November 10, 1969, 50 years ago: Sesame Street premieres on PBS. It became the greatest show in the history of children's television.
Three years earlier, TV producer Joan Ganz Cooney and Carnegie Foundation vice president Lloyd Morrisett met to discuss creating a children's television show that would "master the addictive qualities of television and do something good with them." In 1968, they founded the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), and received grants from the Carnegie Foundation (later the Carnegie Corporation of New York), the Ford Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The original title for the show was 123 Avenue B. Get it? 1, 2, 3, A, B: Counting and the alphabet. But this idea was discarded, because people would have sought out the actual address, off East 8th Street, across from Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan. At the time, the Lower East Side of Manhattan was a pretty rough neighborhood: No person aware of its conditions would have wanted to know how to get there, but kids, not knowing, would have begged their parents to take them.
So the title became Sesame Street. Sesame is a seed that is a source of oil, but, at this time, while McDonald's had introduced the Big Mac burger with its famed "sesame seed bun," the jingle mentioning it didn't debut until 1974. So most people knew the word "sesame" from "Open sesame," a line used in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. People would associate "sesame" with "open," with the idea that they were opening children's minds to learning.
Since what became known as "The Street" (Capital T, Capital S) was supposed to be in a generic neighborhood in New York City, where it was taped, the show was big on diversity from the start. The first character to appear on the show was Gordon Robinson, played by Matt Robinson. Gordon was a science teacher, who was married to Susan, a nurse, played by Loretta Long. Together, they owned the building that was the centerpiece of the show, with the address of 123 Sesame Street.
They wanted to show a black couple as successful and stable. Well, they got most of what they wanted: Long remained on the show until retiring in 2016, and the Gordon character was retired the following year; but there were 3 separate actors playing him. Matt Robinson left in 1972, ironically because he was behind the times: He left because of a creative difference, namely that he did not want Susan to be depicted as working outside the home. He was replaced by Hal Miller, who left in 1974 because he didn't like being on a children's show. Roscoe Orman then played the character for the next 43 years.
In 1976, Alaina Reed joined the cast as Olivia Robinson, Gordon's sister and a photographer. In 1985, Miles Orman, Roscoe's real-life son, joined the cast as Miles, the adopted son of Susan and Gordon.
Another original castmember was Will Lee, as Harold Hooper, operator of Hooper's Store, across from 123 Sesame. In a 1974 episode, "Mr. Hooper" (everybody called him that, except Big Bird -- more on that in a moment) was, like his portrayer, canonically revealed to be Jewish, when his phone rang, and he began speaking Yiddish. In a 1977 episode, he told Big Bird, "I grew up in a neighborhood where that was the only language a lot of people spoke." In the 1978 special Christmas Eve On Sesame Street, Bob wished him a Happy Hanukkah.
Bob Johnson, a music teacher, was played by Bob McGrath. Along with Loretta Long, he was the last remaining original castmember, also retiring in 2016. Bob was white, and, aside from being as talented as the other characters, had nothing to make him stand out.
One particular song he sang was "I'm Going Somewhere," and challenged the audience: "Can you guess where?" He rattled off pretty much every way you could get there, concluding with subway and jeep, before sitting on the stoop of 123 Sesame, and singing, "I'm going... to sleep," and dozing off.
In 1971, in recognition of America's growing Hispanic community, Mexican-American actor Emilio Delgado was added, as Luis Rodriguez, owner of The Fix-It Shop, next-door to Hooper's Store. That same year, Bronx native Sonia Manzano was added as teenager Maria. In 1979, to celebrate the character's 21st birthday, the cast, Muppets included, when to Puerto Rico to meet Maria's family and celebrate.
The show combined human characters, both adults and children, with Jim Henson's "Muppet" puppets. It taught letters and the words those letters stood for, and numbers. Just as every episode began with the eventually iconic theme song (starting with "Sunny day, sweeping the clouds away" and concluding with "Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?"), every episode ended with a castmember saying, in a parody of sponsorship, that the show was brought to you by 2 letters and a number that were featured in it. Example: "Sesame Street has been brought to you today by the letters M and P, and by the number 4." (M and P are my initials, and 4 has always been my favorite number.)
Some of the Muppet characters became icons. Carroll Spinney both wore the costume as Big Bird, who represented childlike wonder (to this day, even after Spinney's retirement and replacement, the character is said to be 6 years old), and operated the character of Oscar the Grouch.
(UPDATE: Since the show's 50th Anniversary, Caroll Spinney has died. So has Emilio Delgado.)
Several "monster" Muppets were introduced, to show kids that just because someone is different -- even a monster -- doesn't mean they're bad. Okay, Cookie Monster is a glutton, and Grover is a klutz, but they mean well.
There were Bert and Ernie. Contrary to popular belief, they are not a gay couple, and were never meant to be. (The Stonewall Riot happened just 5 months earlier.) Contrary to another popular belief, they were not named after Bert the cop and Ernie the cabdriver in the film It's a Wonderful Life.
