Watch: "Lost" Sesame Street footage from 1976 of Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch that was deemed too scary for reruns

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Originally published at: Watch: "Lost" Sesame Street footage from 1976 of Wizard of Oz's Wicked Witch that was deemed too scary for reruns | Boing Boing

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No doubt - I remember being scared of my own mother when she would do the WWotW, no green face paint needed!

It’s the cackle and the fingers

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Can confirm, she scared the crap out of me as a child.

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wow, i have no memory of this. really great find.

EDIT: everyone was scared of her on The Street, they are just lucky she didn’t show up with her flying monkeys.

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At least Mr. Rogers showed us that Margaret Hamilton is nothing to be afraid of.

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I think the Oscar subplot should have been developed a bit more.

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Scary, but I don’t think it’s nearly as upsetting as Return to Oz

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Skimming the episode, I feel like I did see it… and so it must have been rerunned at in the very late 70s.or early 80s. Maybe as a special? Or maybe not… memories of that young are very fuzzy.

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Same here. Unfortunately, my first grade teacher resembled Margaret Hamilton quite a bit. There were a lot of parents who had a hard time detaching their kids from their legs on the first day of school! :grimacing:

ETA:

Yeah, that was too late!

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I always thought this argument was a bit silly because the 1939 movie predated both the modern Wicca movement and the practice of adherents self-identifying as “witches.”

It would be like if someone started a new religion in 2007 where adherents called themselves “Genies” and then attacked Disney for their depiction of same in the 1992 movie Aladdin.

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I was an odd, dark kid; I loved the green witch.

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The Muppet topic was closed and this might be a good place.

The Decades Channel, on most cable systems and over air, is showing a Dick Cavett episode from 1971 with Jim Henson. All the Muppets are making appearances.

Way cool.

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You know how Disney hides Easter Eggs for parents in the form innuendo? I think the makers of Sesame Street were giving one back to the parents when they turned Grandma into a green-face witch.

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I wasn’t scared watching this, I just really needed the bathroom and I was about to do laundry anyway. People in Starbucks need to learn to stop yelling assumptions about other customers.

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I can see how that would have been scary at the time. Usually, like the later Mr. Rogers show with the same actress, Sesame Street would address the fear and reveal that the person behind the mask is just a person. Seems like they going for something Halloweeny instead and never gave us a chance to recognize her humanity, which seems an odd choice for that otherwise stellar program. Even Oscar gets his moments of being nice.

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Wicked Witch: Imma fuck your shit up.

Jaded New Yorker: Yeah whatever.

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Probably a carryover from the Wicked Witch, but I got a Dolores Umbridge vibe as the Margaret Hamilton character was reveled from the bottom up.

Plus the easter egg of the Margaret Hamilton character “not drinking coffee.” How many years did she advertise for Maxwell House Coffee?

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