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- Apr 14, 2007
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I just don't get this. Possibly it's because I don't have kids, but.....
I just really really don't get this.
I watched this show from the age of 2 onward, and I've more than once credited it for my love of reading, creativity, you name it. I thought it was brilliant. And now -
“Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only
Parents, oh ye fellow Sesame-Street watchers of old: somebody tell me if this makes sense to you. I'm just...baffled.
I just really really don't get this.
I watched this show from the age of 2 onward, and I've more than once credited it for my love of reading, creativity, you name it. I thought it was brilliant. And now -
“Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only
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.
Parents, oh ye fellow Sesame-Street watchers of old: somebody tell me if this makes sense to you. I'm just...baffled.