No man, the real beef is mirrored in the latest Star Wars thread about where the fuckin originals can be had.
My kids loved the 1969 pilot that is available on youtube, and I would like to give them more episodes from the 69-74, some of which can be had in clips, some of which can be seen in the short “classics” series available, but for the most part all of those hundreds of episodes can’t be had.
There’s some clips on PBS, but not for Canadians, though I don’t care about that I’ll use a US DNS, except 14 two minute clips is a tease & doesn’t capture the flow that made them so watchable, so unique & new.
My boys looooove original Oscar, they loooove Johnny Cash singing Nasty Dan to Original Oscar. & they don’t show anywhere near the same reaction to modern sesame street.
Except for clips there’s just 5 episodes available from the 69-74 period & I think it’s a loss.
I can’t show you the 4-year old, because most I know are eminently sensible. But I can show you their parents.
HBO, still known as premium TV, has 36 million US Subscribers out of 116 million US households with TVs. If I know my maths, that makes the 31% elitist, but probably not as wonderfully filthy as the 69%.
Why wouldn’t we want to trust our children to a guy who views his customers as addicts?
At least it’s not Fox, right?
Last summer Time Warner, HBO’s parent company, was the subject of an unsolicited $71bn takeover bid from Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox. The word at the time was that the assets Murdoch most prized were its collection of sports rights and HBO… The Fox offer was a premium to Time Warner’s then-share price but Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s chief executive, vowed that he and his team could get the company’s price to the bid level with their own initiatives.
But, sure, other than all that, this is great news.
Edited because I was being antagonistic instead of saying something, oops.
Separate but Equal would be wrong even it is was really equal… The blacks’ and the whites’ water fountains are themselves unjust even if they are equally maintained and giving out the same water - and I don’t think it’s right to dismiss that as “feelz.”
Of course it wasn’t equal. How could a society so racist as to feel the need to separate black from white actually maintain the black infrastructure equally? Even if the intention was the be equal, it wouldn’t have held up.
On the ladder of injustice, kids getting new Sesame St. episodes 9 months later is pretty low, but it is also iconic. Sesame St. was mean to equalize results between rich and poor.
But of course none of the things that have a rich version and a poor version are really equal either, because poor people don’t count as much as rich people, or at least they won’t stay that way, even if they were meant to be that way. I think there is every reason to think that Sesame St. will continue to be what it was and that children will continue to benefit. I’m a little more worried for a nation and a community that are shrug this off as if it’s nothing.
Hell, I can’t afford cable, but if I cut off HGTV my wife will murder me, or make me stay in the house all day with the kids.
(If I had a choice, …)
That’s why I need to look again at our cable bill, vs. Sling-over-Roku, which would include HGTV and the channels the kids watch (Disney Jr, primarily).
Came here to post pretty much this. When I was a kid most of what I saw was already several years old. Just didn’t matter. That is, or at least was, the beauty of Sesame Street- even though music styles and aesthetics change, the essence of it is timeless.
Haven’t seen it in a while, except the “Game of Chairs” parody, and if it’s become more about timeliness of cultural references, well, then it’s not worth saving anyway.
I agree 100%. Segregated water fountains were another example of systematic racial oppression. What I am objecting to is the idea that “because children are born with differing level of access to resources, for literally billions of different reasons, their self-esteem is damaged something something” and that this is in some way equivalent to racial segregation as practiced in the United Sates in the 20th century. That Cory tries to equate the two is offensive.
Those are the people whose kids learn to read from Sesame Street? Those are the typical families who watch HBO? That’s how they’d behave if they’re so privileged as to watch episode 4,412 of Sesame Street when the proles are still watching episode 4,386?
What a weird hill to die on.
And yet…
You do realize that Amazon and Netflix are subscription models too? Believe me, I know. These days I work indirectly for one of them. HBO’s “model is building addicts”? Would you be disappointed to learn that the exact same sentiment has been expressed to me by people who work for Netflix? That their metric for success is not Nielsen ratings, or number of deep-pocketed advertisers, or even any form of demographic measurement, but just how many people click on the View Next Episode button during that 17-second window after they finish watching the previous? Yeah, binge-watching is all they care about. Seriously. As a matter of formal policy. Wish I were allowed to show you the printed manual. So much for the high-minded great democratizer of 21st century media.
