Don’t want to get all political, but why the hell do they need new seasons of Sesame Street? It’s not like they discovered new letters or numbers in the last 30-odd years. Why don’t they just show the same ones over and over? Do the kids who watch the show really care if the muppets are wearing bell-bottoms or they mention Nixon or something. Please help - this REALLY bothers me!!!
It’s for the mommies. The mommies sitting there with preschoolers on their laps watching Sesame Street get really sick of the same episodes.
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt…
Also, the actors grow up, get pregnant, die. Things change. The show needs to change with it.
I think as long as those numbers and letters are willing to sponsor episode after episode, they should make as many as they want. But I swear, that W must have some pretty deep pockets…
lol! Thanks!
Assuming that Seasame Street “tackles” the numbers 0 through 19, or 1 through 20…
If they did only one letter and one number per episode, that’d be just 520 episodes.
But, I’ve seen 'em do two letters and one number in a single episode, giving up to 13,520 combinations.
If they do shows “sponsored by” only one letter and two numbers, that’s another 10,400 shows.
Given the emphasis they offer to Spanish and other languages, we can multiply the total so far by two (at least), for 48,880 total episodes, at a bare minimum.
Of course, one could do an episode with the same letters and numbers, but focused on a different basic emotional state. I know (I’ve got an almost-two-year-old) that some episodes are more about “happy” than they are about, for example, “surprised.” If we’re given “happy,” “sad,” “angry,” and “surprised,” we’ve got 195,520 episodes possible.
That’s over 535 years of Sesame Street, if they did one episode per day, year round, no repeats. What more could a harried parent ask for? <wink, wink>
And that doesn’t even include the “special” episodes where they focus on racial intolerance or other social issues, which are more difficult to quantify.
So, I suppose my answer is: how the hell could they not need more seasons of Sesame Street? The last 30 years represent a paltry 5.6% of the show’s potential, at best.
Crud, I forgot this:
With or without “Elmo’s World” brings us to 1,070 years of episodes.
Because the issues of the social world of a child have changed over the past 25 years, and will continue to change in the years to come.
You may notice that the animations involving letters and numbers DO repeat within the show. It’s the surrounding storylines with the humans and muppets that are new each time, and they are what drives Sesame Street.
Not having watched the show in a while, do they do segments introducing (in a simplified way) modern computers and whatnot? I can imagine a four year-old getting bored with Seseame Street if he’s already surfing the net.
Sure… the computer thing is a recurring theme in kids shows.
1- Dora the Explorer seems to be a hybrid of computer type show, and normal cartoon.
2- The segues on the childrens network “Noggin” are directly yanked from your computer… “click on the color that Maizy is in” clicking sound “Good Job!”
I expect to see that occur more and more as computers are added to classroom invironments and learning goes online.
Don’t forget that in “Play with Me Sesame,” all three of Bert’s games - “Pigeon Patterns,” “Perfect Pair,” and “Oatmeal Art” - are on his computer. You get to see the mouse zip around the screen and everything.
Since this is about television, I’ll move this thread to Cafe Society.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
It distresses me that a whole generation of children might never know who Mr. Hooper was.
They also recently decided that kids can follow one theme longer than they thought, so the more recent shows tend to return to the same topic over the course of the show. The earlier thoughts had been that you had to keep things moving or the kids would get bored, so the pacing was based on the old Laugh-in show.
I miss Mr. Hooper…
Well, I never watched Sesame Street as a kid, so I didn’t know Mr. Hooper.
I’m just saying that it’s not a scarring thing.
I don’t remember Mr. Hooper.
But I’ve heard the show they did about his death was a great one. How DO you explain that to a four-year old?
They need to keep making new ones because it’s one of the last intelligent kid’s shows around. I babysit an almost 2 year old every day and it’s mind numbing to watch the garbage they make for kids. Sesame Street is miles and miles beyond anything else and is still entertaining for little kids. I often find myself laughing at the show too, last week Telly had a toy horse called Clark. I mean really now, on Barney or something they’d call it Horsie or something lame like that, Clark struck me as the kind of name a writer would use when they’re actually thinking about their matieral and not just pumping out sludge.
Oh, but you would be so wrong, my friend. Look at the kids these days, with the boom boxes and the weird pants and the pierced cartilage and the whatever it is they put in their hair… Did they know Mr. Hooper? Did they ever experience the healing balm of witnessing the mildly adversarial relationship between an irate storekeeper and a scatterbrained yellow moa?
No? …Well there you go, then.
Big Bird’s not a Moa, he’s a canary.
Looper. Looper.