Chill. You can make your point without being all threadshitty.
From Sesame Street’s Facebook page:
From an articleon Muppet fan blog Tough Pigs:
So, like, chill out.
What are you saying? These people were volunteers on the television show for more than a decade? That seems implausible.
I had a crush on Bob as a kid. Now I’m sad.
It serves to minorly beef up their online streaming service, HBO Go. and the episodes run on PBS free of charge(free to PBS, too) later.
It was a phenomenal deal for PBS. They now get the show free, completely free, if they just wait awhile.
How could that be? They couldn’t have worked for free. I know Roscoe Orman (“Gordon”) has been acting in small film roles for quite a long time, and I saw Emilio Delgado (“Luis”) in a small part in Law & Order but I’ve never seen Susan or Bob in anything.
Being that it was Public TV I’m sure they made only a fraction of what any network show would pay, but they still had to make a decent living. I do remember in the 80s when congress became annoyed that although CTW (the Children’s Television Workshop) was raking in billions from Sesame Street & Muppet merchandise they still claimed they needed govt money for the show.
BTW I was a first generation Sesame Street kid. I not only remember that Orman was the ‘third’ Gordon, I remember that Oscar was originally orange*!*
I wasn’t threadshitting. I think it’s reasonable to have some sadness tinged nostalgia with this news. The OP’s anger and sense of betrayal was over the top.
Agreed. We original viewers are not Sesame Street’s target audience. I had to remind myself of this numerous times ten years ago when my oldest was watching. That’s why we have Youtube and Avenue Q.
Seems to me that for the children’s understanding of it, they should have had a show where the old cast moved out of the city so the kids could process their sudden disappearance. Or let them say “We’ve been fired! This is brought to you by the letters F and U.”
I remember when Will Lee, Mr. Hooper, died.
They had to have a whole show explaining death to the Sesame Street audience. Big Bird had made some kind of gift for Mr. Hooper and the other adults had to remind him that Mr. Hooper had died. Big Bird got a little sad then said, “Oh well, I’ll give it to him when he gets back!” and the adults had to explain that Mr. Hooper wasn’t coming back, that he could never come back.
Extremely powerful performance by Caroll Spinney as Big Bird, probably the greatest performance of his career.
Still, maybe retiring is a better idea.
Word around the campfire is that there’s been some “miscommunication” about the status of the actors.
My beef wasn’t that they were leaving/retiring but that they had been “fired” Apparently that’s not strictly true…
[Emily Litella]Never mind[/Emily Litella]