A behind-the-scenes look at the Muppets, the cast, and the magic that makes it all happen.
We may not be able to tell you exactly how to get there, but since 1969, kids have been spending plenty of time on Sesame Street. For many of us, it’s an indelible part of our childhood experience, and even that of our own children – and we’ll never lose our fondness for Ernie and Bert, Big Bird and Snuffy, Oscar and Cookie Monster. They’re some of the most widely recognized and best-loved television characters ever to appear on the small screen.
Sesame Street has been captivating audiences for well over thirty years – that’s almost four thousand episodes. Since its first airing on November 10th, 1969 …
The show airs in more than 140 countries worldwide, and actually has local “spin-offs” in nineteen different countries.
It has been host to more than 250 celebrity guests: among them, Barbara Walters, Noah Wyle, Bo Jackson, Phil Donahue, Queen Latifah, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Ray Charles, Jodie Foster, Susan Sarandon, Bill Cosby, Jim Carrey, and Rosie O’Donnell … just to name a few.
It has won over a hundred awards: eight Grammys, two George Foster Peabody Awards, four Parents’ Choice Awards, one Clio Award, the Prix Jeunesse International, an Action for Children’s Television Special Achievement Award, and a whopping seventy-one Emmys (more than any other show ever in history).
It is watched at least once a week by seventy-seven percent of American preschool-aged kids. In an average week, over eleven million people – both kids and adults – tune in to watch the show.
It is shown daily, several times, on over 300 PBS stations in the United States.
There have been more than 600 Sesame Street books published by The Children’s Television Workshop, and six magazines with a monthly readership of over twelve million.
Pretty impressive for a show that, in the beginning, was basically an experiment. It was the brainchild of a young television documentary producer named Joan Ganz Cooney, who had never worked on either children’s or educational programming; she was used to focusing on the political and social issues of the day. Her idea was to create a children’s television show that would teach kids while keeping them entertained – an educational comedy show. The concept of the show’s format was inspired by TV commercials, and Cooney would later explain this concept to the New York Times: “Traditional educators may not be nuts about this, but we’re going to clip along at a much faster pace than anyone’s used to in children’s programs. Kids like commercials and banana-peel humor and avant-garde video and audio techniques … We have to infuse our content into forms children find accessible.” It was from this notion that one of the most successful children’s shows in the history of television was born.