Tuesday 1 December 2009

Sunny day, everything’s A-okay


Nicole Colson looks at the 40-year legacy of the children’s show Sesame Street, and the way it revolutionized television.

From Socialist Worker (US)

[November] marked the 40th anniversary of the television show that may have had a greater impact on the lives of multiple generations of people around the globe than any other.

I’m talking, of course, about Sesame Street. Currently on the air in some 125 countries, Sesame Street is the longest-running children’s TV program in U.S. history. It has become a staple of American life, with one 1996 survey finding that 95 percent of American preschoolers had watched the show by the time they were age 3.

As Michael Davis, author of Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, writes, the show’s creators “came together at a star-crossed moment in American life when people of means who lived in comfort chose to dedicate their energies to the less fortunate and the forgotten, the rural poor and the underprivileged of the urban ghettos. Sesame succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings and, in doing so, changed the world, one child at a time.”

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