I KNOW HOW IT IS…

I just came across an editorial in the New York Times by Virgina Heffernan that caught my eye and by “caught my eye” I mean, enraged me beyond belief:

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.” (source)

I TAKE UMBRAGE!  I would love for my niece and nephew to see the old, dingy, unsafe looking 123 Sesame St. apartment building with Bert and Ernie sharing a room in the basement; Big Bird playing with his imaginary friend Snuffy; Cookie Monster going to town on a big plate of warm cookies… I LOVED THAT!

Parents today are sheltering their kids FAR too much, which if you ask me is the reason that teenagers today are becoming bitchy, materialistic, selfish little shits (as to rebel from their parent’s affections).

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict. (source)

You know what parents?  Sometimes your kids are grouchy! Sometimes your kids want nothing more than to eat cookies! Sometimes your kids have imaginary friends to keep them company when they need to escape!  THEY ARE KIDS! THAT’S WHAT KIDS DO! Let them have a program that they can relate to!  Kids are smart and they know full well that Cookie Monster ain’t crazy for cauliflower so let’s not bullshit them.

Just saying…