Friday A/V Club: Too Hot for Sesame Street

Monday marked the 45th
anniversary of the first Sesame Street, and sites
across the Internet have been honoring the occasion all week. (I
especially enjoyed The Onion‘s
tribute.) Back when the show was turning 40, I pointed
out one of the reasons it had been so successful:

When the program’s entertainers were at odds with its social
engineers, the entertainers frequently won. If Sesame
Street‘s board of academic advisers had its way, the
show’s people and puppets wouldn’t have interacted at all. (It was
inappropriate, they felt, to mix fantasy and reality.) For its
first two decades on the air, writers and performers were usually
free to follow their creative instincts…

But not always. Whether they were pulling Roosevelt
Franklin from the show for fear that he was too much of a
stereotype or ending the
grown-ups-don’t-believe-in-Mr.-Snuffleupagus gag because for fear
it would discourage kids from revealing they’d been molested, the
writers did periodically bow to pressure. The biggest loss may have
been Don Music, a songwriting Muppet who starred in several funny
sketches with Kermit the Frog. Those ended when the producers heard
some kids had copied his habit of frustratedly banging his head on
the piano.

Fortunately, they’ve been preserved online. Here’s Don Music,
the Muppet too hot for Sesame Street, writing “Twinkle
Twinkle” with the assistance of a frog:

There’s also the program’s infamous unaired episode, “Snuffy’s
Parents Get a Divorce”—but given how the test
audience reacted
to that one, it’s probably for the best that it never was
transmitted.

(For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)