Happy 40th Birthday, Sesame Street!

Google helped Sesame Street celebrate it’s 40th Birthday today with a rather unusual (but charming) “Google Doodle.” And what better way to celebrate than with the show’s iconic character, Big Bird, providing the ”L” in the word ”Google?”

Forty years?! Wow! Just think about it. For forty years this show has been teaching children to count. To spell. To sing. To recognize letters and colors and shapes.

I grew up on Sesame Street. I was 3-years-old when it debuted (Sesame Street taught you the math you needed to figure out my age! Just thought I’d point that out!). It was aimed at children between 3 and 5, so I spent 3 years with it as I grew up, learning my ABCs and 123s.

Later, in college, I studied to be an Elementary School teacher. I knew by my Sophomore year that I didn’t really want to teach. I was a puppeteer and very interested in children’s television. I had to do a major paper for a class my Senior year. I decided to do it on educational TV. At that time, there was no cable (at least not as we know it), there weren’t 100+ channels to choose from. Video tapes were not as easy to come by and DVDs weren’t even a thought in someone’s head. All kid’s TV was cartoons on Saturday morning, adult shows that were considered “not inappropriate” for kids, and Public Television. Sesame Street was the center of the hub, and all kid’s TV orbited around it.

I wrote my paper on just that subject. There was Sesame Street, and then there was everything else. Sesame Street was a major research project, three years in the making. It wasn’t just a TV show, it was a study in curriculum, presentation, child development, and educational philosophy. And if Sesame Street was at the core of children’s television, puppetry was at the core of Sesame Street.

From its inception, Sesame Street was intended to include puppets. Jim Henson was really the only name mentioned in early developmental meetings. One article commented that early developers had said that if Henson had declined the offer to come aboard, Sesame Street would not have included puppetry at all. He was that important. Think of your favorite characters from the show, back when you were a child. I’ll bet they were Cookie Monster, or Grover, or Ernie & Bert, or Big Bird. Can you imagine that happy street without the puppet characters? Me either!

There’s an old saying that trees that don’t bend in the changing winds snap and break. TV shows are like that too. They have to bend, or change, to keep up with new trends. Sesame Street is also a study in just how possible it is to keep up with the times. We old timers (did I just call myself old?) fondly remember the days before Elmo, or grow nostalgic for Mr. Looper (um, Hooper), but I can only imagine in another 40 years, OUR kids will be shaking their heads at the digital holo-imaging television sets in their living rooms, telling THEIR kids – “Hey, in my day there was this little red furry monster…”

Without the puppets, would we all have lived on Sesame Street, at least for a few years of our lives? I highly doubt it!

Happy Birthday Sesame Street, and many more happy returns!