Sesame Street Old School!

Recently I've been watching Sesame Street Old School, old Sesame Street from the early 70s, which apparently "Is intended for grown-ups and may not suit the needs of today's pre-schooler."

So obviously I had to watch it to see what was apparently so wrong with it!

I can see a few things that wouldn't fly today. Gordon (who's a teacher - I'd forgotten that) takes it upon himself to walk a little girl who's new to the neighbourhood home from school and introduce her to everyone. Susan invites this little girl she's just met (and many other children over the course of the show) to come over for milk and cookies. And speaking of milk, they seemed really enthusiastic about milk in the first episode. There was like milk propoganda! (Seriously, five minutes on milk, on Sesame Street?) And at one point Luis decides to go out for a coffee break and leaves a small child at the Fix-It Shop with instructions to answer the phone and tell whoever calls that he'll be back in five minutes. Then he says "And if they don't speak English..." and gives her instructions on what to say in Spanish - and I think she didn't even speak Spanish!

It was fun to see early incarnations of the muppets we all know and love. Oscar the Grouch was ORANGE! Big Bird was kind of dopey and stupid at first, then he grew some more feathers on the top of his head and became more childlike than dopey. In Mr. Snuffleupagus's first appearance, his eyes were green - like even the whites of his eyes were green! Cookie Monster was this big dark hairy lurking beast who snuck up and wordlessly devoured Kermit the Frog's W. Oh, and everyone with whom I've argued about the lyrics of the "One of these things is not like the others" song: they don't sing it the same way every time! So we're all right!

But what was even more fun is noticing as an adult things that I took as given as a child. The blue man throws a hissy fit because his alphabet soup doesn't contain all the letters of the alphabet! The grown-ups all drop everything for a game of Follow The Leader. (Oh, and speaking of the grown-ups, they're all wearing or not wearing their own wedding rings - the rings aren't part of the costume! So Bob has a wedding ring, but Gordon and Susan (who are married to each other) don't.) Gordon (who had a fro and sideburns!) and some kids are shooting hoops, and Gordon says "Let's get a game together, but first we need to count how many people we have." So he stops and they all count everyone, then they go back to just shooting hoops. In a scene about how everyone makes mistakes, Big Bird accidentally steps on his J, and Gordon says "Oh, that's okay, don't worry about it, I accidentally step on my J all the time." When I was little, I took this as absolutely normal, and thought it was very strange that I never saw a random W just sitting there on a little brick wall IRL. When I was just starting to learn to read, my parents either made or bought some little letters made of wood so then I had letters like on Sesame Street. I don't know if this is because at some point I expressed a wish for Sesame Street letters, or if they thought of it separately.

Actually, now that I think about it, one of the educational benefits of Sesame Street is that it normalized reading and counting and talking about letters and shapes and colours. Everyone on Sesame Street from children to muppets to grown-ups sometimes just stops everything and counts to 20, or thinks of things that start with B. This would actually be very useful for children because it models these skills on a level they can understand! Because I don't think small children would associate skimming the newspaper or paying for groceries with knowing your letters and numbers. When I was little, I used to think that boys couldn't do math, because I could clearly do math (and was better at it than most of the boys - and the girls - in my class) and my mother was a math teacher so she did math, but I never actually saw my father doing math. But of course he did - my father was a programmer and had investments and did home improvement projects that involved rulers and protractors and calculators and generally functioned in adult life, but I didn't think of any of this as math. Math was textbooks and worksheets and memorizing your times tables, and I just couldn't yet associate it with balancing your chequebook or calculating how much drywall you needed for the basement. So if other children's minds work similarly, Sesame Street could be really helpful just by normalizing the idea of reciting the alphabet or counting by twos.