News & Events
‘Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street’ - New York Times Review
Even those resistant to easy nostalgia will find plenty to think about. As told here, the show’s strategy — using television’s methods for teaching children beer jingles to teach them the alphabet instead — could only have come together through a combination of figures: Joan Ganz Cooney (a creator of the show and the first executive director of the Children’s Television Workshop); Jim Henson, who brought Muppets and just the right amount of irreverence; and the workhorse director-writer-producer Jon Stone, whose daughters say he treated the show as his third child. The show required the input of educators and psychologists and owed some of its freedom to experiment to federal investment.
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New York Times: ‘Street Gang’ - Excerpt
Prologue
Joan Ganz Cooney walked toward the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street, lost in a fog of grief. Ahead were the crenelated parapets that crown the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a Gothic Revival glory on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Black limousines lined the curbside, clogging the street, as NYPD officers wave their arms in a futile effort to get the vehicles moving. The sidewalks were overrun by pedestrians, hundreds of them, all moving toward the cathedral steps. Cooney walked alongside mothers and toddlers clutching Ernie dolls, students playing hooky from school, executives in crisp suits, Midtown secretaries in heels, Latinas in scoop-necked tops, and bohemian types sporting jeans, running shoes, and long ponytails.
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New York Times: How Oscar Got Grouchy
Recent DVD collections of early “Sesame Street” episodes were called “Old School” and came with a peculiar warning: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.” That warning is a measure of how the series has changed in the nearly four decades since its debut in 1969. The old episodes not only have a handmade, anarchic charm that underscores the show’s debts to “Laugh-In,” the Marx Brothers and vaudeville, but they also are blessedly free of the uptight, sunnily upbeat, politically correct tone that has crept into more recent incarnations.
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