Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of LR_PTY.
As y'all knew, I grew up basically without a television in the house. But I'm almost certain that Sesame Street was the first thing I saw on television at one of my babysitter's houses. So when Sage Stossel, one of my fab editors at The Atlantic twittered that it was the venerable program's 40th birthday today, and pointed me towards the first piece The Atlantic published on the show, I headed on over. John Holt's critique of the educational methods used on Sesame Street may be interesting to the eduwonks among you, if you're out there. I have to admit I much prefer Renata Adler's seminal review of the show in The New Yorker (Reprinted in part at the link. I couldn't find a complete version out from behind a firewall, unfortunately.). But both pieces have something in common: the relatively early realization that Sesame Street was a seismic cultural phenomenon.
From an educational perspective, the show had tremendous reach. It had 8 million viewers by 1971, when Holt wrote his critique, and 60,000 learning kits and 300,000 books based on the program had sold already. Adler focused more on the glorious weirdness of the show, which gave her one of the ledes for a critical essay of all time: "When a seven-foot, yellow-feathered bird who is subject to depression attempts to seat himself upon the letter h and fails, it is no longer simply an event in children's television, or even in the media. It is part of the intellectual history of a generation, who are already in important ways the children of Sesame Street." The show was urban, integrated (Adler noticed the use of the phrase "give me some fur" as a cross-over of African-American slang in the form of "give me some skin"), its characters were frequently nervous, sad, or grumpy. Cookie Monster was a bonafide addict. And yet it worked. Holt was wrong and Adler was right about the show's longevity, which is due in part to its ability to use pop icons that make folks like me and the generation before me, who grew up on the show and feel nostalgic for it, think it's still relevant, but to use them in forms that are totally appropriate and useful for children. One of my personal recent favorites is Feist's appearance on the show: