JoNeedless to say, lately we are concerned about what we have lost.
The immediate reaction is sadness and anger, but to persist behind this is a disgrace, especially if you extend things from the personal to the universal; when you think about what we have lost as a culture.
Alex Trebek, Regis Philbin, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Lewis and, just last week, Larry King, Hank Aaron, Cicely Tyson and Cloris Leachman. Different pop culture projects have refocused the deaths and legacies of Fred Rogers, Robin Williams and Whitney Houston. These are people who have been icons for generations.
When Trebek died, he stung so deeply because it reminded us of how few institutions like him remain. He was an industry titan with whom people had an intimate emotional relationship throughout their lives, as did their parents and, in some cases, grandparents or children. In a fractured cultural landscape, it is no longer possible for something to resonate beautifully: a cultural connective tissue between us.
That is, it could not be more reassuring at this time to pay a visit sesam street, and know the infrastructure that was put in place from the time the show was conceived more than 50 years ago to make sure your product would overcome changing times and even its creators, whether those involved they knew it as if they didn’t.
The new documentary Street Gang: How we got to Sesame Street it premiered Saturday at the Sundance Festival, before airing later this year on HBO.
Directed by Marilyn Agrelo and inspired by Michael Davis’ best-selling book, it focuses on the show’s first two decades of rise, from its inception as a renegade disruptor, to ideas on how to talk and educate children. , to its cultural aspect. pedestal: an institution consolidated on its own, but malleable enough to remain so relevant 20, 30, 40, and now more than 50 years after its debut.
Looking Street Gang it is an emotional experience for many of the reasons mentioned above. It’s rare to have a chance to pause and reflect on the ways in which something formative is like sesam street it shaped who you are and the way you see the world; how you related to friends, family, and perhaps most importantly, outsiders; and the significance that your relationship with the characters in the program and the lessons you learned had for you, even if you had no idea of such deep ties.
The inherent fascination behind a documentary like this is learning what created something so deep and enduring: what the creators went through to get the thing out in the first place, and the toll it cost them to manage to maintain. -the clear, entertaining and in conversation with the evolving needs and curiosities of children as the years passed.
More than 20 original and creative casts are interviewed Street Gang, which is abundant with archival footage from the early days of the show and old news revealing how the behind the scenes reacted to its popularity and, in some cases, its real-time controversy.
You may know how to get to Sesame Street, but it’s a journey to know how it was put on the map in the first place.
“You may know how to get to Sesame Street, but it’s a journey to know how it was put on the map in the first place.”
The creation of sesam street it was a radical act, born of the counterculture, the protests of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. In the late 1960s, the revolution was televised, but so was marketing and, when it came to certain child populations, stagnation. One of the key inspirations for sesam street, believe it or not, they were beer ads.
Street Gang presents to the viewer the two people who, apart from Jim Henson, are most responsible for the identity and mission he would define sesam street.
Joan Ganz Cooney was a media executive who had started working in public television, driven by the climate of dissent and social awareness of the time. At a dinner he made, he was approached by Lloyd Morrisett, a Carnegie Foundation psychologist who focused on the socioeconomic gap in schools. He wondered if television, which children at the time were starting to see in record numbers, could be used to help close that gap. But, according to him, “academics were not interested in television. They didn’t have him in their house. It was the boob tube. “
His reflections were music to the ears of Cooney, who had made adjacent observations, but not this connection. “All the kids in America were singing beer ads,” he says in the documentary. “Now, where did they learn beer ads?” The answer, of course, was television. They went to supermarkets and identified products after seeing ads on TV. “The kids loved the medium, why don’t they see if I could educate them?”
In 1966 he commissioned a feasibility study called “The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education,” which found that children between the ages of 3 and 5 watched television half of their waking time. The only thing that overcame him was sleep. If these kids are going to watch so much TV, why not figure out what they like to watch, what’s good about watching and sharing the two?
Its launch earned it an original budget of $ 8 million, most of which was received by the government’s Education Office. I just had this check The New York Times predicting that she would be one of the most powerful women on television.
Outside the bat, he built an unconventional staff. He not only hired writers and producers, but also educators and researchers in child development, and brought them together. That company, which had never been done before, became known as the Children’s Television Workshop.
He was the show’s original writer and director, Jon Stone, the other pivotal pioneer at the center of much of the story. Street Gang, who suggested bringing Jim Henson to the workshop. At the time, Henson’s puppet troupe was a group of high-minded beatniks who performed sketches of nightly comedies on variety shows, determined to show that their index was above the pirates of the children’s birthday party with which his art form was more associated with. But Cooney and Stone’s vision for this new, still-germinating program intrigued him.
“Much of our work was sophisticated and had that black humor,” Henson says in an old interview. “And a lot of our audience was really college-aged. So this would be the first time we worked for kids. When I first heard about Jon, I loved the idea, the whole idea of taking commercial techniques and applying them to a children’s show. “
This word – “commercial” – became the cornerstone of sesam streetthe pioneering brilliance. The program would treat young audiences the same way a commercial company would if it developed an advertising campaign aimed at them. As executive producer David Connell says, “We’re trying to sell the alphabet to preschoolers.”
“When I first heard about Jon, I loved the idea, the whole idea of taking commercial techniques and applying them to a children’s show.”
But there were more things about its inception that represented a marked change in how things were done on children’s television. Cooney was inspired by the civil rights movement, and especially after that first dinner conversation with Morrisett, he wanted to make sure his program spoke specifically and entertained city children and children of color, demographics. which was often left out of child television development and at an academic disadvantage when they reach school age.
At that time, it was common for a children’s show to be set in a beautiful tree house or a clubhouse or a fantastic fairyland. Stone did not want this for his base. The moment of the light bulb passed as I watched an announcement from the Urban Coalition, which was filmed in Harlem.
“As soon as I saw it, I knew exactly where we should be in it,” Stone says. “I wanted to capture that New York energy, because to the 3-year-olds who joined the upstairs room, the action is on the street.”
It’s weird that a bolt looks behind the curtain as fascinating as what’s inside Street Gang. Again, of course, it’s interesting. This is sesam street—This meticulous and accessible view of how the world works is based on each episode.
You’ll be delighted as researchers comment on how they tested the content to determine what balance between education and entertainment should be maintained or as comedy writers talk about educating themselves about the differences between concepts like counting and enumeration. , so that a shocking scene with the count is spelled correctly.
Of course, you’ll love the puppeteers, but you’ll also marvel at how the show’s human performers broke boundaries when it came to various castings.
There is an in-depth discussion about the impact the race had on the show and its legacy — and the discomfort that certain markets had about it — as well as the darkness it could sometimes glimpse on the creators of a show. program that had so much content to produce to each of them. episode, and such a high bar and a worthy mission to fulfill every week.
You will revisit key moments, such as the most important episode in which, after the actual death of Will Lee, who played Mr. Hooper, Big Bird, and the audience at home, you understand what death means and how to process it. -la, and you’ll probably cry again like it’s the first time you’ve seen it.
All this is to say that the more you learn about the fabric of the show that these creators weaved with such care and passion in those early years, the less surprising it has been that it has been essential and, in terms of revenue for viewers and merchandise, successful entertainment all these decades later.
There’s a part of a conversation between Cooney and Henson on the show’s twentieth anniversary, a year before Henson’s tragic untimely death, that the documentary airs again.
“What is interesting from our point of view is that it is a kind of immortality. Because if you think about it, Ernie will live forever, ”says Cooney.
“Does that mean I can stop doing Ernie?” Henson laughed in response. “No, he doesn’t,” Cooney says. “But it means that in 200 years people will look at Bert and Ernie and Kermit the frog.”
In such a rapidly changing world, it is remarkable — and perhaps more poignant than can be expressed — to have the certainty that she is absolutely correct in this prediction.