Elmo was punk first.
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Please don’t talk to me.
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Okay. Please don’t talk to me either, then, cutter-off of dialogue.
G-Bye. You were always better than me.
I used the sing this to my kids as a lullaby.
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And I intend to learn to play this on guitar; if I ever have kids (highly unlikely), I will sing it to them too, sir. Thank you, again, for posting the vid.
bow
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Never really watched Sesame St. (wrong age and nationality) but Elmo seems way better to me in some of the off-screen stuff. Whoever is doing his character knows a thing or two about why never breaking kayfabe is important. 
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Fuck. That is serious. Thank you.
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That was incredible.
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While we’re discussing old PBS shows did anybody remember Vegetable Soup? I can’t find very many old clips of it and all I really remember is an ongoing story about these dead eyed creepy doll people with giant hands building a spaceship in the backyard.
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Oh my god. I haven’t seen that in… 35 years? And I still associate Vivaldi with nature and water droplets.
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My daughter, when she was about 6 years old, totally NAILED what is wrong with the modern Sesame Street. She said there were “too many monsters.” And she is right! All the new characters are monsters, but the old ones were more human and there were more actual people in the show. Elmo is definitely part of the too many monsters.
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Oh, they’re still inclusive – so inclusive that it rankles people who don’t think they should be so inclusive. But they’re considerably less funky than they used to be. The Sesame Street of the 70s was full of funk! Stevie Wonder doing Superstition blew my little mind.
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No, and it’s baffling me. I grew up right when that was on, so I might’ve seen it when I was very small. The few bits I can find online look extremely vaguely familiar. The shows I remember best are Sesame Street, Electric Company, and Big Blue Marble.
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I dunno what it represents exactly - it sounds like it represents loneliness, which I think a lot of kids can relate to. I guess a sibling can fill that void, or even just a good friend or relative. It is a pretty epic song for such a silly, animated cartoon. I mean that guy sang the crap out of it.
But what people find emotional in a song is often times just them, and may be incomprehensible to someone else because, well, they aren’t them.
To this day Puff the Magic Dragon and You are My Sunshine still make me tear up. American Pie and the Ballad of Ira Hayes used to have that effect on me, but now only when drinking.
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The song I remember most from Sesame Street as a kid was…
Ab-cah-def-ghi-Jekyll-menop-qr-stu-vwix-yz!
It’s the most remarkable word I’ve ever seen!
Ab-cah-def-ghi-Jekyll-menop-qr-stu-vwix-yz!
I wish I knew exactly what it means.
It starts out like an a-word, as anyone can see
But somewhere in the middle it gets awfully strange to me!
Ab-cah-def-ghi-Jekyll-menop-qr-stu-vwix-yz!
If I could find out what this word could mean
I’d be the smartest bird the world has ever seen!
I had a record player and a Sesame Street record as a kid in the 80’s. That was the first song on the record. I can’t remember any of the others, but 25+ years later, I still have that song memorized.
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What puzzles me is how I vaguely recall it, even though it should have been before my time. They must have re-ran it for a while.
Cool opening:
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Late stage Capital I…
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It’s weird – I know I watched Electric Company but I basically have zero memory of it. Vegetable Soup on the other hand I have vivid memories of. It would have been in the mid 1980s that I was watching educational programs on PBS.
Maybe it was just the creepy doll things with the giant hands. I mean, just look at them:
Nightmare fuel.
I did find last night that some kind soul posted a bunch of full episodes of the series on YouTube and I watched a few last night. I can only wonder how many drugs were consumed behind the scenes of shows like this (answer: all of them). I also honestly think that series like this that were being so overt about pushing multiculturalism was hugely influential to my young brain.
I don’t remember Big Blue Marble – maybe it wasn’t on my local PBS affiliate (or the timing never worked out). PBS was like the only TV my parents let me watch for many years so I spent a lot of time watching pretty much everything I could (even the MacNeil Lehrer Newshour if I was wanting to feel like a grownup).
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That’s what I’m wondering about Vegetable Soup. I’m sure my parents would’ve watched it with me – I’ll check with them – but I bet it wasn’t even on in my area.
Big Blue Marble was sort of the ultimate 70s-era expression of cultural understanding and working together towards an awesome future. It was like EPCOT Center the TV show.
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Mission accomplished! Right? Right…?
*sigh*
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