Yeah, and I noted that Sesame Street, which was doing pretty well when it could sell DVDs and licensed Elmo toys, nevertheless had to sell DVDs and toys to help make ends meet. Has a political solution come around since Newt Gingrich vowed to zero out funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting twenty years ago? Is a whiter knight than HBO going to step up? How long should Sesame Workshop hold out?
Is this move supposed to be a big financial coup for HBO? Or a sneaky, slimy way for a certain gimlet-eyed Australian tycoon to infiltrate a bastion of democratized, progressive broadcast idealism and maybe infect it with his toxic politics aimed squarely at the preschool mind to convert them early to following the teachings of another, more sinister Grover, or, failing that, to drown it in Ernie’s own bathtub once he has the show helplessly dependent on his company for financial support?
Yeah, okay, you’re probably right about that. I wouldn’t put anything past Murdoch.
But you read what I wrote. Sesame Workshop “cast a wide net” and tried to make a deal with whomever it could. And in the end, Sesame Street will still be on PBS like always, every new episode they make, “uncut and uninterrupted” as they used to advertise on HBO, after an initial 9-month refractory period wherein unprivileged HBOless kids will be obliged to watch the same old reruns they and everyone else their age have had to watch 357 days a year since they were born.
Still a weird hill to die on.
The results aren’t going to change. Rich kids aren’t going to get a superior early-child TV-borne education by viewing a slightly less-stale episode of Sesame Street. The shows are really as close to timeless as evolution in pedagogy and street fashion can allow, which is one reason they’ve been able to recycle so much classic content in new shows for so long: their stuff works. And this development staves off the actual end of Sesame Street. I really don’t think Sesame Workshop has leaped into bed with the devil here, but even if I shared @funruly’s misgivings about HBO’s motivations, I’d rather have Sesame Street on the air than not. Without HBO, there’s a very high risk of… not.
It’s tough to see the immediate profit that HBO will gain; remember, Sesame Street is a money-losing show. But they will gain some prestige, and HBO isn’t broke these days.
Might have been cool if Netflix had bought Sesame Street. They have deep, deep pockets these days, and are producing a hell of a lot of original content now. Maybe they would have appreciated the prestige factor.
Of course, the fact that some of those billions of reasons are a lack of social mobility that has caused poverty to be handed down from generation to generation through black families since slavery ended, and as a result those poor people are disproportionately black. So it’s a little bit like racial segregation.
If you lived through racial segregation and are saying that the kids these days don’t know what real prejudice is like, that seems like a totally valid criticism to me. I certainly don’t know what that was like to actually experience. But if you don’t think that children living in poverty don’t have that economic disparity rubbed in their face every day, then I think you are living in a fantasy world. Poverty in America is a very dire situation.
I agree. I can be happy that Sesame St. will still continue to be made and I’m not disappointed in or angry with HBO for this. That doesn’t make this any less depressing a symbol of the fruition of Thatcher’s declaration that there is no such thing as society.
Old episodes just went up on Netflix (the first season is up now). I kind of want to watch them and cry like this (or go between episodes of TNG and RR):
Yeah, at least the show isn’t entirely paywalled or entirely gone. But I’m not happy about the lag. I known HBO tends to have a big gap between their original programming and their DVD releases. I do think it bears some discussion on privatization of our society, especially given things like income inequality, etc.
[ETA] As usual, the awesome @anon50609448 sums it up best:
It seems we are saying the same thing. I said that funding wasn’t cut. You clarified that, in inflation adjusted terms, the CPB is treading water. It’s cool to think the CPB should have a greater appropriation, but I’m mostly addressing the hazy causality that gets slung around when something like this happens. It seems that ascribing causes such as decreased CPB funding, or, as this article seems to, that the banksters that perpetrated the shenanigans that lead to the financial crisis = Sesame Street holding its hand out to HBO, seem… not like the actual causes.
It’s like, kind of a good metaphor for society, man. It only falls apart if you think about it for more than two seconds or know anything about the situation.
The outrage or hand-wringing or whatever is also a good metaphor for society (man): due to investments made by a capitalist enterprise, poor people will now have more episodes of Sesame Street to watch than would have ever previously been possible, but this is a Bad Thing because rich people will have even more of the More than everyone else.
Or we could have a public sector that isn’t constantly being shredded in order for some rich guys to get richer… But hey, they deserve more than we do, right, cause they’re the “job creators” who got where they were by their very own bootstraps…
