Like most people, when I saw the Youtube video of Grover parodying the Old Spice Man, I thought it was wonderful: cute and hilarious and a bit educational all at once. But it made me think about how, back in my second year of university, a girl in one of my classes insisted that Sesame Street was a bad thing because it trained children to watch television. By making children familiar with the form of the thing, she said, it indoctrinated them into passively accepting different elements in the same form. One of her favorite arguments in this regard was the presence of Guy Smiley as a tool to help kids learn how to watch game shows.
At the time I thought the idea ridiculous. I grew up with Sesame Street longer than most because I was the oldest of four siblings, so if they were watching Sesame Street while I did older-kid play in the background, I was watching Sesame Street as well. The reason I thought the idea ridiculous was that I knew full well that Sesame Street challenged authority on a regular basis. I mean, Bert and Ernie alone should be enough to make that point; every Bert and Ernie sketch is basically Ernie being a bit of an asshole to poor old Bert. But see also the treatment of Herry Monster as a sensitive, gentle giant who likes playing with dollies; Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster in toto; the realistic treatment of Mr. Hooper’s death, which went against every children’s TV convention in the book.
But of late I grow less sure. Part of it, of course, is probably just things-were-better-when-I-was-a-kid-itis. There is no innate need for Herry Monster on Sesame Street as compared to other monsters. Bert and Ernie still do the same schtick, which is the best thing you can hope for. Cookie Monster is still Cookie Monster. (Although Grover is superior to Elmo. I will not concede this point. Ever.)
But of late, the trend in the show seems to be one of parodying not just the general form of culture (as Guy Smiley did) but of specifics: 30 Rock, Mad Men, Law and Order. Although Sesame Street has never been too complex for kids, these sketches seem even simpler. They don’t seem as designed to teach kids; they seem instead designed to reinforce the brand for adults, and to allow kids to understand the cultural references their parents make. (The Law and Order sketch is the best example of this – there’s no reason to make fun of the CHUNG CHUNG noise because the CHUNG CHUNG jokes really only make sense if you understand what the CHUNG CHUNG noise’s significance is.)
Or maybe I’m just kvetching. One thing of which I am more sure, though: Feist’s re-writing of 1234, cute as it may be, is no Lena Horne singing “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” I can’t help but think that there is something to that point.
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“They don’t seem as designed to teach kids; they seem instead designed to reinforce the brand for adults, and to allow kids to understand the cultural references their parents make.”
I imagine those bits are for the parents who might be watching.
I think the problem is they are directing it at the wrong audience. Monsterpiece Theater and Muppet News Flash were directed to kids.. with subtle winks to the parents saying “You know what this is” but now its directed at the parents first, then to the kids. Its a subtle shift but its there. Its like Looney Tunes.. They stopped being funny when it stopped being about the gag.. and more about the catchphrase and the character. Bugs Bunny is an asshole, Daffy is a bigger one. This was just something you knew. Not something that was pushed into your face.
I think it all kinda died for me when snuffaluffagus was found out to be real and not just Big Birds imagination.
The Cookie “Sometimes food” Monster is most emphatically not still the Cookie Monster, sorry.
MUPPET DETECTIVE MUNCH CANNOT BE UNSEEN!
That said, I am much more appreciative of 30 Rock’s shout-outs to the Muppets, than vice versa
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwHha3iB088
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNc5mv5OW5E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzgjpmvYGCU#t=00m35s
I refuse to accept that we are all just living in Elmo’s World.
I think this is more a case of your perspective changing than the show.
What’s the difference between Monsterpiece Theater and Special Letters Unit? Mostly that in the 1980s you probably didn’t know or care why Cookie Monster was in a robe or introducing a segment called “Me, Claudius,” but you still thought it was entertaining. Today you see something like Special Letters Unit and because you’ve watched far more prime time television than Sesame Street lately (and also you already know what an M is), your first impression is to spot the references to Special Victims Unit instead of whatever appeal a naive kid gets out of it.
