Eyewitness: 'Sesame Street' Naughty Before Katy Perry

http://www.aolnews.com/opinion/article/eyewitness-sesame-street-was-naughty-way-before-katy-perry/19652007

Eyewitness: 'Sesame Street' Naughty Before Katy Perry
David Fagin

AOL News (Sept. 29) -- In the early part of the 2000s, I had the privilege of working behind the scenes on "Sesame Street" for a few seasons.

And after seeing the fervor among viewers caused by the leaked video of Katy Perry's revealing outfit during her performance of "Hot N Cold" with a way-too-happy-looking Elmo, I'd tell those offended by the clip that they should be thankful it's taken this long for the sexual innuendos on the classic children's program to surface.

Don't get me wrong. Like most grown-ups, I'm a huge fan of Sesame Street. No other children's show on television ever came close to the Muppets' brand of mixing humor and learning.

But the fact is that adult themes have bubbled in and around the show ever since it first aired back in November 1969.

While I can't dish the best dirt that went on behind the scenes, for fear of going straight to Muppet hell, I'll give you a few "lighter" examples:

For starters, just for laughs -- and probably because taping any television show can be an incredibly boring and drawn-out process -- certain members of the crew used to place postcards containing images of scantily clad women on the rack inside Mr. Hooper's grocery store. Of course, the viewer at home could never make out what, exactly, was on those cards, and that made it all the more fun.

Along the same lines, the prop department had its fun naming the products that stocked the shelves of good ole Mr. Hooper's store, such as "Poop Away" toilet paper. (I won't even tell you what the fiber cereals were called.) Once in a while, a box of condoms would mysteriously appear between cereal boxes.

During one taping, an episode in which a morally bankrupt and dejected Cookie Monster slumped slowly off-screen after being falsely accused of stealing cookies, the sound effects guy let out a shotgun blast. Of course, that sound never made it to tape, but it had the crew in hysterics.

One of the best things about working on "Sesame Street" is the Christmas parties. They're legendary. Each year is a new theme. One particularly fun year, the entire set was turned into a 1960s go-go bar, complete with dancing girls shakin' it in Big Bird's nest.

Whatever the theme, each and every year, Elmo and his pals would perform R-rated skits that would leave the audience in stitches. One of my favorites was the time Ernie and Bert finally came out of the closet. Good times.

And, of course, let's not forget a more publicly visible display of Muppet mutiny: Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez, the Tony-winning writers of "Avenue Q" -- the hit Broadway show that depicts puppets doing things most people wouldn't dare do -- got their start working as interns on "Sesame Street."

On the air, you just have to watch the show on a regular basis to pick out all kinds of "double entendres" and things that make you go, "Hmm." The folks at Sesame Workshop sort of acknowledge this in their statement -- released after they decided not to air the Katy Perry bit that more than a million had already watched on YouTube: "Sesame Street has always been written on two levels, for the child and adult."

The good news is that "Sesame Street," even after 41 years, continues to be a huge draw for both parents and their children. And perhaps the recent flap will only encourage more of them to tune in and stop being such grouches.

Editor's note: Sesame Workshop declined an invitation from AOL News to submit a comment on this piece.

Katy Perry To Appear On 'The Simpsons' In December

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1648733/20100927/perry_katy.jhtml

Sep 27 2010
Katy Perry To Appear On 'The Simpsons' In December
After 'Sesame Street' canned her skit last week, Perry will perform with 'Simpsons' puppets for Christmas episode.
Gil Kaufman

You can bet good old Moe Syslak will have no problem at all with Katy Perry's low-cut dresses when the singer drops in to visit "The Simpsons" in December. After getting the hook on "Sesame Street" for showing Elmo too much cleavage, Perry is gearing up to add to her comedic résumé with a coveted guest spot on the long-running Fox sitcom on December 5.

According to Entertainment Weekly, Perry will guest in a very special Christmas-themed "Simpsons" episode in which the sallow-skinned denizens of Springfield will join her in live action as puppets. Perry will, of course, play herself in the bit, in which, yes, she will play Moe's girlfriend in an episode titled "The Fight Before Christmas."

Executive producer Al Jean spilled a bit of the reasoning for taking the lovably 2-D characters into the third dimension for the show, which was actually shot in mid-September, before Cleavagegate. "In the wake of Elmo's terrible betrayal, the Simpsons puppets wish to announce they stand felt-shoulder-to-shoulder with Katy Perry," Jean said. Among Perry's duties on the show will be leading the gang in singing "The 39 Days of Christmas."

