Did He Who Made The Bird Make Thee?
This week marks the 40th anniversary of a show near and dear to my own heart: Sesame Street. Aside from its importance to me, though, this anniversary commemorates the very beginnings of modern youth-oriented media. The ‘Street made it okay to speak to kids in a streetwise, modern vernacular; sure, there were goofy characters like the Looney Tunes that came before them, but the show brought children into the real world while simultaneously providing them with the tools they’d need to navigate it. What has evolved since then is a multibillion-dollar market catering to children’s learning needs and desires. In today’s social media-dominated world, it is possible to see the shadow of Jim Henson, faint though it may be, who suggested that kids might want some of the same things that adults do – whether that’s a television show or a Facebook account. (I speak, of course, for the Western world – although Sesame Workshop, the show’s parent company, has done impressive work spreading these ideas across the globe.)
The Street itself, however, hasn’t always borne these evolutions well. For a reminder of what the old neighborhood used to look like, take a look at this (truly hilarious) passage from a 1972 New Yorker article on Cookie Monster (via Slate’s Browbeat):
Cookie is a fanatic, undeviating in the quality of his obsession. He eats things. Many lessons on Sesame Street are terminated when something eats them. But Cookie, who has of late been eating mainly cookies, is a junkie. “To me, your nose is a cookie,” he once said to another Muppet in a desperate moment. When cookies arrive, he tends to eat the entire shipment, but he is moved to empathy at the sight of a human being temporarily deprived of a cookie.
Listen to that. To me, your nose is a cookie. Those are the words of a monster tormented by his desires. He learns to grapple with them, as we all must, and allows us to find the humor in such a moment. While we may not all be driven by an insatiable hunger for baked goods, Cookie Monster’s cycles – his ups and his downs – are not unique. And they are certainly teachable moments.
Today, however, Cookie Monster does eat more than just cookies. It’s an urban legend that he’s become the Fruit and Vegetable Monster (and anyone who doubts Henson’s initial commitment to health, anyway, has obviously never seen Captain Vegetable), but there’s no doubt that the timbre of the show has changed – as the New York Times recently noted, the graffiti on the street is gone, the Grouch has mellowed out some, and there are a disturbing number of cute, younger Muppets whose foibles lie more in their ineptitude than in any character flaws. But is this right? The dirt on the streets outside doesn’t go away just because it’s vanished on the television. Wouldn’t it be better to see our cast of characters with a bit of their anarchic edge back, getting along despite their grouchiness and tendencies towards compulsive eating, finding beauty in the beat-up crevices of the block? As it struggles to keep up with what it thinks kids want, the show would be well-advised to remember that it’s been doing so since the beginning. That’s why it’s lasted forty years. And if it can stay true to that core mission, it may manage forty years more.
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