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Sesame Street DVDs not for kids – Metro US

Sesame Street DVDs not for kids

During Sesame Street’s first five years, Oscar The Grouch was orange.

ON MY WAY TO WHERE THE AIR IS SWEET: The Children’s Television Workshop dipped deep into its vaults this week with the release of Sesame Street: Old School, a three-disc box set of DVDs covering the first five years of the show’s history, which roughly coincide with this writer’s prime early TV years. It was an era on the Street where Mr. Hooper and Bob were our human guides, Big Bird only hallucinated the Snuffleupagus, and jokes about Bert and Ernie’s living arrangements were only whispered by the most dirty-minded of sideburned and leisure-suited adults.

Rob Owen, TV critic for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, pointed out in a recent column that the set comes with a disclaimer, spoken by an animated character calling himself “Bob.” “These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grown-ups,” Bob informs viewers, “and may not meet the needs of today’s pre-school child.” His interest piqued, Owen contacted the custodians of Sesame Street to find out just what might be traumatic for modern toddlers in the Sesame Street of 1969-74.

“To kids today watching Sesame Street, this looks significantly different,” said Rosemarie Truglio, vice-president of education and research for Sesame Workshop. “This Sesame Street is not their reality. Kids have no concept of time, so for parents to tell them, ‘This is the Sesame Street I watched growing up,’ would be a disconnect. It has a different Gordon, Oscar is orange, not green. Big Bird looks significantly different.”

It’s true — the Nixon-era Sesame Street was a very different place, where Grover carried a switchblade, Oscar was fond of spouting revolutionary rhetoric about the liberation of the masses, kids played in the burnt-out cars that occasionally appeared parked at the street’s curb, and Grace Slick occasionally dropped by for consciousness-raising sessions with the female Muppets. And who’ll every forget the weeklong drama when the Symbionese Liberation Army occupied Mr. Hooper’s store, demanding the release of “political prisoners” from Attica?

Seriously, though, it was a different time, as Owen underlines when he notes the episode that shows kids merrily playing in a junkyard, unsupervised amidst the menace of tetanus, rodent bites, injury and abduction by the legions of pedophiles who, as we all know today, haunt junkyards like wannabe screenwriters at wi-fi-equipped coffee shops. It really was a different time; me and my buddies on Gray Avenue thought nothing of practicing our flick-knife skills on each others’ sneaker-shod feet, or eating from cans of food that had been sitting in the sun for days.

“The disclaimer is intended so parents, instead of having an impulsive reaction to put it in to watch with their children, will think about it and be prepared,” said Truglio. “I’m trying to protect the magic of Sesame Street for today’s young viewers who don’t know it has 37 years of history.” Something to think about when you’re about to cue up that classic two-part episode where Big Bird is caught shoplifting and loses his virginity.

rick.mcginnis@metronews.ca