The turn to comedy is in keeping with Perry's recent foray into acting, including a pair of appearances in skits on the season premiere of "Saturday Night Live" this weekend. In the first, a bespectacled Perry bounced and giggled her way through a "Bronx Beat" bit in which she played a buxom teen named Maureen Dichico who's been turning heads at the local library while reading to kids.

Perry showed decent comedic timing in that one, but was back to her usual forte during an appearance in the night's "Digital Short," in which she sang the theme to the fictional superhero movie "Boogerman." It's all good practice for her upcoming big-screen debut in "The Smurfs" as Smurfette.

Could there be a "Mr. and Mrs. Brand"-type caper in the future for Katy and hubby-to-be Russell?

Was Katy Perry too sexy for Sesame Street?

http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2010/09/23/was-katy-perry-too-sexy-for-sesame-street/

September 23rd, 2010
Was Katy Perry too sexy for Sesame Street?

“Sesame Street” has said "yes" and then "no" to Katy Perry’s appearance on the iconic children’s TV show after parents reportedly complained the star's outfit revealed a bit too much of her cleavage.

The 25-year-old singer stopped by “Sesame Street” to make a kid-friendly music video of "Hot N Cold" with Elmo, which made rounds on the Web earlier this week. The song itself was cleaned up for kids, but it seems that to some parents, her clothing wasn't.

According to TMZ, Sesame Workshop received complaints like, "You can practically see her [expletive]," and "they're gonna have to rename it cleavage avenue."

In a statement, a rep for Sesame Workshop said that the show “has a long history of working with celebrities across all genres, including athletes, actors, musicians and artists. Sesame Street has always been written on two levels, for the child and adult.”

The show uses celebrities and parody segments “because we know that a child learns best when co-viewing with a parent or care-giver. We also value our viewer’s opinions and particularly those of parents,” the statement went on.

“In light of the feedback we’ve received on the Katy Perry music video which was released on YouTube only, we have decided we will not air the segment on the television broadcast of Sesame Street, which is aimed at preschoolers,” the statement concluded.

In response, Perry’s rep has also released a statement: "Katy enjoyed working with Sesame Street, Kevin Clash and playing dress up with Elmo. You can view all the fun at http://www.katyperry.com/."

'Sesame Street' at 40

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-sesame-street10-2009nov10,0,147349.story

'Sesame Street' at 40: The importance of being Ernie -- and Bert and Kermit . . .
Beyond ABCs and 1, 2, 3, a multicultural cast and iconic puppets have entertained and educated generations of kids.
"Sesame Street," the world's largest informal children's educator, celebrates its 40th birthday on PBS KIDS.
By ROBERT LLOYD
Television Critic
November 10, 2009

Happy birthday, “Sesame Street.” You are 40 years old now, just a year younger than Mickey Mouse was the year you arrived on television -- and he was semi-retired by then, while you still report to work each day. This very morning you begin your 41st season, you and your cast of aging humans and ageless Muppets, with three first-episode veterans still in residence: Bob McGrath (who plays Bob), Loretta Long (called Susan) and Big Bird, who is still only 6 years old, although the man inside him, Caroll Spinney, will turn 76 next month. (The Bird's voice has dropped a little, but you should be so spry.) That kind of continuity is rare, if not otherwise nonexistent, on television. Certainly there is no other children's show to match you for longevity, cultural penetration or global reach.

The occasion is also being marked by the release of "Sesame Street: 40 Years of Sunny Days," a two-DVD set that, given the fact that today's episode is numbered 4,187, understandably fails to give the series its due. (Previously available sets spend three discs each on the first and second five years of the show.) But it does give something of its changing flavor and cast of characters (Kermit, Bert, Ernie, Cookie Monster, Grover, Elmo, Elmo, Elmo, Elmo), its working method and its huge ambitions: Birth, death, marriage, a hurricane -- the street has seen it all.

This was, of course, not the first educational series for kids. “Ding Dong School” with Miss Frances (Dr. Frances Horwich) goes back right to the Golden Age, and you could pick up odd bits of useful knowledge from "Captain Kangaroo," still going strong when "Sesame Street" bowed in the year of the moon landing and Altamont, or from "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," which premiered the year before. The franchised "Romper Room" suggested a pre-school, but in those days that meant marching in circles and ritual socialization: Do be a Do-Bee, Don't be a Don't-Bee; it didn't get any deeper than that.

