Sesame Street

Big Bird, politics, and the ABCs: how a television show made to represent New York City neighborhoods like Harlem and the Bronx became beloved by families around a divided country. This episode originally ran in 2022 as "Getting to Sesame Street." To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Rosetta Stone, offering an alternative approach to language learning. Without relying on traditional memorization, the platform guides users to intuitively think in a second language. More information at rosettastone.com.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  It's the late afternoon on a Monday. I'm four years old, sitting crisscross applesauce on the floor of my parents' apartment. The carpet is shaggy, ugly, and brown. I have a cherubic face and bowl haircut, you know, like the one Jim Carrey has in the film Dumb and Dumber. In front of me is a TV with an antenna and dial. It's the late 1980s. And on the screen is my daily companion, Sesame Street.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Today is a very special day because today's the day when my little sister Alice meets my best friend, Bird.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  My family had only recently moved to the US from Iran, and I was lonely. I couldn't speak English. I couldn't make sense of where we were or what had brought us here. In that moment, where I needed a lifeline, Sesame Street with its weird cast of characters was there. The giant animals, monsters, muppets, the kind adults and children everywhere on the street.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  It's a puppy! Oh, Ernie! You're right, Bird. Oh, look at him. Isn't he cute?

• 1:45Speaker 01

  I learned English watching Sesame Street. I learned how to deal with loss, anger, sadness, loneliness. When my parents, who were dealing with their own trauma and working constantly to make rent, weren't there, I learned from Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Susan, and Gordon. It was a window into a whole new world, a safe, accepting, beautiful, American world.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  I wake up in my house. It's called a dream.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  The name's Grimace. Whatever you say, Froggy. It is yours. I just opened my mouth and...

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Well, that's amazing!

• 2:38Speaker 01

  But I wasn't alone. In millions of other homes, millions of other young children like me were sitting in front of their TVs, watching the same show I was. And some of those children grew up to work right here on Throughline.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  I watched Sesame Street in the early 90s when I was a kid. From the early 1970s, so right, you know, right when Sesame Street started.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  I always joke that it was created just for me because it was made about a year after I was born.

• 3:10Speaker 05

  My sister and I actually weren't allowed to watch a lot of TV, but Sesame Street was one of the very few shows that we were allowed to watch.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  I would watch from the couch of my family's apartment in the Bronx.

• 3:23Speaker 06

  I was in Wichita, Kansas.

• 3:25Speaker 05

  On the floor in our living room, way too close to the TV.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  And actually, my earliest memory of Sesame Street is actually my earliest memory.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  I think it made me feel like I could be on the show, like I could be on Sesame Street.

• 3:39Speaker 06

  Only child, being raised by a single dad, so I spent a lot of time in front of the TV.

• 3:46Speaker 03

  I think a big part of this was because there were kids on the show who looked like me.

• 3:52Speaker 07

  I came to show you the moon, Maria.

• 3:55Speaker 05

  My favorite character was Big Bird.

• 3:58Speaker 07

  Look up in the sky.

• 4:00Speaker 06

  My favorite, favorite character was Roosevelt Franklin. I have a letter. It is here with me. I'm in my 50s and even now, I find myself walking around and randomly hearing Roosevelt Franklin Elementary School.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  One of these things is not like the other.

• 4:21Speaker 07

  I saw the beautiful moon.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  Just kind of felt like friends. It just felt like a place I wanted to spend time.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  I learned everything on Sesame Street. Things that taught you how to, you know, navigate the world. And I feel like in a way, I'm still learning from Sesame Street.

• 4:37Speaker 06

  I don't know. I think it really, really has played a major role in my worldview.

• 4:45Speaker 06

  So yeah, Sesame Street.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  For many of us, Sesame Street was our first taste of education. It taught us how to read and count and be nice people in this society. But the road to creating the show and sustaining it decade after decade has come with its own struggle. A struggle that can tell us so much about the role of education in socializing children and developing cultural norms and shared values.

• 5:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  Arguments over what those are and how they're communicated tend to flare up during moments of cultural anxiety, like the one we're in now.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  This is a story about how a TV show made to represent a block in Harlem, New York, has sustained its mark in educating children around the world. And it's a story about the questions we're still asking about who the people are in our neighborhood.

• 5:52Rund Abdelfatah?

  In this episode of Throughline from NPR, the story of Sesame Street.

