Rated B (for Behavior and Blogging)

The Muppets of Sesame Street

Courtesy of Sesame Workshop

Last week’s blog post looked at some of Sesame Street’s content designed to engage adult attention as well as children’s.  Shared experience and attention leads to facilitated learning via shared scaffolding and a communal history of fun.   The holiday season—whichever holidays you celebrate—frequently relies on these shared histories of family jokes, entertainment and fun.  Sesame uses parody of works that parents/caregivers may have seen as vehicles for these contributions. 

In recent years, Monsterpiece Theatre’s word play has shared air time with Crumby Pictures.  This series teaches “executive function,” which means both self-control and learning ways to cue behavior and decision making.  They focus on Cookie Monster, whose control issues focus on cookies.  Not just learning to eat other foods (see “About that Tomato”) but learning to recognize and read situations in which his urge to eat cookies can be self-moderated.   There is a narrator-voice that gives his cues and advice.   For example, one older episode included in the exhibit is an Aida-inspired “C is for Cookie” (led by guest opera singer Marilyn Horne) in which he destroys the pyramid by grabbing the cookie with which it is constructed.   The open-ended Crumby Pictures take on the Life of Pi has Cookie on a boat made of cookies.  He and the audience learn that if he eats the cookies, the boat will sink.  What does he do?  With Sesame Street’s writers’ usual skill at adapting all of the elements that they could parody, these films are provided with ratings based on the behavior learning opportunity, such as Rated SC for Self-control.

One of the Crumby Pictures excerpted in the exhibition is their take on Les Miz.  Jean Bonbon trudges through a cobblestone Paris, encountering characters and songs from the musical, while learning to share his cookies.  The narrator tells him how to read other character’s emotions—the Muppet Anne Hathaway is particularly tragic—and how to base his actions on their needs, not his.  You can see the entire parody on Sesame Street’s YouTube.  Between the Sesame version and the Forbidden Broadway parody, I find it impossible to experience the musical seriously. But that shouldn’t stop you.  NYPL has them as films and recordings, piano-vocal scores, and many translations of the original novel—see the list here.

The backstage video that Sesame Workshop created for the exhibition shows the writing and production staff developing Jurassic Cookie, a Crumby Pictures parody of the Jurassic Park franchise.  The script and the research curriculum report that inspired it are on display as well as Cookie’s safari suit. 

Come visit the exhibition which is open only through January.  Join us for the final panel next Monday, January 5, for “On the Street Where You Learn: The Intersection of Broadway and Sesame Street.”