Once upon a time, there was a street called Sesame.
How do you write a book about Sesame Street? Where do you start? With 40 years of Sesame Street history behind you and a blank page in front of you, where would you begin? You might say: Simple. Begin at the beginning. Okay, but where exactly is that? Where would you begin your life story? On your birth date? Well, for Sesame Street that might be November 10, 1969, the day the show first aired, blinking to life on public television stations nationwide.
Then again, that isn't really the beginning of its story, not by a long shot. After all, shouldn't you really start your life story with the moment your parents first met, when the possibility of you first emerged? In the case of Sesame Street, that would mean starting with Joan Ganz Cooney, then a documentary filmmaker for public television, and Lloyd Morrisett, head of philanthropic Carnegie Corporation - the two founders and birth parents of Sesame Street. So maybe it all began when Lloyd first popped the question to Joan in 1966: "Can television be used to teach children?" Or with Joan's response after months of research with teachers and kids: "The Potential Uses of Television," a document containing the entire essential DNA for Sesame Street.
Then again, for many Muppet-loving fans, the story of Sesame Street should probably begin with the morning Jim Henson, puppeteer and brilliant filmmaker, first showed up, scaring the bejesus out of Joan with his radical hippie get-up and then focus squarely on the merry band of Muppeteers he assembled over the years. But for music aficionados, maybe it starts when composer Joe Raposo struck the familiar first note of that iconic "sunny day" theme song? Or how about starting the stroll down memory lane with the moment friendly neighbors Bob, and Susan, Gordon and Mr. Hooper first strolled down the block that November morning? But then, what about all the people in the neighborhood you never got to meet as kids, the writers and crew behind the cameras? What about them?
Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?
So then I thought, how about this? How about telling the story pictorially? How about tackling Sesame Street's complex history through a series of big-idea chapters - like the show's genesis, its human actors, three waves of Muppeteers, celebrity guests, animations, music, curriculum, outreach, international productions, and more—and starting each of those chapters in the present day? I began to imagine a history of Sesame Street that could spotlight a single moment on the set, today, see it through the eyes of someone right there in that moment, and then backtrack through the decades to trace how we got there. It would be a different kind of life story, one that would witness the bustle, controlled chaos and passion that goes on everyday to make Sesame Street's incredible story possible in the first place. Better still, to tell that interconnected, messy, emotional, colorful history mostly in rare and never-before-seen photos, documents and memorabilia.
I pitched the idea. The writer, Louise Gikow, was game. In fact, Louise's gallant cheerful parrying of every right hook thrown at her would prove unfailing over the next two years. And so it was we began the big dig that would bring the story out from the Street.
The editor and the detective
Enter Susie Tofte, detective. Well, all right, officially "photo researcher," but that didn't come to scratch the surface of describing her role on the project. Susie was the detective who took us from one dismal pile of posed PR shots to a collection of hundreds of thousands of candid photos in a single year, by quietly digging through old cabinets, mislabeled files, and personal collections. Susie was the person who plucked the undated, unidentified contact sheet from my hand—the one I’d apparently been holding upside-down for two days—squinted at a tiny black-and-white image in the bottom corner and said, "Isn't that a shot of Jackie Robinson with Joan? This must be the summer of 1969." Sure enough, yes, it WAS Jackie Robinson. (Seriously, how could she know that? She wasn’t even born until two decades after his last Dodgers' at-bat.) We kept digging, and uncovered even more beneath the Street - Joan in a Harlem apartment, screening early clips from the as-yet-unaired Sesame Street test shows on a Super 8 projector; Maurice Sendak's edgy doodles made famously while sitting in as an advisor on the show’s first educational seminars; and an early design sketch of Big Bird that barely resembles the Big Bird you know today. For someone like me, who quite literally grew up with the show, there is a secret rush when digging for these pieces of Sesame Street’s past, like the day I reached into a lopsided box and pulled out one of the original copies of Joan Ganz Cooney’s,“Television for Preschool Children: A Proposal.”
Into Sesame Street: A Celebration - 40 Years of Life on the Street it all went, well over one thousand visuals at the end of the day. So then, after more than a year of digging for gold, somehow, all these photos, documents and ephemera had to be woven by Louise into a cohesive framework around that original, odd idea of seeing the show as if standing just to the left of the camera lens, as if you’re right there on the set through four decades of invention and reinvention.
So let’s say you did the same. That you arrived, summer of 2009, at page 300 or so, right where I did. Now you face another question: where does the story end?
Forecast: More Sunny Days
I’m not sure I ever figured it out, because Sesame Street the show is constantly, incredibly, reinventing itself even in its 40th year.
This year, in 2009, the experiment begun in 1969 continues with clay- animated shorts, "Bert and Ernie's Great Adventures", a powerfully nostalgic homage to earlier styles, side by side with groundbreaking CGI Muppets that magically, somehow still look warm and fuzzy. It launches with innovations in its format and a startling variety of guest stars that includes a stint by Ricky Gervais and a Mad Men spoof that are already cracking up adult fans on YouTube. The 40th year of the show also begins somewhere on this website, where you can collect your favorite new clips and assemble your own playlist to screen any time you’d like.
In the end, all I can hope for is that you love where Sesame Street began, where it has been, and where it is going. It's a story of fuzz, fur and feathers. It's a history you’ll get a taste of in new posts here over the next few months. But to really get any sense of it, you’ll have to read Sesame Street: A Celebration - 40 Years of Life on the Street, because it took all 304 pages and over a thousand photos just to skim the surface.
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