Now, the dangers of exposing kids to TV. Look. My niece hasn’t even turned two yet and she already knows what a DVD is and she’s this close to knowing how to turn on the TV and play one. When her favorite programs are on it’s like she’s in a trance, and I can see why–the TV takes her to a magical other world that doesn’t exist in her normal life, but to experience it you kind of have to sit still and stare at it. Watching her watch TV makes me realize that it’s fairly natural for humans to react to this device in this way, so unless you’re going to raise a child in a household where the TV is never on, sooner or later she will indoctrinate herself to watch TV, Sesame Street or no. The only “danger” there must be the inferred assumption that this will lead to her watching Power Rangers all day, and I think that doesn’t give kids (or their parents) any credit to even attempt to develop healthy viewing habits.
Have you ever watched Finding Nemo five times in a row because the resident child wouldn’t stop screaming unless he could watch it one more time? Yeah, pretty sure if they didn’t put adult jokes in kid’s programming then every parent everywhere would have shot themselves a dozen times over by now.
Hence why Toy Story 3 rocked so hard.
Of course, you have to keep in mind that today is much different from yesterday. In the ’80s kids simply wouldn’t have responded to pop culture references like they do now because back then pop culture wasn’t the force it has become. The information age has surrounded us with memes and references like never before. Kids today are just much more likely to be exposed to programs from other genres because our eyes and ears have access to that much more now. So in a sense these Sesame-pop-culture references are only to be expected.
Okay I never watched Sesame Street, but bear with me: kids will laugh at jokes they don’t get. This is a basic fact of nature. Whether or not they actually enjoy them is another matter, but think about it: the first joke you ever learned was probably “Why did the chicken cross the road?” but did you ever actually get what was funny about it? No, but you understood that you were supposed to laugh at it.
Kids aren’t just small adults who don’t know as much as grown-ups. The way their minds work is different. They can’t grasp metaphors, for example. I think most people forget what it really was like to be a small child.
Kids’ shows are designed, written, and performed by adults, with maybe a child actor thrown in on occasion. Most of the time they end up making a show that appeals to adults. When they test it on kids, though, kids will still seem to enjoy it because kids laugh at jokes they don’t get.
Out of all the children’s programming that I’ve ever seen, I think only Mister Rogers really understood how kids view the world and successfully tailored his show to that. When it comes to books, I can name Beverly Cleary … Go back to something you haven’t seen since you were a kid, some movie or a book or something, and experience it again, and it will be mind-blowingly different to you.
Sesame Street does feel different to me.
As Tarpo said, there was a shift around the time that Snuffaluffagus was proven to be real.
The introduction of Elmo, and his eventual dominance of the show, was a big shift.
The attempt to get Cookie Monster away from cookies, because it was seen as a bad dietary influence. (Despite the detail that if you actually tried to eat like Cookie Monster, large portions of the cookies would end up on the floor.) And though I don’t have proof, I swear that the lyrics to the old “One of these things is not like the others” bit were changed to be more politically correct.
When I was a kid, we had Sesame Street for kids and The Muppet Show for older kids, but there were still similarities. Sometimes, it felt like the biggest difference was that the Muppet Show wasn’t trying to teach the ABCs. Modern Sesame Street is…something else. It feels hollow and soulless. It is going through the motions. It goes overboard in trying not to offend and tries to play it safe. I cannot help but think Mr. Hooper’s death, considered quite risky at the time, would not be a story that you would see in modern Sesame Street.
I thought the difference was that back in the day, parents didn’t watch TV with kids. They might’ve checked out the show for a few minutes to see if it was suitable for their kids, but that was it.
In addition, with only a few channels available, there wasn’t much choice, nor was their much chance of a parent getting it wrong. Every parent only had to be familiar with a handful of shows to know what their kids were watching.
In our current state of hyper-hover-parenting (this is neither a good or bad thing in the general sense) and of multi-channels, more parents sit down and watch TV with their kids more often. So creators have to make the show of interest to adults, otherwise they’ll have their kids watch some other show.
