The Sundance Film Festival had a shorter run, and screened less films this year due to the pandemic, but they still had a few documentaries that were fantastic. Questlove, the drummer from the Roots band that plays the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, entered a film about a Black music festival that happened in New York City, during the same time as Woodstock, although Woodstock was a three day weekend show, the Summer of Soul festival was a few hours, once a week for four weeks. It was fantastic, and it is also around to rent or buy on streaming services. If you love music, it's a must see. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, which is the best film of the whole festival. Having said that, there was one other film that I liked above Summer of Soul. It's called Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street.
I grew up watching Sesame Street, and I love it still to this very day. I may not be as big a fan of the newer episodes, although they are still pretty great, this documentary takes you back through the history of the people that made Sesame Street, the successes, the failures, and then eventually conquering the whole landscape of children's programing, which basically existed as cartoons or shows with clowns advertising food and toys. Television was using kids from ages two to four to advertise products. One man, Jon Stone, was a children's programing producer/director, and was fed up with it all. He truly felt it was illegal to hypnotize children to sell things to their parents. One day he gets a call from a woman named Joan Ganz Cooney. She was sick of the advertising and despicable people making the cartoons aimed at young children.
Joan Ganz Cooney was thinking about the young children from poor areas in New York. Before first grade, kids had to stay at home while their parents went to work for the day, and television was basically raising them. She had an idea to take everything that made up advertising, and instead, sell small kids the alphabet and numbers. There are a lot of Sesame Street sketches that teach kids their letters and numbers, and they are all usually a minute or under, just like commercials. Joan Cooney was taught that a kid that didn't know their alphabet and numbers before first grade was likely to be set back three months, and then the same kid, after three months, would be almost a year behind others their age, and the gaps get further and further away, and Joan Cooney believed that television could be more than a box with blinking lights inside of it.
The film follows three kinds of people that created Sesame Street. There were Education majors who were brought in to tell the writers, staff, and actors what they needed to do to be able to be successful at educating children. In fact, there is a scene in the film where Joan Cooney shows everyone a playbook that the educators made up with all of their fancy education terms, but then explained them to the writers and actors on what would be needed to teach the fundamentals. For example, I can't remember the term, but it was a fancy way of saying, use objects to help the kids count. We then see a clip from Sesame Street with the Count counting bats that followed him from the castle. The fundamental was taught to the viewers in a simple way the writers, actors, and then viewers could understand.
The second people, the writers and directors, were told that they needed the sketches or segments needed to be educational, in a way children could understand, but make the show really funny or entertaining for adults, so that they wouldn't get tired or annoyed of Sesame Street. It's a fine line of writing, but they do it masterfully. Some of this description might make the film seem boring, but it never is.
The final people, the actors. Joan Cooney was sitting in a meeting talking about what Sesame Street should include, and she looked in the back of the room, and she asks her assistant, "Who is that dirty hippie in the back?" "That's Jim Henson!" It's impossible to go through life in this day and age without knowing Jim Henson, or at least all of his creations. He was hired to make funny little sketches with his "Muppets" for commercials or little segments that would play after the 10:00 News. He was known a little bit, but when Jim Henson and Frank Oz were put together, it was a hurricane of talent and brilliance that no one can do justice using words. They were a puppeteering dream team, and their infectious personalities and humor really pulled the show together. Of course there were all of the human actors who were great, and they all brought something different to Sesame Street and it's success.
There is a clip in the film where they filmed a couple of episodes, and then had a focus group of three year old kids come in and watch it, basically to see if they liked it or not. Originally, Sesame Street was going to only have humans on the set, and the Muppet, or animated segments, weren't on the actual street set, just in their sketches, and the children weren't very receptive to the street segments, but loved the Muppet segments, and it was decided that the street had to have the Muppet monsters around as well to make the show captivating for the full hour it ran.
Sesame street began airing in 1969, and it is still running today. One thing I did with my son, Elliot, even though he is almost 11 years old, I wanted to show him what Sesame Street was like when I was a kid. There have been a lot of changes over the years, which is great. It's still running after fifty years. I'm not sure if you, the reader, are aware, but every single episode of Sesame Street is available to stream on HBO Max for free, with the subscription of course, but I turned it on for Elliot and me, and it was like going back home. There were songs and segments that I fondly remember, even if they were buried, and all of a sudden, I was singing along and laughing throughout the episodes we watched. Elliot thought that they were great as well, and we even rewound the episodes to watch funny sketches, usually containing Grover or Oscar the Grouch.
There are a lot of neat behind the scenes...uh scenes, lol, and they are all very interesting. My favorites were when Frank Oz and Jim Henson would accidentally flub a line, and then get made fun of, I would love an actual show that was just behind the scenes of Sesame Street. I'm 100% positive that there is enough footage for many television seasons. However, it also had it's sad moments, like when Mr. Hooper died, and the cast explain it to Big Bird, or the original Sesame Street director, Jon Stone's eulogy at Jim Henson's funeral in 1990. The world truly lost a little magic when Jim Henson passed away. There are also a lot of really funny clips, and how voiceovers would talk about Jim Henson and Frank Oz basically using improv, something I love to do myself, to roll with the punches the little children in the sketches would throw. They talk about how much of a master Frank Oz is, by showing clips of how when he and Jim Henson were such master puppeteers, that the children never looked at them, and believed that the Muppet characters were real people. It's absolutely fantastic.
This documentary was interesting, funny, sad and all of the emotions in between, and it is very much worth the price to rent it for five bucks, or purchase, like I did, for nine bucks. Its a show you can watch with the family for the most part. It's rated PG for thematic situations, like integration of children from all different races and people, and a couple mild swear words when Jim Henson or Frank Oz make jokes when a take went wrong, which were part of my favorite scenes, lol, and of course, the sad parts.
I have always loved Sesame Street, and if you were ever a fan from being a child all of the way up to now, you owe it to yourself to go back to Sesame Street, and relive the magic, the knowledge, and the fun that Sesame Street excels at.
That's it for this blog post. I hope that I have reached you all to go back and watch some Sesame Street. I started writing another post, which is a little longer, so, I haven't finished it. I was going to finish is it, but I really wanted to write about Sesame Street, and it's all I have been thinking about. The other post will be up shortly. I hope you are all doing well, and be carful, now that there are variants of the Covid virus, it's best to wear masks in public again, although it's up to you. I have a sweet niece that was diagnosed last week, and good friend who was diagnosed two days after my niece, so it's still out there, and even if you have had your shots, it's not a guarantee that you will be safe from coming down with the virus. Like I said, I have a new post half way written that I will be posting in a couple of days. Take care!
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