• 6:09Speaker 06

  Roosevelt Franklin Elementary School.

• 6:17Speaker 09

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• 7:10Speaker 10

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• 7:34Speaker 11

  Part one. A symphony orchestra of rain power.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Today, it may be easy to think of Sesame Street as a show that was created by some massive government program, carefully concocted in some laboratory to teach kids how to read and write. But the reality is Sesame Street began at a dinner party at the Manhattan apartment of a local TV producer named Joan Gans Cooney.

• 8:05Speaker 12

  She and her husband hosted, you know, a classic 1960s dinner party. And she prepared beef bourguignon from Julia Child's cookbook for some of her colleagues and friends.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  I have never actually had beef bourguignon, but I figured I would tell you that just as an excuse for me to say the word. But anyway, this group of people at this party were basically just Joan Gans Cooney's friends and colleagues, except there was one hot shot there.

• 8:39Speaker 12

  Fellow named Lloyd Morissette.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Lloyd Morissette.

• 8:43Speaker 12

  Who worked in the philanthropic world, working on projects devoted to children.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  By the way, this is Michael Davis.

• 8:52Speaker 12

  Author of Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  OK, so back at the dinner, all the guests gobbled down the beef bourguignon. And then the conversation turned to kids and education, something Joan had been thinking about in a television special she'd made.

• 9:09Speaker 12

  That investigated a program in Harlem where they were enriching the lives of preschool children with educational materials and instruction and essentially giving.

• 9:24Speaker 12

  Young kids in Harlem who were younger than school age, the opportunities and influences that kids who in more privileged homes were getting, books and records and being read to and those kinds of things.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  And that program ends up becoming the model for what we now know as the National Head Start Program, a federally funded education program designed to prepare children for kindergarten.

• 9:49Speaker 12

  And there came a moment in the after dinner conversation when somebody said, you know, I wonder if television could provide the same thing.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Because by the 1960s, basically everyone had a TV. And this electric picture box was like a direct pipeline into living rooms all across the country. Joan saw this as an opportunity.

• 10:12Speaker 12

  Could television teach? And Joan, at that very moment, said, I don't know that it can, but I'd sure like to be the person who would try.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  And then?

• 10:26Speaker 12

  Boom. Just like that, at that moment, in her head, an idea came into clear focus. That some of the things that she saw in Harlem could very well be translated to the screen. Let's see if we could do that.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Lloyd Morissette, a vice president at the Carnegie Foundation, decided to give her a grant to conduct research on whether a TV show to educate kids was even possible. At the time, this idea was sort of novel because most children's programming on television was not educational at all.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  What was the hole that they were trying to fill?

• 11:34Speaker 12

  Well, the hole was a gaping, wide gap. I mean, the world of children's television circa 1968 was sort of a cavalcade of mayhem.

• 11:57Speaker 12

  Cartoons that really weren't all that worthy. Afternoon shows in local markets that were, you know, just put on the air to sell products.

• 12:10Speaker 12

  It was a minefield of junk.

• 12:16Speaker 13

  At the time, the only show on the air for preschoolers that was quality was Captain Kangaroo.

• 12:26Speaker 13

  And it wasn't educational. It was a nice show for kids.

• 12:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Joan Gans Cooney from a television interview on a show called The Open Mind back in 2009, talking about that question from the dinner party. Could TV teach?

• 12:41Speaker 13

  So I did a report saying, yes, the answer is yes. And here's how it might proceed.

• 12:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  That report was called "The Potential Uses of Television for Preschool Education."

• 12:53Speaker 12

  And she felt that famously that, you know, kids could sing beer commercials, beer jingles. If television had the power to teach that to children, maybe it could teach something a little more pro-social, like, you know, some basic rudimentary concepts of learning.

• 13:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  It went all the way back to what she saw in Harlem, making that TV special about the project that was part of the foundation for Head Start.

• 13:18Speaker 12

  Joan's fundamental idea was, if we're going to try to see if television can teach, let's do it in a bona fide way. Let's get educators to help us craft a curriculum for the show that can be measured. We want to be able to prove to our funders that it worked. Now, that was a real part of the brilliance behind Sesame Street, to ground it in a bona fide, scientific, educational research.

