Cultural Amnesia on Sesame Street
Airbrushing the lefty roots of a cultural icon.
At the Lincoln Center in New York City, the Library of Performing Arts has just mounted a fresh new retrospective exhibit on Sesame Street (“Somebody Come and Play: 45 Years of Sesame Street,” September 18, 2014–January 31, 2015). This once-controversial kiddie show is now older than most of the mothers who are crowding in with their toddlers and baby-strollers. I dropped in the other day and was hit with a blast of cultural amnesia.
The exhibit suggests that Sesame Street was always about Big Bird, fluffy puppets, and silly songs. It was never about urban slums, racial conflict, or any of those other “relevant” social themes of the late 60s that the newspapers always talked about when reviewing the program. Looking at this exhibit, you wouldn’t have a clue that when the first program was broadcast in November 1969, its “target child” was a “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (according to the New York Times) or that the original opening sequence showed black children in a gritty playground, with Harlem “projects” towering behind.
Sesame Street‘s most striking early innovation was its “inner-city” studio set. Many people assumed it was meant to be Harlem. There were brick tenements with fire escapes, laundry hanging on clotheslines, garbage cans on the sidewalk; as well as an old brownstone inhabited by a black couple who wore afros. A kiddie show set in the “slums” (as theTimes put it) seemed like a hip and edgy idea. ...
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