"Sesame Street," by contrast, was conceived from the beginning as an instrument of learning and uplift -- a Head Start of the Air that would, by a sort of pedagogical jiujitsu, use the force of an addictive medium to its own higher ends. It was largely, though never exclusively, meant to give a leg-up to disadvantaged kids, and to get parents involved by putting on a show that was also attractive to them. I was no longer a child nor yet an adult when "Sesame Street" began, but I was certainly attracted: It looked like nothing else on television, showcasing independent animation at a time when that art was elsewhere reaching new lows. And it had Muppets, who came from the world of grown-up show business and added -- although it's odd to say -- sophistication to the mix.

And then there was the setting: Where most kids' shows took place within some snug refuge, a Treasure House or a Nice Man's Living Room, "Sesame Street" is set in out on the sidewalk, and therefore in a community, in what was clearly the city of New York -- and not the Starbucked and Disneyfied Manhattan of contemporary commerce, but a funky working-class neighborhood where laundry dries on clotheslines and trash cans sit by the stoop. (They cast the brownstone steps in concrete so they would sound right when anyone pounded up or down them.) Radically -- really, radically, in 1969 -- it prominently featured black actors (and Latino and Asian soon afterward). The series remains peerlessly multicultural and multicolored -- blue, orange, red, green, yellow, purple, all the primary and secondary hues, plus the usual variations on black, white and brown.

Because it is in part publicly funded, and because, notwithstanding some fluctuation in viewership, it is regarded as important, it stirs up controversy now and again. That the next couple of seasons will feature a curriculum "designed to create a love and understanding of the natural world" some might describe as propaganda. And there was a small storm recently over a joke mentioning "Pox News" as a "trashy news show" -- that these were garbage-loving Grouches talking gives it the proper context, but PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler still blogged a kind of apology: "Broadcasters can tell parents whatever they think of Fox or any other network, but you shouldn't do it through the kids."

At the same time, the show also relies for survival on its success as a brand, a commercial entity: The wearing ubiquity of Elmo seems a function of that. New this year is a cartoon series, "Abby's Flying Fairy School," featuring sparkly pink Abby Caddaby, which is being ballyhooed as the first CGI transformation of a "Sesame Street" character, as if that were a great thing and not, as it seems to me, a bid to compete with other kids' shows -- of which there are now many more than there were 40 years ago -- on their own, lower level. There's more magic in even a moderately well-handled sock puppet than in the most expensively rendered computer image.

Still, every neighborhood changes with time. Cookie Monster also eats fruit now. The teaching of letters and numbers has contracted into a couple of spots in the show -- "40" is today's number -- and the old mosaic approach, an energetically ragtag olio of short films interlaced with a longer street-set story, has been streamlined into a relatively few discrete blocks.

Like New York itself, it is a tidier place than in 1969. Still, "Sesame Street" is not here to satisfy my aesthetic preferences or Grouch-like nostalgia for the mud. It is here for your children, and for all the right reasons.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

Sweeping the Clouds Away

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-medium-t.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1195592575-+8HD/geYCMva+7me/zEOdQ

November 18, 2007
The Medium
Sweeping the Clouds Away
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.

Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”

In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.

The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.

Points of Entry

Caveat teletor: Volumes 1 and 2 of “Sesame Street: Old School” are available on DVD, which you can sample and buy on Sesameworkshop.org. With a few episodes, extras and celebrity appearances by the likes of Richard Pryor and Lou Rawls, “Old School” sounds harmless enough. But are you ready to mainline this much ’70s nostalgia?

The Way Old: YouTube is great for performance art. If 1969 is not far back enough for you, how’s 1935? The Oscar-winning short film “How to Sleep,” by the Algonquin Round-Tabler Robert Benchley, can be found here in sumptuous black-and-white; search for his name and the film’s title on YouTube.

Come of Age: Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the men of “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething,” have at last introduced their online-only young-adult series, “Quarterlife.” It started Nov. 11 on MySpaceTV.com, and it marks the first time a network-quality series — a long indie film, really — has been produced directly for the Internet. If the old times unnerve you, welcome to the new times.