• 13:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Joan and Lloyd had been able to raise about $1 million from foundations to support their idea of a children's TV show. But they had to come up with a budget of $8 million to actually do it. In today's money, that's about $62 million. So who else was going to invest that much money into an idea that probably offered no kind of financial return?

• 14:20Speaker 14

  I propose that we begin a program in education to ensure every American child, the fullest development of his mind and skills.

• 14:33Speaker 13

  This was the era of Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society. But Washington was, had various pilot projects around the country that they were researching to see if early intervention could make a difference. And the research showed that it did make a difference.

• 14:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  The administration of Lyndon Johnson was laser focused on eliminating poverty and reducing inequality. To that end, they made education, especially for black children, a priority. Joan and Lloyd were completely on the same page with the administration.

• 15:06Speaker 12

  The civil rights movement, it gave energy to this initiative. And these were, you know, New Yorkers, liberals. They were convinced that the government could and should be in the business of helping preschool children with media.

• 15:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  After months and months of pitching, it worked. In 1968, Sesame Street got almost $4 million from the Office of Education facilitated by the LBJ administration. That made up about half the budget to kickstart the show. The rest came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations, along with other funders.

• 15:58Speaker 12

  I think they, they had a holy crap moment. It was like, okay, you know, Joan spent a year, you know, doing research and talking to people, educators and psychologists and doctors, pediatricians, you know, and then, you know, all of a sudden it became very real. And they realized that we've got to, we've got to put a show on the air. And within a year, you're talking about something that had never been done before. They summoned the brightest people they could find from disparate worlds, the world of education, psychology, psychiatry, medicine, artists, musicians.

• 16:42Speaker 12

  And they had a series of seminars and they brainstormed together. No one had ever created this symphony orchestra of brain power.

• 16:53Speaker 15

  I think it's fair to say that by the time our program goes on the air, it will be the most thoroughly researched show in the history of the medium.

• 17:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  The show was developed under a nonprofit called the Children's Television Workshop. All they needed was an audience and Joan had to sell it.

• 17:10Speaker 15

  The short, simple 60-second form used by TV advertisers in commercials to sell products is used here to teach numbers and letters.

• 17:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is from a promo that was filmed before Sesame Street's debut.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  You know what this is, Kermit? A really bad triangle? Oh, come on, Kermit, it's a circle. Okay, so it's a circle, so? Well, you know that, but a lot of little kids don't.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  It's hard to overstate how revolutionary this was. It was a show whose goal was to reach black audiences at a time when black families were struggling for equality in education. It was a show inspired by Harlem, which many people thought wouldn't resonate with the national audience. No one knew if anyone would watch. So the creators were literally hitting the streets to spread the word.

• 18:04Speaker 12

  A woman named Evelyn Davis, African-American woman who was a community activist in New York City. Very, very well-connected, knew everybody. It was her job to raise awareness that this show was coming. And she was able to convince Khan Edison, you know, the big utility in New York City, to donate a bus.

• 18:35Speaker 12

  And on that bus, they had an early VCR, a tape machine, and a monitor.

• 18:46Speaker 12

  And they invited people onto the bus to have a look at, you know, basically a reel of what Sesame Street was going to look like. She went from church to church, preschool to preschool, a community house to community house, just selling this idea.

• 19:07Speaker 12

  And doing her best to get excitement generated about its promise.

• 19:15Speaker 12

  That work was so important because she had credibility in the Black community, high credibility.

• 19:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was 1969, three years after the dinner party at Joan's apartment. And Sesame Street's first episode would air on November 10. Millions of dollars had been invested, yet no one knew for sure if the show would work. Nothing like it had ever existed before.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  When we come back, Sesame Street launches, and legends are born.

• 20:01Speaker 16

  Hi, this is Regina from Washington DC, and you are listening to the best sound design podcast there is, not to mention the best NPR podcast, Throughline. Thanks for all your work, guys.

• 20:15Speaker 09

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• 20:51Speaker 17

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• 20:59Speaker 18

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• 21:08Speaker 17

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• 21:15Speaker 19

  In the much-talked-about new movie, Wicker, Olivia Colman plays a woman who commissions a husband literally made of wicker. Yes, wicker. We'll tell you why the silly and bawdy new movie is also a nice, cozy fall watch. Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 21:38Speaker 11

  Part Two: How the People Spoke.

• 21:43Speaker 12

  I was a senior in high school when Sesame debuted.

• 21:49Speaker 12

  And I already was determined to watch it.

