 0-7868-6460-5
• Cherow-O'Leary, Renee. (2001). "Carrying Sesame Street Into Print: Sesame Street Magazine, Sesame Street Parents, and Sesame Street Books". In "G" is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street, Fisch, Shalom M. and Rosemarie T. Truglio, eds. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ISBN 0-8058-3395-1
• Clash, Kevin and Gary Brozek & Louis Henry Mitchell (2006). My Life as a Furry Red Monster: What Being Elmo has Taught Me About Life, Love and Laughing Out Loud. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-7679-2375-8
• Cole, Charlotte F., Beth A. Richman, and Susan A. McCann Brown (2001). "The World of Sesame Street Research". In "G" is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street, Fisch, Shalom M. and Rosemarie T. Truglio, eds. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ISBN 0-8058-3395-1
• Cooney, Joan Ganz (2001). "Foreword". In "G" is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street, Fisch, Shalom M. and Rosemarie T. Truglio, eds. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ISBN 0-8058-3395-1
• Davis, Michael (2008). Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street. New York: Viking Penguin. ISBN 978-0-670-01996-0
• Finch, Christopher (1993). Jim Henson: The Works: the Art, the Magic, the Imagination. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-6794-1203
• Fisch, Shalom M. and Lewis Bernstein (2001). "Formative Research Revealed: Methodological and Process Issues in Formative Research". In In "G" is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street, Fisch, Shalom M. and Rosemarie T. Truglio, eds. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ISBN 0-8058-3395-1-4
• Giklow, Louise A. (2009). Sesame Street: A Celebration— Forty Years of Life on the Street. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers. ISBN 978-1-57912-638-4.
• Gladwell, Malcolm (2000). The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown, and Company. ISBN 0-316-31696-2
• Huston, Aletha C., Daniel R. Anderson, John C. Wright, Deborah Linebarger, & Kelly L. Schmidt. (2001). "Sesame Street Viewers as Adolescents: The Recontact Study". In "G" is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street, Fisch, Shalom M. and Rosemarie T. Truglio, eds. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ISBN 0-8058-3395-1
• Lesser, Gerald S. (1974). Children and Television: Lessons From Sesame Street. New York: Vintage Books.
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• Morrow, Robert W. (2006). Sesame Street and the Reform of Children's Television. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-8230-3
• O'Dell, Cary (1997). Women Pioneers in Television: Biographies of Fifteen Industry Leaders. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-0167-2.
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• Truglio, Rosemarie T. and Shalom M. Fisch (2001a). "Introduction". In "G" is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street, Fisch, Shalom M. and Rosemarie T. Truglio, eds. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ISBN 0-8058-3395-1
• Truglio, Rosemarie T. and Shalom M. Fisch (2001b). "Why Children Learn From Sesame Street". In "G" is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street, Fisch, Shalom M. and Rosemarie T. Truglio, eds. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ISBN 0-8058-3395-1
• Truglio, Rosemarie T., Valeria O. Lovelace, Ivelisse Segui, & Susan Scheiner. (2001). "The Varied Role of Formative Research: Case Studies from 30 Years". In "G" is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street, Fisch, Shalom M. and Rosemarie T. Truglio, eds. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ISBN 0-8058-3395-1
• Whitburn, Joel (2004). The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, 8th edition. New York: Billboard Books. ISBN 0-8230-7499-4
• Wright, John C., Aletha C. Huston, Ronda Scantlin, & Jennifer Kotler (2001). "The Early Window Project: Sesame Street Prepares Children for School". In "G" is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street, Fisch, Shalom M. and Rosemarie T. Truglio, eds. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ISBN 0-8058-3395-1
• Yotive, William and Shalom M. Fisch. (2001). "The Role of Sesame Street-Based Materials in Child-Care Settings". In "G" is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street, Fisch, Shalom M. and Rosemarie T. Truglio, eds. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ISBN 0-8058-3395-1
• Zill, Nicholas. (2001). "Does Sesame Street Enhance School Readiness?: Evidence From a National Survey of Children". In "G" is for Growing: Thirty Years of Research on Children and Sesame Street, Fisch, Shalom M. and Rosemarie T. Truglio, eds. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. ISBN 0-8058-3395-1

External links

• Sesame Workshop
• SesameStreet.org
• PBS Kids: Official Site
• Muppet Wiki
• Sesame Street Live
• Sesame Street at TV.com
• Sesame Street eBooks
• Sesame Street Episode Guide at Muppet Wiki