Sesame Street Will Kill Your Kids

[Jimmy]

Excerpted from NY Times.com

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.”

We've been asked to protect our children from Sesame Street.

The rest of the article can be found here -

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

I am dumbfounded by modern cultures' need to make everything politically correct and dumbed down to the point where nothing makes sense anymore.

I recently read. heh, that reading for pleasure in America is at one of it's lowest levels in decades. That scares me. My children are either going to rule the world with their superintelligence, or they'll be stoned to death by the other kids on the playground for daring to say that the earth isn't flat.

If the mods feel the need to condense this thread with my Santa Claus thread please go right ahead and I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

This thread has been brought to you by the letters "B" and "S" and by the number "0."

[Daghain]

Ah, you have to register to see it. But I can venture a guess.

I am sooo sick of this stupid need to bubble-wrap the world. Kids are going to grow up to be a bunch of wussies, and dumb ones at that, if this keeps up.

[TerribleT]

The thing that really scares me is that our entire society is now being geared towards those who are "cognitively disdvantaged", rather than trying to elevate everyone to a higher level. If you strive for more, you are considered maladjusted, and if you're a bum you're considered normal and healthy.

[Jorge]

I'd FORCE my kids to watch it. Hell, if I had kids, I'd wait until they were 7 or 8, then drive them out into the woods and make them find their way back home. If they can make it, they've passed the test and can be admitted into the family as a full-time member.

[Jimmy]

The article for those without nytimes.com accounts.

Excerpted from NY Times.com

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.

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.

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.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.

Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”

In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.

The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.

[Arthur Heath]

I read this article, though in another place. How absolutely ridiculous. Kids these days would chew this up and spit it out. There is SO MUCH DESENSITIZATION in pop-culture today. There worried about Bert and Ernie? LAUGHABLE! Kids deal with gay issues IN REAL LIFE EVERYDAY, with their parents! Cookie Monster is a diabetic? Yea, so is my 6 year old cousin, who can give HIMSELF necessary shots everyday.
Again, absolutely ridicules. The author of this article is a hyper conservative idiot.
Would I let my child watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre? No.... Would I let them watch Sesame Street, your damn straight.

[Jimmy]

The point of the story is not the writer's perspective, the point is that there's a warning label on the Sesame Street DVD.

I have to include the entire article, as well as the author and it's source to avoid legal ramifications for linking.

[Matt]

I seriously can't believe this! I watched those episodes as a kid

But I guess I could be considered pretty fucked up.

[Wuducynn]

Ah, you have to register to see it. But I can venture a guess.

I am sooo sick of this stupid need to bubble-wrap the world. Kids are going to grow up to be a bunch of wussies, and dumb ones at that, if this keeps up.

Speak it sister! SERIOUSLY.

[Ruki]

so is burt still ernie's abusive gay husband?

[Jorge]

Of course Bert and Ernie weren't gay. They didn't even have moustaches.

[William50]

I never watched that show. I found it boring......but know its ok. Just kidding!

[Daghain]

BWAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!

[OchrisO]

I grew up on Sesame Street and there's a whole lot of shit wrong with my generation and the kids they are raising. Maybe they are on to something. haha.

[Girlystevedave]

The problem with today's society is we are expecting cartoons, movies, celebrities, and athletes to raise our children for us. I was raised on tv. I was watching scary movies when I was about 8 or 9. I even saw nudity in movies. No, my parents weren't letting me watch porn or anything, but a bare breast wasn't a big deal. The reason why it wasn't a big deal was because I knew it was only a movie. Only fiction. Only entertainment. People are so fucked up to think Sesame Street may cause their children to eat too many cookies or maybe live in a garbage can one day. Maybe if people would step up and be real parents and talk to their children, they could actually be normal adults one day. But I'm sure it would be much easier to blame all the kid's failures on a PBS show.

[Wuducynn]

I grew up on Sesame Street and there's a whole lot of shit wrong with my generation and the kids they are raising. Maybe they are on to something. haha.

No, its just you.

[Bethany]

but you younger guys don't realize that we haven't watched the same show. the PC, dumbed down crap that comes on today is NOT sesame street. elmo can bite my butt and die. show of hands here--who remembers the "it's the plumber, i've come to fix the sink?" now that's real entertainment.

[Wuducynn]

Watching Electric Company, Zoom and Mister Rogers is what drove me over the brink.

[Bethany]

one two three
four five
six seven
eight nine ten
eleven twe-eh-eh-ehlve!

[Wuducynn]

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

[Wuducynn]

Oh and we can't forget - 3-2-1 CONTACT!

[TerribleT]

Maybe if people would step up and be real parents and talk to their children, they could actually be normal adults one day.

AMEN!!!! Preach it!!!!!

[Matt]

I miss SchoolHouse Rock

[ZoNeSeeK]

Its always people with kids wanting to blame someone else or something else for anything that happens to their child. Censorship is so damn high because people refuse to take responsibility for themselves and their kids.

[fernandito]

I'd FORCE my kids to watch it. Hell, if I had kids, I'd wait until they were 7 or 8, then drive them out into the woods and make them find their way back home. If they can make it, they've passed the test and can be admitted into the family as a full-time member.

....wait, you're joking right?