But they were based on The Odd Couple, which had already been a Broadway play and a movie, but not yet a TV show: Bert was the "Felix," uptight with some strange hobbies; and Ernie was the "Oscar," sloppy and immature. The name and personality of Oscar the Grouch, who loved trash and lived in a trash can, may also have been a nod to Oscar of The Odd Couple.
Occasionally, Kermit the Frog, an original Jim Henson Muppet, would make an appearance. In 1976, Kermit became the "host" of The Muppet Show, which, at first, confused the heck out of me: I thought the Muppets meant Sesame Street, but he was the only Sesame Street character who appeared on it. (Eventually, Big Bird would make an appearance, and Bert and Ernie also would, but those were rare exceptions.)
And except for Kermit, no Muppet Show characters -- not Miss Piggy, not Fozzie Bear, and, thankfully, not Statler and Waldorf -- crossed over onto Sesame Street. At that age, I didn't know that the Muppets, including Kermit himself, went all the way back to 1955, and were regulars on The Ed Sullivan Show in the 1960s.
Some Muppets would be re-used. For example, TV game show host Guy Smiley was re-dressed as The Muppet Show's anchorman: "Here is a Muppet News Flash!" There was also a "Fat Blue" that was used for several early characters, including the bald, mustachioed restaurant customer who drove Grover, playing a waiter, crazy.
Let's see, I've mentioned Big Bird, Oscar, Cookie Monster, Grover, Bert, Ernie, Kermit, Guy and Fat Blue. That's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine! Nine nifty Muppets! Ah ah ah ah! (BOOM!) Oh yes, there was also "The Count": "Do you know why they call me The Count? Because I love to count things!" He was later given the full name of Count Von Count. He was a purple guy who looked like Count Dracula, but didn't bite anybody. (Come to think of it, while Cookie Monster would eat almost anything, not just cookies, he didn't bite anybody, either. Except for that one time when he tried to eat Guy Smiley's hand.)
The show also produced legendary songs. Kermit's "Bein' Green," meant to say that it's okay to be different; Ernie's bathtime song "Rubber Duckie"; and "Mah Na Mah Na" actually became hit records. (It was 1970. There were some considerably stranger songs on the charts in those days.) All were sung by Henson himself, who operated and voiced the corresponding Muppets.
(Officially, the hippie-looking guy who sings "Mah Na Mah Na" is named Bip Bippadotta, but everybody ended up calling him "Mahna Mahna," so that became his official name when he appeared on The Muppet Show, with "Bip" still being his Sesame Street name.)
Other songs that were featured on Sesame Street included Big Bird's alphabet song "Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz" (pronounced "AB-ka-DEF-gee-JECK-le-min-OP-qwer-STOOV-wix-iz"), Cookie Monster's "C is for Cookie," Oscar's "I Love Trash," "Sing (Sing a Song)" and "One of These Things Just Doesn't Belong Here."
I was born just 38 days after Sesame Street debuted. The show and I grew up together. By 1978, it was big enough to get its own Christmas special, with Bert and Ernie having a storyline paralleling O. Henry's story The Gift of the Magi, except that Mr. Hooper came through to provide a happy ending. Also, Cookie Monster tried to contact Santa Claus, but every method -- his pencil, his typewriter, his phone -- reminded him of cookies, and he ate them.
And, in an unusual instance of Spinney's characters interacting, Oscar asked Big Bird how big fat Santa got down those skinny little chimneys on the roofs of city apartment buildings. Big Bird got worried that Santa might not be able to come to Sesame Street, and nobody would get any presents. Spoiler Alert: The presents showed up, and Big Bird was told that it didn't matter how it happened.
Also by that point, there were international versions of the show. It became Plaza Sesamo in Spanish-speaking countries; 1, rue Sésame in French-speaking countries; Sesam Strasse in German-speaking countries; and, from 1983 to 2015, in Israel, Rechov Sumsum, with the street in question being a safe place for Jewish and Muslim children to play together, a "neutral zone" apart from "the real world." Today, Sesame Street has variations shown in 150 different countries, in 70 languages.
Big Bird occasionally had a difficult relationship with the show's grownups. Starting in 1971, he had a friend, Mr. Snuffleupagus. This was a big thing with orange hair that looked like an elephant, with a long trunk, but without the large ears. He did, eventually, get a first name: Aloysius Snuffleupagus. But Big Bird usually just called him "Snuffy." Snuffy called him "Bird."
The Muppets and the show's kids could see him, but the grownups never did. Since they'd never heard of a snuffleupagus, and Snuffy never seemed to show up when Big Bird needed him to, they said there is no snuffleupagus, usually followed by, "Big Bird, you sure have some imagination!"
Times change, and the show had to change with it. By the mid-1980s, it began to dawn on the CTW's people that children might see that the grownups didn't believe Big Bird when he said Snuffy was "real," so they might not be believed about important things -- good or bad. So the decision was made to have them definitively see Snuffy.
