There are 4,633 episodes of Sesame Street (and counting). Even if they stopped making the show tomorrow, that means that if your one-year-old infant started watching one episode a day for five days a week they would reach adulthood before they ran out of episodes.
So no, no kid is going to watch “each and every” episode.
I don’t know if taking things only literally ever works for much.
Kids would watch a different episode daily and happily for the length of time that they as individuals find the content interesting, compelling and engaging.
I hope the paragraph preceding this sentence serves as clarification.
But there is already more than enough Sesame Street content available on DVD or other formats to keep kids happy throughout childhood. You seemed peeved that not literally every episode is available in its original unedited broadcast format.
Peeved may be a bit strong, however I think it’s perfectly reasonable to believe the full seasons of the first 5-8 years ought to be available, for the reasons I gave.
There’s some good stuff in the 80’s too, some in the 90’s, sure, not after that as the show targeted a different demographic beginning in the 2000’s.
The original 5-8 seasons were best imo, and of what I was able to show my kids, they enjoyed immensely.
Edit: corrected 5-8, but also any episode with Buffy Sainte-Marie in it
There are more than enough books in my local library for me to read nonstop every day for the rest of my life, but I would be peeved if a librarian said, “Nah, let’s throw half of these out. The Classics are good enough for anybody.”
Suppose I saw something special in Gordon’s acting- I might want to conduct a critical analysis for the benefit of the future. Going to need all 60 episodes.
In this video, the narrator laments how little footage survived from this delightful children’s show:
These days it should be possible to do that on a streaming service, but I remain convinced that there’s not much of a market for selling a massive collector’s DVD set of all unedited 1055 episodes from the first 8 seasons. (At 60 minutes each that’s around 500 DVDs, right?) Almost certainly not enough of a market to make it worthwhile for Sesame Street Workshop to go through that effort, even if there are a few fanatics out there who want to watch Every. Last. Episode.
Oh I agree, needless plastic too.
Streaming or d/l is the now. I mean a game I play had a 122GB update last week, took some hours which was annoying but meh, I still played that same evening. It doesn’t matter how many episodes.
In case it isn’t already apparent, I’m talking about the first 5-8 seasons complete in particular, and notable persons/events/episodes throughout.
A lot of notable stuff is probably on YouTube etc, like Buffy Sainte-marie breastfeeding on Sesame in 1977 is posted many times. So it’s all out there in bits, not a lot of reason not to have it all out there, though you’d probably anger the ip holders
Clearing the IP could be a huge hurdle, but so would even the most basic cursory review before making it public. If someone were to watch 8 hours a day every workday it would take them most of the year to get through it all.
But in this case we’re talking about whether it would be financially worthwhile for Sesame Workshop to undertake the legal and technical challenges of remastering and publishing thousands of episodes of a TV show that aired decades ago. If there’s not a significant market then it doesn’t really make sense from their perspective unless some well-moneyed alphabet lover offers to foot the bill.
I wonder how much simply omitting previously broadcast bits would cut it down 
… sixty percent? … eighty percent? … more?
That’s certainly what you’re talking about, whether it’s profitable and thereby rational or worthy of consideration.
That’s not the only lens available, it is just the default setting.
The episodes I’m talking about were produced with a lotta public money, up to 1981. The show had high ratings immediately and kept them. That public start contributed to the ip value of today such that the resource of putting them up digitally, not remastered (not selling things here) for public consumption doesn’t really compare.
That single lens does want you to use it exclusively, it can’t require it.
That was literally the rationale you explicitly cited when you brought up the idea in the first place:
& I stand by it. You don’t see the value, but I wasn’t the only person looking for old episodes when my kids were in that window.
I certainly wouldn’t recommend dvds, box sets or any of that. Streaming it all piecemeal tho, is a rational thing to explore.
Edit to add : I -don’t- want to pay for it or for others to pay for the early public stuff… but would your outlook really let that happen? Unlikely, so yeah, your outlook can try to monetize it, but make it available. I -would- pay a service, particularly if it were simply in their larger body of content.
But do you actually do that, or have you in the past?
I think it’s a shame that HBO pulled hundreds of old classic Sesame Street episodes out of their streaming catalog, but was it important enough for you to subscribe when you had the opportunity? HBO used to have about 650 episodes available to stream (including some from the earliest seasons) then cut that back to only 450 episodes or so. Yeah, I know that the 650 episodes wasn’t the “complete” catalog you insist on but it was still a hell of a lot of content.
Personally I bought the Sesame Street Old School DVD sets, but I wasn’t such a huge fan that I felt the need to subscribe to HBO to see even more classic episodes.
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