Sesame Street - Not Suitable for Children?

I had a friend apologize for not remembering how 'dark' and 'disturbing' Muppets from Space was. A group of us took our three year olds to see it when it was revived by a local theatre.

I couldn't help asking her if she was insane.

But I'll tell you, though, I do actually find The Cat In The Hat to be a subtly sinister book. I don't remember reading it as a child, but when I read it to my own kids, I was kind of taken aback at how wrong it all seemed. Lol! So, I'm crazy too.

They've also put warnings on the DVD sets for Looney Toons and Tom & Jerry for the racial content in many of those.

Yep, Tom and Jerry were practically Klansmen, all right. Somebody has to protect us from outselves.

This is the crazy thing about children's tv, film and books. Children and adults see them very differently. And this is why writing in this genre is so fascinating for me.

In "Alex" I have a sequence on a train where time is meaningless, where they keep repeating the same day over and over with no stop, and people are disappearing but no one except Alex notices. Zombies are then introduced as is a soul sucking machine. Kids love this sequence. Adults are freaked out by it. Adults see the horror of the situation, place themselves into it as if it was utterly real, and it gets to them. Kids just see the events happening as they occur. It's weird, but there must be an explanation. They don't see the nightmare of time having no meaning etc. It's two totally different ways of reading things.

Same with Sesame Street. I watched it as a kid. I never thought Oscar was a homeless person. He was a grouch and his home was a garbage can. Snuffleupagus wasn't an illusion, he simply was never there when others were. Ernie and Bert were friends who were opposite from each other. And the adults on the street were all pleasant and sweet and taught moral lessons.

But then adults come in and project their own world weary views on everything, and then they want to take away the joy and wonder for kids and give them "appropriate" material to watch. Adults really do ruin the good time for kids. They also seem to not understand them at all. Really frustrating.

Maybe adults should talk to the kids and see what they are seeing. As opposed to tell them what they think they are seeing. There's a thought.

Sesame Street was my show of choice back when I was growing up in the 80's. It saddens me to here this.

I agree, if this what this country is coming too, get me a ticket on the first what ever, heading where ever.

Toothpaste makes a really good point, but I think there's a little something more to it:

Values have changed since the show was first aired. Having grown up in the 60's, I remember when the neighbors would watch all us kids and if I screwed up, any mom on the street could correct me and I took it, just as if she were my mom. There was a sense of community that's become lacking as people's lives got busier, as violence against children became more well-known and people became more suspicious and distrusting in general.

Not to mention such things as food, germ and other health awareness. Things like that didn't exist anywhere close to the obsession level it has now.

The world has just plain changed in the last 40-odd years. It totally doesn't surprise me that Sesame Street's first seasons have warnings on them because they cannot be viewed with the same mindset as they were originally. People don't think that way anymore. They can't.

It makes total sense to me why it has the warnings.

And it's not just cartoons getting edited (remember the run of Tom & Jerry cartoons where they redubbed Mammy's voice so she didn't sound "colored"?). A few years ago, probably 1997 or so, I was watching a rerun of Bewitched on Nick At Nite. It was when Samantha was expecting (sorry. We can't use the "p" word in this context! It didn't exist on TV back then!) Tabitha, and she was preparing for a dinner party. During one scene, she was unwrapping packs of cigarettes to put them into a box on the coffee table; because she was preg...expecting, the scene was digitally edited so it zoomed in AND YOU COULDN'T EVEN SEE HER TOUCHING THE NAKED CIGARETTES. And, yes, I've seen the original episode before this.

We've come a long way, baby.

jmascia said:

I would like to add one more thing to that. I watched Pinnochio (yes, the DISNEY movie). In the movie, the child runs away from home, ditches school, goes to an island where he smokes cigars and drinks beer, this is a movie we all watched as kids. Tell me 2 things. 1) Why do you think this one has no warning on it? and 2) How many of you after watching that movie as a child asked your mom or dad for a cigar?

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No to the last. When I first saw this when I was a kid all I thought at the time was that it was a cartoon. Period. Oh and it had a lot of boring music in it. lol.

DeleyanLee said:

The world has just plain changed in the last 40-odd years. It totally doesn't surprise me that Sesame Street's first seasons have warnings on them because they cannot be viewed with the same mindset as they were originally. People don't think that way anymore. They can't.