• 21:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  That first episode opens with weird animated creatures. One looks kind of like a cross between a unicorn and an alligator. The other, an armless grinning blue guy wearing a bowler hat. It has a very 60s vibe.

• 22:09Speaker 12

  Number one, I had seen a special on NBC that aired a couple of days before that hailed the show. But number two, I loved the muppets. I call my bathtub Rosie. Here I was, you know, like 17, watching a show meant for kids aged four.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  Why do you call your bathtub Rosie?

• 22:28Speaker 12

  Because every time I take a bath, I leave a ring around Rosie.

• 22:33Speaker 12

  And I thought, man, this is really great.

• 22:40Speaker 20

  Sally, you've never seen a street like Sesame Street. Everything happens here. You're gonna love it.

• 22:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the first scene of the very first episode, you meet the store clerk, Mr. Hooper, Bob, the music teacher, and in the background, two kids, black and white, play with a ball. And then Gordon, the guy who owns the Sesame Street brownstone, calls into the window of his house.

• 23:01Speaker 20

  Susan's my wife. You love her. Susan, come here. Want to say hello to Sally?

• 23:05Speaker 21

  Hi Sally. What are you doing?

• 23:07Speaker 22

  Susan is not a name that you name black children, okay? I inherited Susan. However, Susan was from the Midwest. She grew up on a farm. She had a father and a mother and a brother. And I use my own story.

• 23:24Speaker 12

  Susan is you.

• 23:26Speaker 22

  Yeah, yeah, it's me.

• 23:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Dr. Loretta Long, who played Susan, starting from that very first episode in 1969.

• 23:38Speaker 22

  I was born in Kansas, but I was raised in rural Michigan, 20 miles from Kalamazoo, zoo, zoo.

• 23:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  Dr. Long has been an entertainer since she was a kid. She used to sing show tunes while helping her family sell produce at the roadside stand.

• 23:56Speaker 22

  When I graduated from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, I immediately moved to Detroit. My dream was really to work for Motown.

• 24:08Speaker 22

  I wanted to be part of the Motown sound, but all the slots were taken. The Supremes didn't need nobody. Martha had all the Vandellas. So I had to, I had to branch out.

• 24:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  Dr. Long went to New York City in 1960. She wanted to make it big, be a star. But she needed a day job that would give her the flexibility to go on auditions. And so with a degree in education, she landed substitute teaching gigs in Harlem and the Bronx.

• 24:47Speaker 22

  I knew if I got the right phone call, I was history.

• 24:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  When she finally got that call, it was 1969, and she'd been co-hosting a show on New York Public Television that was all about black music, black culture, and black identity. It was a show called Soul.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  It's Soul. And this is your announcer, Jerry V.

• 25:09Speaker 22

  No train. We didn't have the money for a train. Just Soul. The young man who was, who was a set director, every time the camera went off, you heard zzz, zzz, zzz.

• 25:24Speaker 22

  He was building the, the mock-up for Sesame Street. He said, oh, I'm doing this for this children's show. And you're a teacher? Why don't you? And I'm so, I'm an actor who happens to be teaching. I am not a teacher. He said, right now, you're a teacher who can sing. Okay?

• 25:48Speaker 22

  So he sent me to the audition.

• 25:52Speaker 22

  It was just a regular room with a bunch of judgmental people sitting at a long table with their arms folded, looking at you. But I was used to that. I mean, I had auditioned for Broadway.

• 26:05Speaker 22

  They were looking for an acoustic folk guitarist, Joan Baez looking. And I looked like, I looked like Angela Davis. I had a big fro, short skirts and, and show tunes. They looked me up and down and said, where's your guitar? I said, excuse me? My what? They said, so, very New York. So sing already.

• 26:34Speaker 22

  One, two, you know what to do. Hey, I'm a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle. And I said, "Hold it, hold it." See, I knew we were singing to children. And I looked right in the camera and I said, "Now, you all know this song. Now, I'm gonna start it again. And you stand up and sing it with me, okay? One, two, you know what to do. Hey." Ed Palmer, who was head of research, said the kids all stood up and sang. And I have a career because of some kids in Harlem that stood up and sang with me.

• 27:11Speaker 21

  Anybody seen any more rectangles right around in this neighborhood? Yeah, the pictures. Oh, the pictures. Those are good rectangles. Look at this.

