Today Sesame Street is 50 years old. That’s pretty amazing for a television show!
I feel like I have a long history with the show and I’ll admit to being quite attached and it having a warm place in my early childhood heart.
The show launched in 1969 and my youngest brother who I was (and am!) very close to was born in 1968 - so I well remember those early years that he watched.
An early childhood/psych major in college I did some student teaching in a preschool. One of my students was sure I was Maria! She called me “Ms. Maria”. Truth be told, a dream job for me would have been to work for the show.
Flash forward to the late 80’s and 90’s when my kids were born and while we limited tv this was a show my kids loved and to this day they talk about fondly often. Right up there with Arthur. Today we were together to celebrate a birthday and they had a conversation about which SS character they each thought they were most like.
My son was hugely attached to Grover. Stuffed Grover accompanied us on family trips for YEARS. Every one.
Any special fond memories of SS in your family? One of my favorite things - even now - is to watch the clips when celebrities appeared on the show. So many good clips!
Sesame Street has returned to our family in a big way, since my daughter just got engaged to a man who worked for Sesame Street for many years and has 4 Emmys from the show. He has some cool memorabilia like a coat rack that was in Jim Henson’s office. He puts these little googly eyes all over the place. We all loved Sesame Street when the kids were growing up. My favorite was Snuffleupagus (sp?).
^^ This is so VERY cool! I remember crying a good bit when Jim Henson died - it was like the most creative person who had brought our home so much life had died.
I told my youngest that I likened her to Snuffleupagus when she was little. Quietly in the background, quietly observant, but very lovable and caring to others.
Sesame Street was such a breakthrough in children’s television and its longevity proves how well done the programming is. I haven’ t watched in forever, but certainly my kids grew up with SS. One daughter really loved her stuffed Grover. In the last few years, my other daughter has written some songs for SS.
My son has his cookie monster round pillow on his bed at home. He won’t take it to college but he does wear his cookie monster pajama bottoms made for adults.
LOL.
I LOVED The Monster at the End of this Book. I loved reading it to my own kids too.
I loved Cookie Monster the best. I also loved Oscar the Grouch. I loved that there were still the same characters when my own kids watched. The
Count, Bert and Ernie, the rubber duckie song, which I sang to my own kids when they had bath time. I loved everything about that show. Great memories.
I was five when it first came on. I watched right from the start. Probably watched way past when I should have. I just looked up the Grover Near and Far sketch. I was ten, way too old, lol.
I remember watching Sesame Street first year as a college freshman. We all huddled around the one TV in the lounge. Loved it…still do.
When we got married, we had a black and white very small TV. The year our oldest child was born, my dad gave us money to buy a color TV because he didn’t want his grandkid seeing Sesame Street, and not knowing what colors Big Bird, Elmo, Oscar , etc were.
^^ Oh my gosh, that’s a gem of a story! The colors are important! Think about it - so many of them are known for their color - red for Elmo, blue for Grover and Cookie Monster, green for Oscar, yellow for Big Bird!
The main reason we bought cable 28 years ago when we moved from an apartment to a house was so we could see Sesame Street with our kids. We also loved Reading Rainbow and Electric Company, though they didn’t have same longevity.
I love Sesame Street and the memories it conjures of sharing the show with my children. Now I am loving being able to share it with my 2 year old granddaughter. I already have my dvr programmed to catch the PBS special next Sunday night. My kindergarten teacher cousin posted this link to an interesting article about the show yesterday.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/unmistakable-black-roots-sesame-street-180973490/
My intro to Sesame Street was when I was a college soph taking a developmental psych class and we had to watch an episode and analyze it for developmental appropriateness. I still remember Grover’s bit on “here” and “there” from that episode.
My kids both watched the show when they were young. S1 especially loved the show. We kept his Cookie Monster puppet and Elmo stuffed animal which his 2yo daughter now has. He brought his Cookie Monster puppet to Sesame Place in Pa when he was 2yo, and jumped and shrieked with joy when he saw the life-size Cookie. His Elmo went everywhere with him, but he dropped him from a shopping cart seat and Elmo’s hard plastic eye cracked in half. We tried gluing it back together but it didn’t hold. GD now has Elmo in the car with her and calls him “One-Eye Elmo”.
Love, love, love. Yes, this is one of very few shows, like Reading Rainbow and Mr. Rogers that we let the boys watch and yes! we still talk about Sesame Street! One of our favorite Golden Books was “The Monster at the End of this Book” and another one “The Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum”.
I have a very extensive library of children’s books at my house and when the kids were teenager and in their early 20s, they would ask why I kept all those books. I always answered that I planned to distribute them to grandchldren and that when they produced those grandchildren, I would send each one home with a few books every time they visited or bring with me when I visited them. I’m doing that now with S’s little girl and have taken a few books to D’s for her baby due in March. The favorite books I’ve given to 2 year old GD have been the Sesame Street books. I love it when she asks to have them read over & over.
Best Christmas show ever…Sesame Street Christmas or whatever it’s called. We have a DVD of it, and watch it every year. The song “Keep Christmas With You” is a real winner too.
I was 7 when SS began but my brother was 4 so I mostly remember him watching it. We didn’t watch it on tv that much when my boys were young, maybe because of when it was on as they were daycare all day kids, but we had a number of SS VHS videos, mostly purchased at thrift stores, that were watched over and over and over. We still reference Elmo Saves Christmas - - what IF every day were Christmas?? And I’m still known to sing the line from it: “Happy Independence Day it’s Christmas again!”
We watched that one, Big Bird Goes To China, Follow That Bird and Don’t Eat The Pictures (in the museum) SO. MANY. TIMES. We didn’t watch Disney movies but we watched those over and over again!
Today we were together to celebrate a birthday and they had a conversation about which SS character they each thought they were most like.