It is somewhat for the parents, and it is somewhat because the kids do experience popular culture to a certain extent, but according to actual CTW people I knew back when it was CTW it is also somewhat because people make the show and if they enjoy doing it and get a laugh, that carries over into the show and the kids know it.
I find it odd that people are calling Snuffleupagus being real as the demarcation point of quality, as opposed to Jim Hensen’s death. Surely the latter of those two was far more important to the actual mechanics of production.
These is the end of the great bastion of child’s programming. actually Elmo is the pure embodiment of the death of the Street.
Why give our kids crappy spoofs of crappy television. Our poor kids have this crap, or the Hanna montana crap from Disney. When i was a Kid we had live action comedy. You can not do that on television, or Let’s Go. Sure some of it was nasty, but honestly it was cleaner than the sluts/retards on Family or the Spoofing of adult themed television.
Grover is infinitely better than Elmo. Fist-bump, Grover bro.
Since there have been a few complaining about the devaluation of Cookie Monster here, I must remind all of you that Cookie has been an advocate for balanced nutrition since the ’70s, and all this came about because another character sang him a song about how cookies are a sometimes food, whereupon he said “NOW is sometimes!” and ate the cookie.
http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Is_Cookie_Monster_now_the_Veggie_Monster%3F
This is a really weird discussion, because it seems to be mainly about Sesame Street not being as good as it used to be, but as Rebecca points out, none of us really can actually make that comparison because we aren’t kids anymore, and kids *are* different. They don’t just “know less” than us, their minds work completely differently.
How many of you were watching at four years old, when Snuffy turned out to be real, and thought, “Well I’m done”. No one. And if you were watching, you probably felt the kid equivalent of awesome, because the whole Snuffy wandering away just before others showed up was the most annoying and frustrating thing ever as a kid. None of you treated it as a metaphor, or a statement on imaginary friends, it just annoyed the crap out of you that he was clearly real but no one believed Big Bird, just like your parents didn’t believe you when you saw a fox in the garden or something.
And, as kids, you fucking *loved* the ewoks. You know you did.
And kids today love Elmo because he is adorable. FACT. We can love Grover because he is riddled with self doubt, but kids love Elmo because he isn’t.
And while I am being Old Man Grumpus, kids of the nineties also loved Jar Jar Binks.
Sorry for randomly bitching. I am a bad internet citizen.
So, to sum up. I agree with Rebecca.
I don’t know. I remember watching old Sesame Street sketches well into my teens (much younger sibs, and a video game which froze the sketches out around 1990). I tended to love and hate the same sketches throughout the time. Sesame Street News Flash held up well, as well as most of the alphabet songs. I loved this song Prairie Dawn sang to Grover about Q words, and pretty much anything Bert & Ernie.
Then, senior year of college, my roommate and I decided to watch a full ep of Sesame Street while in bed sick. This was 2005. Most of the show seemed to have its ups and downs… hard to tell how much of the disappointment was due to growing up and lack of nostalgia…
But we both reacted violently against Elmo’s World. Mind, I was familiar with Elmo. I liked him okay when I was younger. I didn’t find Elmo repulsive. But my roommate and I decided we couldn’t stand the fact that we could count words of two syllables on our hands, and nothing was longer. It was seriously dumbed down compared to classic eps that we liked, and it took over a quarter of the series.
I’m inclined to believe Sesame Street has gone downhill, and simplifying is the problem.
I think I read that Sesame Street is (intentionally) skewing towards a younger audience than it did previously. It used to be for six-year-olds (Big Bird’s age; he used to be the POV character for the audience), now it’s for four-year-olds (Elmo’s age; the current POV character). So if you think it’s ‘dumbed down’… well, yeah, kinda.
There is so much more kids’ programming now than there was when I/most of us were kids, so the Street was all we had. Research told CTW that Sesame Street really wasn’t holding the interest of six-year-olds vs. Spongebob or whatever. So they revamped.
Oscar > Grover >> Elmo.