• 27:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  The thing about Dr. Loretta Long is that she really did embody what Sesame Street has been doing since the very beginning, mixing education and entertainment.

• 27:28Speaker 21

  One of these things is not like the others. One of these things doesn't belong.

• 27:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  In fact, during the first few years the show ran, Dr. Long was earning her PhD in urban education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

• 27:45Speaker 21

  I have a riddle for you. What's closer to you than the air? And what stretches like a rubber band and comes in a lot of pretty colors, like white, all shades of brown?

• 27:57Speaker 22

  The fact that we could put entertainment and educational concepts together and make it more palatable for children, it fit me like a glove.

• 28:08Speaker 21

  Well, did you guess? It was skin.

• 28:11Speaker 22

  I was hired for one week. We shot a pilot from a Monday through Friday to show how we would teach and utilize every day to reinforce the lesson we were teaching. I was only hired for a week, so that wasn't any big celebration.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  And that brings us back to that first episode in November 1969.

• 28:41Speaker 23

  E E C M I L K.

• 28:47Speaker 23

  Did you ever wonder where it came from?

• 28:49Speaker 01

  That first episode is trippy.

• 28:53Speaker 20

  Sure it is. Hello, Big Bird.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Big Bird is this big dopey disheveled looking creature with sort of creepy eyes, a rough sketch of what we see today.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  You're letting all the fresh air and sun light in, boy, I hate that.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Oscar the Grouch is orange.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Oh, go away. Close my can, little dear.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  And Sesame Street was born at a time when the government was taking a bigger role in people's lives. Medicaid and Medicare had been created, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and the government was getting involved with what was on TV. Sesame Street first aired on the National Educational Television Network, which would become the public broadcasting system, PBS, the next year, which is why even today Sesame Street can feel so synonymous with PBS.

• 29:41Speaker 12

  I was there, man, in 1969. Nobody knew what the hell PBS was, believe me.

• 29:49Speaker 12

  In a lot of markets, you couldn't even find it. It was on a UHF station, and you're lucky if you could get rid of the fuzz and get a decent picture.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  But the picture was pretty clear. In its second week, Sesame Street was reaching almost 2 million homes, and the reviewers loved the show.

• 30:11Speaker 12

  I think the majority of people hailed it and loved it, and, you know, it was an immediate success. It was a blockbuster success. It was everywhere. But there were opponents from the very start.

• 30:30Speaker 12

  Notably, Mississippi Public Television refused to air the show.

• 30:37Speaker 12

  Why? Because black and white children were portrayed as being friends on the show and, you know, did things together and it was as normal as, as normal could be. That was not going to fly in Mississippi until, aha, the parents said, wait a minute, we want this show. We think our children should be able to see this show. And they resolved that conflict in the best of all ways. The people spoke.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  The ban lasted less than a month, but the Mississippi government wasn't the show's only critic. Some educators themselves were questioning whether a TV show could really do a good job teaching kids.

• 31:21Speaker 12

  They thought that the pace was too frenetic. They thought it was going to create a generation of kids with attention deficit disorder. There were people who were really angry with it, suspicious of it, didn't like it one little bit.

• 31:37Speaker 22

  I had a guy say, well, am I supposed to be entertaining my kids in, in the class? And I said, why not?

• 31:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Sesame Street was changing the game.

• 31:50Speaker 12

  Kindergarten teachers had to rip up their curriculum. They had to start over because no longer were, were kids showing up not understanding the basics. They showed up ready to learn and to learn more.

• 32:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  A 2015 study showed that a whole generation of kids in the 70s were coming to school more prepared. By 1979, around nine million kids under the age of six were watching Sesame Street every day. And it wasn't just reaching, quote unquote, disadvantaged children.

• 32:23Speaker 12

  Within weeks of its premiere, it was clear that all boats were going to rise as a result of this show.

• 32:40Speaker 12

  A lot of people questioned the idea of the government getting involved in television and the whole idea of a public television network seemed to them to be like just more liberal brainwashing. But, but, but, but, but, moms, grandmoms, dads, older siblings, I mean, once they started watching this show, when it debuted in November of 69, immediately defended it, immediately took to it, immediately saw that it was like nothing else on television. And, you know, within a year, Big Bird was on the cover of Time Magazine.

• 33:32Speaker 12

  The tone of Sesame Street and the tempo of it was extraordinary, too.

