Pop culture influenced by Sesame Street

Pop culture influenced by Sesame Street

Works about the show

• Sesame Street was subject of its own A&E Biography.
• The World According to Sesame Street is a 2006 documentary that made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival.

Projects with Sesame cast, crew, influences

• Rainbow was created in 1972 to be a British take on the Sesame Street concept. It featured puppets and animated segments between a live action story.
• Jack's Big Music Show on Noggin is produced by David Rudman and Adam Rudman, with puppeting by David, Alice Dinnean, and John Kennedy, all Sesame employees or alumni.
• Between the Lions often draws comparisons to Sesame Street. This reading program on PBS used puppet characters and animation to explain literacy concepts to slightly older children than Sesame’s audience. Christopher Cerf and Norman Stiles are among the show's Sesame-alumni.

Major parodies

Avenue Q

The hit Broadway musical Avenue Q is a parody of Sesame Street. Four members of the original cast (John Tartaglia, Stephanie D'Abruzzo, Rick Lyon, and Jennifer Barnhart) are all former puppeteers for the Jim Henson Company. The following disclaimer appears in the Playbill for the show, in the insert for the soundtrack CD, and in the show's piano-vocal songbook: "Avenue Q has not been authorized or approved in any manner by the Jim Henson Company or Sesame Workshop, which have no responsibility for its content."

Ernest & Bertram

Released in 2002, the short film satirized the rumors of Bert and Ernie's gay relationship by depicting the sad truth of what would happen if it were true. The movie received a cease-and-desist order from Sesame Workshop, and was immediately pulled.

Wonder Showzen

Wonder Showzen is a sketch comedy television series that began airing in 2005 on MTV2. The show's format is clearly a parody of children's shows such as Sesame Street (e.g. use of stock footage, puppetry, and clips of children being interviewed).

Madtv

Madtv has a recurring segment that is a parody of the show itself, complete with a Sesame Street-styled opening. So far there have been 4 segments. The first segment involved Big Bird having the Bird Flu and spreading it to everyone on Sesame Street. The second segment involved Sesame Street being sold to Donald Trump (whose hair in this segment acts as a "muppet" and is able to talk/sing). The third segment poked fun at Myspace and the incidents of pedophiles using the site as well as Dateline's "To Catch a Predator" segment in which Bert is caught in such in act. The fourth and most current segment to date involved Oscar the Grouch building a "dirty bomb" for Elmo, who has become an extremist known as "Elmo TMX" (spoofing the name of the Tickle me Elmo Extreme Doll) who is trying to take over Sesame Street and make it into Elmo's World.

Other parodies

One of the more famous Internet websites using the effects of Adobe Photoshop and other image-editing software revolves around the Sesame Street character "Bert." The site (and many variations), entitled "Bert is Evil", featured the character as part of many horrific acts throughout history, often co-conspiring with terrorists and other world leaders with negative connotations.

In the Homestar Runner cartoons, debuting in the Strong Bad E-Mail "for kids", Homsar hosts a kids show, "Whaddaya Know, Haddi-Man?" In this show, there seems to be a "letter of the day". In the episode snippet viewers saw, the letter of the day was "G", which may have come from Sesame Street episodes that were brought to you by a letter of the alphabet. However, Homsar's comment on the letter G was, "I'm not gonna lie to you, that's one hefty piece of real estate!"

Family Guy

The FOX show Family Guy has made reference to Sesame Street on some occasions. In the episode The Father, the Son, and the Holy Fonz, it showed a short clip of Stewie, who is in a plastic bubble, taking on the role of the pinball from a counting sketch. Other counting sketch parodies have been included, notably Peter's attempt to set up Cleveland with a total of seven prostitutes in the episode Petarded. In the episode Model Misbehavior, when Brian gets a job at Stewie's Cash Scam, Stewie tells Brian "If the Cookie Monster calls, tell him I'm not talking to him until he gets out of rehab." Later in the episode, Lois sees him as a desperate, jittery addict, seated in a bathroom stall of the rehab center trying to make a cookie by holding raw dough in the bowl of a spoon over a lighter flame as if it were [...]. In another episode, Lois sees Stewie dialing a real phone and mistakes it for a Sesame Street phone.

