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.
The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.
And on and on. What a list of horrors the kids of decades ago were subjected to! No wonder they are all slacker, self-centered losers! If we had only known that Big Bird and others like Mr. Rogers were destroying our kids…
I worked at an educational TV station when Sesame Street started and we couldn’t wait for each new episode. They were hilarious!
Erica Hill stays in touch with the old Tech TV crowd/blogs, I guess. She was talking about this on CNN, today.
I almost hate to mention it, but Zoom made me a meth addict. It’s a damn shame.
Yes, and that Children’s Workshop crowd of Commies was also responsible for getting rid of just-plain-fun local & national kids TV shows that featured commercial products and prizes for kids won on the respective shows’ contest segments.
Such local shows in Boston, where I was raised, included “Major Mudd,” Rex Trailer’s “Boomtown,” “Captain Bob,” and the local franchises of “Bozo the Clown” and “Romper Room.” In fact, CTW specifically lobbied against our “Romper Room”" teacher, “Miss Jean,” pitching for the franchise’s products–”Romper Room” toys, records, etc.
And CTW made national headlines in their drive to limit and restrict the hours of network programming which may advertise to kids, thus killing fun cartoons which were largely sponsored by cereal companies and toy manufacturers.
Having won their battles against capitalism, the public television Commies managed to kill fun kids shows and cartoons. Now we’re left with all these lousy, multi-cultural-bent, sensitivity-training propaganda shows that are making weenies of kids.
Yes, and that Action For Children’s Television (ACT) and Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) crowd of Commies is responsible for killing off all the fun local & national kids’ TV programming, with their campaigns aimed to restrict or eliminate commercial sponsorship of kids’ TV shows.
In Boston, where I was raised, such programs as “Major Mudd,” Rex Trailer’s “Boomtown,” “Captain Bob,” and “Willie Whistle,” among others, including the local franchises of “Bozo the Clown” and “Romper Room,” all disappeared by the early 1970′s, thanks to the efforts of these social engineers and their agenda designed to make robotic wimps out of our kids!
In fact, ACT specifically lobbied against the host of our “Romper Room” franchise, “Miss Jean,” preventing her from pitching the franchise’s products, which were books, records and toys, effectively killing income for the program. And “Romper Room” was the least offender among them, for what really drew the lefties’ ire were toy companies that sold toy guns, or the sugar-based cereals that were a red flag to the granola and wheat germ set.
And we all know what happened to the fun Hanna-Barbera and Warner Brothers and action cartoons that used to be fixtures of Saturday morning television viewing, the graet kids’ dramas such as “The Roy Rogers Show” and “Fury” (“Oh-h, they had guns on those shows–horrors!”) all largely sponsored by cereal companies and toy manufacturers. Thanks to that bunch of lefties at ACT/CTW and their ilk, with their anti-capitalist rhetoric, those fun kids’ shows and cartoons disappeared from the networks as well, leaving us with nothing but multi-culturalist/sensitivity-training indoctrination propaganda, which has contributed to making a few generations of self-indulegnt, socialist weenies!
But every so often, one of them wanders off the farm and thus situations like Columbine. Time for a re-programming! They’re not weenie enough. “Recommends intense immersion in readings of Maya Angelou and Abby Hoffman. Continue with subliminal sleep teaching, playing recordings of Pete Seeger!”