Happy Birthday Sesame Street!

Posted by
Jack Schofield Wednesday 4 November 2009 14.44 GMT
guardian.co.uk

The Big Bird Google Doodle celebrates 40 years of Sesame Street

It's somewhat shocking to discover from a Google Doodle that Sesame Street is 40 years old. The educational show created by the Children's Television Workshop certainly has legs, as they say, and Google has chosen to highlight the ones belonging to Big Bird rather than exploit Kermit, Bert and Ernie, Elmo or other likely candidates…

Well, that's true for the US and Canada, though your local version of Google may vary. There are different logos and different characters in different countries, as The Next Web has pointed out. And in the UK, where Sesame Street (as distinct from The Muppets) has not had the same cultural impact, Google has gone with Wallace and Gromit's 20th birthday instead.

Google's Sesame Street celebration is slightly early -- it should be on 10 November, when there will be an anniversary show featuring First Lady Michelle Obama, with or without Hula Hoop. There will also be a couple of books: Sesame Street: A Celebration of Forty Years of Life on the Street, and Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street.

When I was growing up in Canada in the early 1970s*, I almost never missed Sesame Street, and while Big Bird was never the best character, I enjoyed his jousts with Mr Hooper Hooper. In the UK, however, the series was considered too fast-paced and people frowned on its use of advertising techniques. Of course, a series made for disadvantaged inner-city kids also had lots of elements unfamiliar in suburban Surrey, or even Islington. And even the most brilliant of those early episodes would not pass through the Political Correctness barrier today.

* Technically, I was doing an MA at UBC at the time, but I also did some toddler-sitting with some of Sesame Street's biggest fans.