Early episodes of Sesame Street deemed inappropriate for toddlers

[Bern80]

Ladies and gentlemen we have officially become too PC.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-medium-t.html

 

[Gunny]

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Published: November 18, 2007
Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

cont ... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-medium-t.html

 

[Toro]

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

LOL @ PCers

 

[Threedee]

Ah, people who are astronomically my intellectual inferiors... How uplifting and yet sad at the same time...

 

[Skull Pilot]

OMG the next thing they'll say is that Bugs Bunny was too violent.

What they already have?

We're doomed.

PS Does anyone else think Elmo should die?????

 

[Shogun]

that's crazy.


I'm reminded of reading Catcher in the Rye this summer and pondering how it was controversial because of the sex and cursing... Yet, if it were written today it would have been controverisal because of the chain smoking and drinking. Totally different.

meh.. the book wasn't that great anyway.

 

[jillian]

Might be one of the most overrated books ever.

P.S. I love Elmo.

 

[Skull Pilot]

Might be one of the most overrated books ever.

P.S. I love Elmo.

I agree Catcher was not that great a read. And what's with serial killers and that book??

I think we should bring back the old grumpy and cantankerous Oscar the grouch ( not the cleaned up version of today) and let him tear Elmo limb from limb and feed him to Cookie Monster

 

[Gunny]

I agree Catcher was not that great a read. And what's with serial killers and that book??

I think we should bring back the old grumpy and cantankerous Oscar the grouch ( not the cleaned up version of today) and let him tear Elmo limb from limb and feed him to Cookie Monster

They cleaned up Oscar?

Now THAT is f-d up.

 

[William Joyce]

Sesame Street was early and effective liberal propaganda. Through its depiction of "urban" settings, it was meant to make whites sympathetic to blacks and Hispanics. It promoted race-mixing. Never mind that when you actually go to the ghetto, you get a knife in the back, not a red puppet singing to you.

For truly politically incorrect stuff, try old fairy tales.

 

[M14 Shooter]

The end of the world is nigh.

Buy your tickets now, while good seats are still available.

 

[Shogun]

the end is NYE!?!?!

 

[Skull Pilot]

the end is NYE!?!?!

ROTFLMAO

 

[Gunny]

Sesame Street was early and effective liberal propaganda. Through its depiction of "urban" settings, it was meant to make whites sympathetic to blacks and Hispanics. It promoted race-mixing. Never mind that when you actually go to the ghetto, you get a knife in the back, not a red puppet singing to you.

For truly politically incorrect stuff, try old fairy tales.

Really now? The first time I ever saw Sesame Street I was home for a couple of weeks with strep. Coincidentally, we lived in Capitol Heights, MD, a mostly black neighborhood and school.

I never put the two together -- my neighborhood and Sesame Street -- and there most certainly was no race-mixing on the program in 1970, nor was race-mixing spoken, much less promoted.

Incidentally, I never got a knife in my back, and the fights I got into were straight-up, one-on-one affairs.

You ever lived in a mostly-or-all black neighborhood?

 

[midcan5]

At 5 we protect them from a grouchy puppet, 13 years later we send them off to die in a senseless war.

"At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face." Albert Camus

 

[Gunny]

At 5 we protect them from a grouchy puppet, 13 years later we send them off to die in a senseless war.

"At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face." Albert Camus

Ah, well ... the threads complete now.