• 33:44Speaker 12

  It was very fast-paced.

• 33:49Speaker 12

  There were quick cuts.

• 33:51Speaker 07

  Oh, you're really weird.

• 33:53Speaker 12

  There was animation. There were songs.

• 34:01Speaker 12

  There were parodies.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  And now, time for TV's favorite game show, Beat the Time.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  And here's TV's favorite moderator, Guy Smiley.

• 34:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  And the show wasn't just about numbers and letters.

• 34:18Speaker 22

  The diversity was the soft skill that laid right in there with the ABCs and the 1-2-3s and Kermit singing "It's Not That Easy Being Green."

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Having to spend each day the color of the leaves.

• 34:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  And all the while educators and researchers, directors and writers work together, trying to figure out how to do all this right.

• 34:49Speaker 07

  Hi, Mr. Looper. What you doing?

• 34:51Speaker 12

  Hooper, Hooper.

• 34:52Speaker 07

  Hooper.

• 34:53Speaker 12

  Life presented Children's Television Workshop with a real dilemma. When Willie, the actor who portrayed Mr. Hooper, died. And fairly suddenly.

• 35:06Speaker 07

  I'll sweep for you.

• 35:07Speaker 12

  You will?

• 35:08Speaker 07

  And that way you can sit down and study because that's what you should be doing.

• 35:11Speaker 12

  I see.

• 35:12Speaker 22

  He rode in the Thanksgiving Day Parade, went in the hospital.

• 35:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  And less than two weeks later, Willie and with him, Mr. Hooper, died.

• 35:24Speaker 12

  They had to decide what would become of that character.

• 35:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  Since the show spent so much time researching each episode, the episode where they addressed the death of Mr. Hooper wouldn't air for almost a year after his death.

• 35:41Speaker 07

  I just drew pictures of all of my grown-up friends on Sesame Street and I'm gonna give it to you.

• 35:49Speaker 22

  They said, "We have to say the words, 'Mr. Hooper died.'" And it has to be put in Big Bird's mouth because he's a child.

• 36:00Speaker 12

  Big Bird was a stand-in for like a six-year-old child. He's the child's representative on the street.

• 36:08Speaker 22

  And if he had a question, we figured that the children were questioning that as well.

• 36:15Speaker 22

  So we were all in the alcove and sitting around and he had drawn caricatures of each of us and he brought them to give them to us.

• 36:24Speaker 07

  Hey, it's time for your presents. Presents!

• 36:27Speaker 22

  And then he went to give Mr. Hooper's his.

• 36:32Speaker 07

  And last but not least, ta-da!

• 36:36Speaker 22

  And that's when we said, "Well, Big Bird, you know, you remember Mr. Hooper died."

• 36:44Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. I remember. Well, I'll give it to him when he comes back.

• 36:51Speaker 21

  Big Bird, Mr. Hooper's not coming back.

• 36:57Speaker 07

  Why not?

• 37:02Speaker 21

  Big birds, when people die, they don't come back.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Ever?

• 37:08Speaker 21

  No, never.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Why not?

• 37:23Speaker 22

  We did it one time. The assistant director came out, Lisa crying. "There were a few things wrong. Anybody want to do it again?" And everybody said, "No." And we ran. We ran for our dressing rooms. You know, that was it, man.

• 37:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, how Sesame Street takes on empathy, diversity, and some of the country's most divisive issues.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Hi, my name is Stephen Barrera, and I'm a graduate student at Indiana University here in Bloomington, Indiana. And you're listening to Two Line from NPR.

• 38:21Speaker 09

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• 38:57Speaker 24

  This week on Short Wave, truth and fraud. That is the beating heart of the movie You Can See Everything. But can you spot a liar in action? Lying doesn't come with emotional and behavioral stereotypes that we think. How to detect deception for real. On Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 39:22Speaker 25

  This is Terry Gross. Listen to Fresh Air for thoughtful questions, like when I asked Steven Spielberg about porn titles. When John Waters was on our show, he said his favorite was shaving Ryan's privates. Did you know about this?

• 39:35Speaker 12

  Uh, no. Not until this very moment.

• 39:41Speaker 25

  Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get podcasts.

• 39:45Speaker 11

  Pot tree. Don't this big bird.

• 39:52Speaker 21

  Now, where is that Roosevelt Franklin?