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I feel your forty-year estimation is way off, at least as far as the Dallas area goes. Random adults got on my case all the time as a kid in the late 80s to early 90s in both the middle-class burbs and the barrios across the Trinity. Pissed me off, too, which is why I remember it so clearly. I've always been a bit of a rebel...

My kids are 9 & 11 and have never watched a single episode of Sesame Street on TV. I, however, grew up as a S.S. consumer. In my memory, S.S. rocked (and The Electric Company rocked even harder; anyone remember a very young Morgan Freeman with a huge 'fro?). So, I decided to share the love with the wee ones. I found old S.S. skits on YouTube and showed my kids: the Yip-Yips (those muppets with the giant extendable bottom lips who shout "Book, book, book, uh-huh, uh-huh"), the tweedle-bugs (those low-IQ bugs who live in Ernie's window box and can't figure out how to work the car), and a host of other loveable S.S. weirdness. My kids LOVED it! They HOWLED at its silliness and inanity. I'd forgotten how gratuitously silly most of Sesame Street actually was.

At least as silly as... SpongeBob Squarepants or Fairly Odd Parents, shows that my kids watch daily with delight. You know, if anything needs a warning, it's bizarre, Pythonesque, psychedelic, SpongeBob frickin' Squarepants. At least Sesame Street TRIED to teach kids to read.

Toothpaste said:

It's weird, but there must be an explanation. They don't see the nightmare of time having no meaning etc. It's two totally different ways of reading things.

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The concept of time is learned, not instinctual. Kids don't understand it for a long time. Tell a 4 year old to sit still and quiet for 5 minutes and they think it's an eternity. A ten minute car ride feels like a year. They understand boredom, but not the physical units of time passing, so having a place where time means nothing fits in with their own perception of the world.


And this S.Street mess is a lot like what the "experts" said about Winnie the Pooh like 10 years ago.

Christopher Robin isn't a healthy child -- he has no real friends and exists in his own little world.

Eeyore -- clinically depressed

Pooh -- Obese and obsessive over-eater

Tigger -- promotes lying

*cringe* PC makes me die a little inside.

Soon we will all be working Christmas, schools won't be allowed to perform Fiddler on the Roof, choirs won't be allowed to sing any music composed by someone who was Christian, and heck, they might as well just ban money since it says "In God We Trust."

By then we will all look the same and dress the same, because heaven forbid we offend anyone with our beliefs and personalities...

AND GOD FORBID CHILDREN EAT COOKIES!!!!!!

jmascia said:

I would like to add one more thing to that. I watched Pinnochio (yes, the DISNEY movie). In the movie, the child runs away from home, ditches school, goes to an island where he smokes cigars and drinks beer, this is a movie we all watched as kids. Tell me 2 things. 1) Why do you think this one has no warning on it? and 2) How many of you after watching that movie as a child asked your mom or dad for a cigar?

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He also gets turned partially into an ass.

There probably doesn't need to be a warning because by the end of the movie, Pinocchio realizes these things are wrong and becomes noble and brave. Plus Disney has a heck of a lot of money to spend to get their movies distributed the way they want...without warnings.

I often suspect that Shelly Duvall' s Faerie Tale Theater would never have made it onto tv nowadays.

I learned a great deal from watching Sesame Street as a small child. Namely:



COOKIE!!!!


num num.

I miss Sesame Street. Why are they trying to ruin my childhood?!

hm....so, they don't like COOKIEmonster eating cookies, but they won't show kids the 'real' bugs bunny any more who ate carrots ALL the time or Popeye who ate spinach all the time...

I used to watch SS all the time when I was little. Always. I would go to the shows when they were in town. I learned how to count in spanish from them. I can't say much else, but I can still count to 10! I also have to say the one character I never did and still do not like is Elmo. Don't like him, have never liked him. Ever. And yet they push and push him on kids these days.

One thing that does really bother me is the idea that people associate Bert and Ernie with being gay. As a kid, that was never my thought. I thought of them as brothers. Best friends. Never sexual in any sense, and i think that's part of this 'growing up' that people do is they do, as Toothpaste said, start seeing things differently. And it's a shame that we can't see something that is (and has always been intended to be) innocent as corrupt and sexualized just because we are so used to viewing the world like that and can't separate reality from children's fiction.

So what if they were designed to be gay? Negative reaction to the suggestion indicates the depth of socialized discrimination.