Thank goodness for this thread, I thought maybe SS just wasn’t as good as I remembered. Also, Elmo needs to be made into a bathmat (and in a particularily nasty bathroom just to make the punishment fit the crime).
I read some article in one of my teaching magazines, that SS and similar snippet-shows, is suspected of contributing to decreasing attention spans among young children. Mixing longer and shorter stories is much better, like Mr. Rogers did. Of course, the article also pointed out that before the age of four, kids don’t get much out of tv and are better off without. How that might work in reality, I dunno.
You used to be able to watch “Sesame Street Unplugged” on a cable channel called Noggin. This was about 3 years ago. I was thrilled; all the classic episodes shown in order! I should have taped them. We don’t get cable TV anymore, but maybe someone else can check and see if Noggin is still airing them?
Because, yeah, new SS sucks the bag. (And that’s from an ADD kid!)
According to this site, Noggin pulled the original Sesame Street episodes a while ago. Firstly they wanted to emphasize original programming, and secondly the only people watching it were aging hippie babies like us. Furthermore, it appears that there were only 65 episodes aired; seems to me there were a lot more episodes filmed between 1969 and 1986.
(That Electric Company site isn’t half bad either… Gene Wilder did the voice of Letterman?!)
[QUOTE=beajerry]
What the fuck, you goddamn educational psychiatrists that fucked up Sesame Street and turned it into a fucking goddamn program for ADHD shithead kids!!!???
What happened to all the variety? The fucking coolness of the little skits and cartoons and films that made SS so great??
Now it’s all fucking Elmo and Search for Ernie and Monster Playhouse!
What a bunch of shit!
I wish I could obtain the first two decades on dvd to show my kids. This new format sucks! Fuck you, SS! You suck! Take Elmo and stick him up your ass!
[QUOTE]
Get out of my head! I HATE the “nu-n-improovd” Sesame Street. HATE. Hate it enough that I hand-coded that last sentence. I remember storylines that lasted a full week. I remember creative little animations that didn’t flash by at 60,000,000 frames a second. I remember the pinball machine. Why did they ditch the pinball machine? Why?
If any of the only kids watching this are like me, this will probably launch them into begging their parents for a baby sister/brother. I actually don’t think this is a bad idea for a storyline – it can be quite traumatic for a toddler or somebody just out of toddlerhood to be presented with a baby sibling, and hopefully Baby Bear isn’t being traumatized – but I do remember stuff like this driving me crazy when I was little. There’s this assumption that everybody’s going to have siblings, and it’s not just SS that’s assuming it.
I finally got my little brother just past my eighth birthday. I was a little old for SS at that point. Fortunately, he’s turned out great. (Though my begging had nothing to do with his appearance. I think it was more “if we’re gonna have another, now’s the time!”)
PBS is going to air a very special 35th anniversary episode this weekend called Sesame Street Presents: The Street We Live On. The good news: it’ll have flashback footage from old episodes. Mr. Hooper’s in it! The bad news: it stars all Elmo, all the time. I’m debating whether to watch it…
It surprises me that CTW hasn’t figured out there is a market for the original Seseme Street DVD collection. Then we could expose our children to the good Seseme street.
I loved the aliens with the telephone. Cow…Yep, Yepyepyepyepyep.
(Last I checked, Guin, Telly was still on. But I hate to break this to you, Telly is part of the abomination we are talking about. We of the Grover, Bert and Ernie, Cookie Monster and Kermit the Frog years - I’m old enough that even secret Snuffie was past my peak SS years. Telly is part of the Elmo, Zoe, Baby Bear set).
There is a wonderful book about the making of Sesame Street called Sesame Street Unpaved. You can get it from Amazon. Lots of behind the scenes stuff, lots of pictures.