• 39:54Speaker 20

  Somebody call me by my first and last name.

• 40:00Speaker 21

  Yes, I called you, and it's about time you got here, too.

• 40:02Speaker 12

  What's really interesting to me is the character Roosevelt Franklin.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Here I am, here I am, and there you are. Mm-hmm. And that's just what we're going to get into today.

• 40:19Speaker 12

  Who was an identifiably black character.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  Here and there.

• 40:25Speaker 12

  And funny and fresh, and the bits were always set in a schoolhouse, in a classroom, where he clearly spoke in a black vernacular.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  Rhyme time, rhyme time. Everybody ready for rhyme time?

• 40:39Speaker 12

  While some in the black community were delighted to see it and thought it was something that Sesame Street absolutely needed to do, if your target audience is black, other members of the black community said, oh, no, no, no, no, no.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  It was over here. Now it's over there. Uh-huh.

• 41:00Speaker 12

  Right. Well, that's the difference between here and there. The pressure amounted, and they did drop the character.

• 41:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  Here's the thing, though. The guy who created that character was Matt Robinson, the same guy who played Gordon, Susan's husband. And he was proud of Roosevelt Franklin, which brings us to a question that Sesame Street has been forced to deal with throughout its entire existence. Who should be included in the neighborhood?

• 41:35Speaker 12

  While there were conservative voices saying that the show was trying to sell something that they didn't necessarily want their children to buy, voices on the left were saying, "You folks aren't going far enough."

• 41:52Speaker 01

  In the early 1970s, you started to see pushback on representation on Sesame Street. There were feminists who were angry that the Susan character was too subservient to her husband. Two new human characters, Luis and Maria, joined the show after activists asked for more Latino representation in the neighborhood.

• 42:11Speaker 12

  There were individuals throughout the history of Sesame Street saying, "You know, why aren't you showing a gay or lesbian family on the show?" It's the rare television show that can claim getting criticism from both sides.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  We are looking at the public spat between Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Big Bird. Big Bird put out a tweet after getting the COVID vaccine. He called Big Bird's tweet, "Government propaganda for your five-year-old."

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Over the years, Sesame Street has become known for taking on more and more of these culturally sensitive topics, trying to help families navigate how to talk about them. It's right there, along with the ABCs.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Do you tell everybody that it is okay to hug someone who is HIV-positive, like me? My dad's in jail.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  In jail?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Why? I don't like to talk about it. Most people don't understand. What does divorce mean? Well, divorce means that Abby's mommy and daddy aren't married anymore.

• 43:29Speaker 26

  We see ebbs and flows.

• 43:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Dr. Kira Hunting, associate professor at the University of Kentucky, who specialized in children's media.

• 43:38Speaker 26

  We see these moments where Sesame Street introduces something new. And sometimes you get pushed back from the larger culture relationship there, or more frequently politicians' relationship to that. And then we move on. And maybe perhaps we don't have something new for a little while, and then we have something new again.

• 43:58Speaker 23

  Children don't need this kind of access at such an early age. They're simply not ready for it. They're not prepared for it. And really, we're taking away our children's innocence. We're taking away...

• 44:12Speaker 01

  In a country that's so politically divided, what does a show like Sesame Street represent in terms of either exacerbating that divide or bridging it?

• 44:24Speaker 26

  Well, I don't think it exacerbates it. I think it can be used by people who want to further the divide, right? I think we've certainly seen politicians take moments from Sesame Street and tweet about them and be like, oh, my God, Big Bird got a vaccine. Well, Big Bird also got a vaccine in the 70s. He was fine.

• 44:42Speaker 07

  I want to get a measles shot. I don't want to get the measles.

• 44:47Speaker 26

  So I don't think that Sesame Street can really fulfill its goals and its purposes without engaging in some representations and some content that is going to be perceived as political in a negative way by at least some commentators and some politicians.

• 45:08Speaker 12

  There was, in the early days, some critique of the government's place in funding Sesame Street. But I think the volume on that was increased later, in the 80s and during the Newt Gingrich era of the Republican Revolution. I mean, it was later when that drumbeat of criticism of the show really grew louder.

• 45:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  By the mid 1980s, Sesame Street had been relying less and less on government funding and more and more on merchandising Sesame Street products like stuffed animals, t-shirts, and books. But because of its reach and because it symbolized a public, more liberal media, it was an easy target.

