[HN Gopher] 'Sesame Street': From Radical Experiment to Beloved ...
___________________________________________________________________
'Sesame Street': From Radical Experiment to Beloved TV Mainstay
Author : pseudolus
Score : 71 points
Date : 2021-05-09 10:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| neilv wrote:
| I think I liked Sesame Street well enough, but, as an adult now,
| I'm not sure what their pedagogic/developmental intent was with
| this format: o/~ Three of these kids
| belong together... Three of these kids are kind of the
| same... But one of these kids is doing his own thing...
| o/~
|
| (Watch out for nonconformists)
|
| (Denounce them to authorities)
|
| (persistent song repetition, for operant conditioning)
| AndrewBissell wrote:
| There's a lot to suggest that _Sesame Street_ is not the
| harmless quirky kids ' show it's made out to be. From
| https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/03/21/obey-the-cookie-
| mons...:
|
| _Not long ago the new television ad featuring Sesame Street's
| Cookie Monster pitching the iPhone 6 would have been considered
| a deplorable exploitation of children's culture for profit. But
| this final collapse of a putatively public educational project
| into the realm of corporate marketing caused little stir, quite
| possibly because Big Capitalism was written into Sesame
| Street's DNA from Day One.
|
| Sesame Street was born as a ruling class experiment in social
| control, managed and funded by the Carnegie Endowment in
| concert with the Ford Foundation and federal agencies.
| Carnegie's Children's Television Workshop (CTW) created the
| show as a conscious response to late 60s urban insurrections
| and African-American revolutionary sentiment."_
| allturtles wrote:
| > There's a lot to suggest that Sesame Street is not the
| harmless quirky kids' show it's made out to be.
|
| If there's anything to suggest it, it's not in this article.
| The author seems to be angry that a children's television
| program was not designed as a vehicle for encouraging
| socialist revolution.
| mycologos wrote:
| That article seems to just be a sequence of innuendos and
| insinuations meant to surround Sesame Street with unsavory
| associations without ever actually providing evidence of
| them. Seriously, they're arguing that Sesame Street is
| responsible for _advertisers copying their format_ and
| failing to teach long-form critical thinking to _pre-
| schoolers_.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Why do they still make Sesame Street episodes? There's 51 seasons
| of content, but the audience is realistically only going to spend
| a few years of their lives watching it. Kids these days should
| probably get a "best of" selection of episodes that aren't
| ridiculously out of date. Otherwise, most of it is evergreen.
| koolba wrote:
| > Why do they still make Sesame Street episodes? There's 51
| seasons of content, but the audience is realistically only
| going to spend a few years of their lives watching it.
|
| Because the producers think that having Elmo telling kids that
| their parents are racists is a good idea:
| https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1269270231383449601
|
| I really don't get it. Children are blameless innocent minds
| and truly feel that it's things like this that pervert them for
| years to come.
| jjj1232 wrote:
| Are you referencing something specific? I watched that whole
| clip you linked, and there's nothing in it that would
| "pervert" a child's mind.
|
| It's a clip explaining what protesting is, and what racism
| is. Both seem like valid things to explain on a kids show. Is
| your issue that it's lightly in support of the BLM protests?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I haven't watched Sesame Street for like thirty years, but my
| memory of it was that every episode had both new segments and
| best of segments.
|
| I think more things would feel out of date than you'd think,
| though by now they probably do have enough evergreen segments
| to manage ~3 years of shows they would likely not cover the
| full range of desired topics.
| subpixel wrote:
| The trailer includes the Stevie Wonder Sesame Street appearance
| that is a hit with my toddler, and me
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8lUnI35Sd8&t=39s
| jeffwass wrote:
| I've always wondered how many classic Sesame Street sketches were
| made by artists and animators while tripping on psychadelics.
|
| All the sketches below are ones I've seen when I was little.
|
| The legendery Pinball Number Count, with music by the Pointer
| Sisters : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZshZp-cxKg
|
| Totally tripped-out alphabet, and I mean totally tripped-out :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waxmzwxpKOo
|
| Multi-armed guru counting to twenty a few times including in
| Spanish : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOkbuwRUTZo
|
| Little kid gets lost in a weird neighborhood :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqPcQeMEnFc
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| People often wonder this about psychedelia art. But is it even
| possible? The alphabet one, for example. It takes awhile to
| draw the stationary design behind any of those letters, let
| alone an animated sequence that transitions to the next one.
| Surely the mind of someone hallucinating would have moved on to
| many other fleeting visions before even finishing the letter A.
| jeffwass wrote:
| That's a good point. They could have designed the overall
| vision for how and what to create while under the influence,
| for example.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Philip Glass scored an animation for Sesame Street.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JWwOzEDGss
|
| I blame this for my interest in modern classical. I can't
| imagine them doing something so progressive today. But that's
| because they had a captive audience in the 70's.
| moralestapia wrote:
| The myth that drugs make you more creative is, well, a myth.
|
| I've had a few content-producing startups and I can tell you
| that there was literally no correlation between the
| amount/quality of the art produced and whether the person
| making it was a drug-addict or not (everybody was treated
| equally at my place).
|
| If you want to know the secret behind creative genius, it is,
| as in other things, hard work and dedication. No substitute for
| that.
| pram wrote:
| I watched some of the new Sesame Street with my toddlers and it's
| frankly just boring and cheap now. All the other characters have
| been sidelined for Elmo. The songs and themes are really
| repetitive too.
|
| I mean I know it's for infants, and it feels petty complaining,
| but the episodes from the 80s are like a million times better lol
| moshmosh wrote:
| Changing the "main character" from Big Bird to Elmo, and other
| re-structuring of the show, really did harm it a ton.
|
| Sells merch better, though. And I dunno, maybe zero kids would
| still watch it in a world of smart phones and YouTube and other
| relatively frantic entertainment for pre-schoolers, if it were
| still as sedate as it once was. Maybe kids can't relate or look
| up to Big Bird like they can wacky, high-energy Elmo, anymore.
| floren wrote:
| I thought I read something about how _Grover_ was the main
| character, intended to be a little older than the viewers,
| while Big Bird was supposed to be a little younger and more
| of an audience surrogate.
|
| Of course that all depends on your own definition of what a
| "main character" is, but it's hard to deny it became The Elmo
| Show at some point.
| subungual wrote:
| I think the piece you're both referencing is here:
|
| https://kotaku.com/how-elmo-ruined-sesame-street-1746504585
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Maybe they need to come up with new ideas, _' baby shark' and
| Elmo will fight to the death on Sesame Street today!_
|
| That should liven things up a bit. (no, I've never watched
| Sesame Street)
| jdkee wrote:
| And on to teaching Critical Race Theory.
|
| https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/sesame-street-surrende...
| meepmorp wrote:
| Good for them!
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-10 23:00 UTC)