The episode where it happened aired on November 18, 1985, the premiere of the show's 17th season. This was also the episode that introduced the character of Elmo, the little red monster Muppet, and he turned out to be instrumental in Snuffy's revelation. This is what I call the show's "hinge episode": Elmo proved so popular that he came to dominate the show. "Elmo's World" became a segment, but, at times, it seemed like the entire show was Elmo's world.
A quirk in Big Bird's character was that he always mispronounced Mr. Hooper's name, usually coming out "Mister Looper." I remember a "Mr. Dooper" and a "Mr. Stooper" -- that last one really annoyed Mr. Hooper. Even when Mr. Hooper got his GED, he was introduced at the ceremony -- by a grownup -- as "Harold Cooper."
On December 7, 1982, Will Lee died at age 74. The CTW had a dilemma. They based their whole show on the fact that kids were smart enough to learn things. So they knew that kids would notice if Mr. Hooper were played by a different actor, or if he stopped appearing altogether, and would need an explanation. Since it had been established on the show that he had a brother living in Chicago, they toyed with the idea of saying the character had retired and moved away.
In the end, they decided to tell the truth -- or, rather, write the actor's truth into the character's story. On November 24, 1983 -- Thanksgiving Day, a day when families were together, to help explain to the kids watching anything that the show might not have properly covered -- it was revealed that Mr. Hooper had died some time earlier (no cause was given), but that Big Bird still didn't grasp what this meant. He had to be told that it means, "Mr. Hooper's not coming back."
McGrath said of the human cast, "We barely got through that show." Spinney said, "The best episode we ever did was Mr. Hooper's death. Those were real tears. Will was the sweetest man."
In 1986, Manzano got married in real life. In 1988, she got pregnant. Now, the CTW had a very different adult issue on their hands. They couldn't have Maria disappear from the show until after Sonia's baby was born: Again, kids would notice, and ask what was going on.
So, since it had long been established that Maria worked for Luis at The Fix-It Shop, the writers wrote a story that had Luis and Maria falling in love, getting married, and having a baby. It was all above-board. It was a story that could have been told on TV, even 20 years earlier.
Except, by this point, I was an adult, and I thought it was kind of a creepy way around it. Sure, they were both Hispanic (the term "Latinx" for Hispanics of every gender identity wasn't used yet), and they already knew and liked each other. But Luis was old enough to be Maria's father! (Or so I thought. As it turned out, Manzano was 38 when the baby was born, and only 10 years younger than Delgado. But I didn't know that then.)
So, in the 1990s, Gordon and Susan's son Miles and Luis and Maria's daughter Gabi became the representatives of what could have been called Sesame Street: The Next Generation. By this point, with Northern Calloway, who played Mr. Hooper's assistant David, also having left the show (it wasn't a story I'd like to share, and he died soon thereafter), Hooper's Store was run by Alan, a Japanese-American played by Alan Muraoka, and Miles and Gabi went on to work there.
I guessed that the show would eventually write in a romance between them. This hasn't happened: When they graduated from high school (together, despite Miles being introduced as a baby 4 years earlier), and went off to college, the characters were written out of the show.
Other difficult subjects were introduced. Deaf actress Linda Bove introduced the show's viewers to sign language and the difficulties of hearing impairments. Aristotle was introduced in 1981 as a blind Muppet, Julia in 2017 an autistic one, and Lily in 2011 as a poor one, revealed in 2018 to be homeless. Because he depended on his hearing more than any other character on the show, Aristotle is one of the few monster Muppets to have visible ears.
After September 11, 2001, an episode was written with as close a parallel to the terrorist attacks as the writers could safely come up with: Maria and Elmo are in Hooper's Store when a grease fire breaks out. Although Alan is able to put it out with his fire extinguisher, Maria still has to get Elmo out, and Elmo is traumatized by the event. And when the firefighters, wearing their full equipment, making them look bigger than people their size would normally be, try to talk to him, he's scared further. They explain things to them, and invite him to their firehouse, and he calms down.
Joan Ganz Cooney is still alive, and is scheduled to turn 90 on November 30. Lloyd Morrisett is also still alive, and turned 90 on November 2. He also co-created The Electric Company, which The CTW also ran, from 1971 to 1977.
Sesame Street was originally taped at Reeves Teletape Studios, at 81st Street and Broadway, formerly CBS Studio 72. Also taped there were The Electric Company, and several other shows, for kids and adults alike. In 1986, Reeves Teletape was demolished, and Sesame Street moved production to Unitel Video, at 515 W. 57th Street, off 10th Avenue. Since 1993, they have taped at Kaufman Astoria Studios, on a block in Astoria, Queens bounded by 35th and 36th Avenues, and 35th and 36th Streets.
In 2000, The Children's Television Workshop was renamed Sesame Workshop. In 2016, Sesame Street left PBS, and moved to HBO, where it just began its 51st season. It remains relevant.