• 45:58Speaker 27

  When Newt Gingrich, the leader of the Republican Revolution, was asked what in the federal budget would first feel his axe, he answered "the Corporation for Public Broadcasting."

• 46:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  All this criticism hasn't stopped Sesame Street, Children's Television Workshop, and now Sesame Workshop from trying to represent what they feel is right for the moment. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, Sesame Street partnered with CNN to host a town hall on racism called Coming Together. Racism? What's that?

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Oh, racism is when people treat other people unfairly because of the way they look or the color of their skin.

• 46:43Speaker 26

  If you look at some of the specials or the episodes that are being critiqued by some conservative groups and other commentators, you can really see that they're mostly just about children and Muppets in the community dealing with difficult experiences.

• 47:01Speaker 11

  Well, my friend Big Bird, he was bullied by some other birds because of his yellow feathers.

• 47:09Speaker 26

  So Sesame Street having these direct depictions is very consistent with what's always done in just a slightly more explicit way that is consistent with this historical moment.

• 47:24Speaker 09

  They won't stop with their push for woke politics.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  It's the innocence of kids that's being attacked earlier and earlier.

• 47:36Speaker 26

  And I think what really I want to ask is why that's controversial. Why talking about self-esteem and inclusion and being a good friend and dealing with people who have excluded you or have been mean to you or treated you badly for part of who you are is okay in some instances, but in other instances is being treated as inappropriate or as, quote, "too political."

• 48:08Speaker 12

  I will tell you this, it's always a mistake to diss Big Bird. Bad idea. Why can't you diss Big Bird? Over time, what's happened is that we really deeply understand these characters. We know who they are. And to suggest that Big Bird was doing something stupid or not good for kids just rings false with the viewer.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Like the time presidential candidate Mitt Romney said he'd cancel subsidies to PBS and use Big Bird as a stand-in. There were all these memes and media coverage about it, and it was used against him in the election in 2012.

• 48:54Speaker 28

  Thank goodness, somebody is finally getting tough on Big Bird.

• 48:59Speaker 28

  We didn't know that Big Bird was driving the federal deficit.

• 49:02Speaker 01

  In December 2024, the streaming service Max announced that it was ending its decade-long partnership with Sesame Street. Some Sesame Workshop staff have announced their intent to form a union. Sesame Workshop announced layoff plans shortly after. A Sesame Workshop spokesperson told NPR in an email that the decision was made, quote, "amid the changing media and funding landscape."

• 49:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  It's impossible to say how much of the rhetoric for or against Sesame Street helps anyone's cause, but there is something deeply ingrained in many of us about Sesame Street, something that's decades in the making, that makes some adults feel like kids, that makes dissing Big Bird off limits for many people, including me.

• 49:51Speaker 22

  Big Bird, I said, was the prototype of the child. You were messing with their childhood.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Sesame Street started as a way to reach underprivileged kids. It was going above the noise and really above the politics that can slow down and sometimes obstruct real change in schools and governments.

• 50:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  And because it was started by white liberals from New York City and kickstarted with government funding and aired on public television and meant for black children, the question still remains, who gets to control the neighborhood, the messages, the music they choose, the Muppets who have continued to teach us, generation after generation?

• 50:47Speaker 22

  One, two, you know what to do. Hey, I'm a little teapot, short and stout.

• 50:53Speaker 11

  I'm a little teapot, short and stout.

• 50:57Speaker 06

  Here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get on steam, that's hear me shout.

• 51:07Speaker 07

  Tip me over and pour me out.

• 51:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 51:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  And me and? Lawrence Wu.

• 51:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg.

• 51:48Speaker 06

  Yolanda Sangwe. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.

• 51:52Speaker 05

  Devon Kadyama.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  Amiri Teller.

• 51:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  Jennifer Etienne. And a big, huge special thanks to the Throughline Kids you heard at the end, Reed, Rumi, Soleil, and Finley.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Fact checking for this episode was done by the one and only Kevin Volk. Thanks also to Kimberly Sullivan, Micah Ratner, Taylor Ash, Samantha Bellegarde, Tamar Charney, and Anya Grunman. This episode was mixed by Josh Newell.

• 52:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani.

• 52:27Speaker 12

  Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara.

• 52:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  And as always, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected].

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Thanks for listening.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.