Stuff You Should Know
We Got to Sesame Street
Thu, 08 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000
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One of the longest-running television shows in history is also one of the best. Sesame Street was conceived as a radical idea – to give disadvantaged preschoolers a leg up in getting ready for school. It ended up becoming a beloved institution worldwide.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
What is the significance of Sesame Street's impact?
So from their initial eight million dollars in funding from different foundations and some from the federal government, they spent nine hundred thousand dollars of that eight million to promote the show. Which is a pretty staggering percentage out of the gate. And they had a bunch of, they went to regular media outlets, of course, but they also hit Head Start programs and churches and daycares.
I think you found out that when, like the week before the premiere, they hired trucks with loudspeakers to just drive around a lot of urban neighborhoods, advertising that it was coming on. Mm-hmm. And like you mentioned it from the onset, Mr. Jim Henson coming aboard was also a big part of getting people to watch because the Muppets were already a thing.
Yeah, like we said, Kermit was already so commercialized, he basically was removed from the show. But they've been around since the 50s. I think Jim Henson's first puppet gig was out of high school or during high school. And he developed this schtick pretty quickly, but it wasn't associated with kids.
He would take it on like the Steve Allen show or the Jack Parr show, like late night TV and do like puppet skits. That weren't at all geared toward kids and very quickly started doing advertising with them as well. They just became a thing. Muppets. People knew Muppets before there was Sesame Street. So to land Jim Henson, he wasn't like some mega star. You know, he was no C.C.
DeVille at the time. But he was well known. So it was kind of like they landed a bit of a whale by getting Jim Henson fully involved in developing and executing, or I should say producing Sesame Street initially. You know what? I think I got the poison reference wrong in that episode recently. That's why I said that. CeCe DeVille is a guitarist. Ricky Rocket was a drummer.
You got that straight finally. Talk dirty to me. One of the reasons why also, Chuck, it was so big to bring Jim Henson on was because from that research, and today this seems totally normal, but this grew out of the children's television workshop research, was that puppets and animation really got kids going. It really jazzed them. It really got their attention.
And as we learned from the editorial cartoon episode, that's because they're super stimuli, so they jack kids up.
Yeah.
And then weirdly, some of the child psychologists involved in the development of the show were like, OK, that's fine. We need puppets. But the humans and the puppets can never interact. They can never communicate. It will scare the bejesus out of the children if they do. And I guess somebody was like, that's a pretty ridiculous thing. And that got thrown away even before the pilot episode ran.
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