In another episode (Mind over [...]) Peter spends so much time inside his house that "all the TV programs are starting to mesh together". The example shown is [...]: Life on Sesame Street, which mixes [...]: Life on the Street with Sesame Street. In it, Bert is a gruff cop living with Ernie, who are shown as a bickering pair. In this scene, Ernie says " Bert, I wish you wouldn't drink so much." Which Bert responds with "Well, I wish you wouldn't eat cookies in the [...] bed!"

And in the episode A Picture Is Worth a 1,000 Bucks, Meg does some bird calls, which leads to Big Bird walking over and asking her what she wants. When she tells him that she wasn't calling him specifically, he gets mad and tells her how hard it is for him to live a normal life, ending with him pushing her down, spitting on her shoes, and walking away, muttering "[...]."

American Dad

Seth Mcfarlane has also had Sesame Street in his other cartoon American Dad on at least one occasion. In one episode Stan Smith is seen watching television, pointing at the screen and yelling for one of the characters to "Shoot him!". We see he is actually watching Sesame Street, with Elmo and Cookie Monster having fun. The 'camera' cuts back to Stan, who is even more furious, shouting "Don't trust him! It may look like he[Cookie Monster]'s eating, but he never actually swallows anything!". This is, of course, a sly joke at how whenever Cookie Monster eats, he inevitably sprays crumbs everywhere.

[...]! Show

The raunchy TV show [...]! Show featured a segment called Clay [...], which consisted of parodies of the Sesame Street muppets (and one of Miss Piggy) as people constantly having [...], and it also included Bert and Ernie as a gay couple.

Gang t-shirts

On May 23,2006, several t-shirts were banned from a Brockton, Massachutes high school because they showed Sesame Street characters as gang figures, which violated that schools dress code policy. Because of this, the incident briefly made local and national headlines and the school which enforced the ban was awarded $650,000 dollars (2006 USD) as part of its anti-gang effort. As of May 2006, it is unknown about the fate of the person or persons who created the offending shirts and if the images on the t-shirt violated any copyright laws.

Robot Chicken

The popular Adult Swim show Robot Chicken parodied the MadTV skit in which Big Bird is shown having the Bird Flu.

The Simpsons

In the episode Missionary: Impossible, a pledge drive interrupts Homer's TV watching which causes him to pledge $10,000 after actress Betty White proclaims that $10,000 is what will end the drive. However Homer doesn't have the money and a chase ensues which includes Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird, and Elmo, each who want a piece of Homer which is in contrast to their character's true identity.

Other

• Although rubber duckies existed before Sesame Street, their pop culture icon status was mostly spurred on by Ernie's "Rubber Duckie" song, and subsequent appearances of Ernie's bath toy.
• Ert and Bernie are characters from Sonic Movie Madness.

References

The Beavis and Butt-head book This Book Sucks makes reference to the program, stating that it would be televised after Barney & Friends and viewers could "get a class credit for watching".

The Return of the Living Dead (1985): Dan O'Bannon purposely named two characters Ernie Kaltenbrunner and Burt Wilson, a reference to the show.

In 2006, popular Sesame Street characters including Big Bird and Elmo joined Alex Trebek during an episode of Jeopardy! with the category, "Sesame Street Eats". The category focused on various elements found in healthy foods.

In "Kansas," a fourth-season episode of the Jim Henson-produced SciFi Channel series Farscape, the show's alien characters are seen learning the alphabet from a Sesame Street segment in which Kermit the Frog teaches a young girl her ABCs. ("This child is slow!" one protests, referring to the girl onscreen.)