Episode 4501: School for Chickens.
Sponsors: N, 4.
Word on the Street: Strenuous.
Street Story:Oh... It's actually Professor Buck's School for Clucks.
Free-range school for chickens... So there's no chicken left behind...
And the chicken puns just keep coming thanks to their school's fight song.
Cooped all day long in, whatever it is cheickens live in...
Finally, the merch opportunity emerges with a blatent chance for them to bring back Chicken Dance Elmo.
Typical schoolclass sheninagans ensue like getting the chickens to pay attention to the teacher, talking in turns instead of all at once, standing in line for snacktime, meh.
Song: "Raise Your Hand Up High", (sounds like a new song instead of a remake of a previously-existing SST song).
Muppets/Celebrity Word of the Day explaining Strenuous, I almost never know who these people are.
Murray Had a Little Lamb: Farm School.
Super Grover 2.0: Cheer School.
Yes, the cheerleaders clearly do have a case of floppy arms.
Floopy arms? My buddy Bert has floppy arms...
Sorry, entirely different segment. Grover seems equally compitent equally loveably scatterbrained in this sketch, I rather like it.
Try the cheer again... Brickabracka firecracker sis boom bah, Bugs Bunny Bugs Bunny rah rah rah!
Letter of the Day: Answering a question from the Coming Soon thread, yes, the dancing-clapping bit with the SST Muppets will be the standard intro, just got it today for the letter N.
Animation: The N Museum.
Animation/Film: N for nightinggale.
Muppets: Murray at farming school taking care of animals.
Cute moment with Ovejita trying to speak to the animals in Spanish, Murray telling her they don't speak her language.
Abby's Flying Fairy School: Clean-Up Time.
Okay, it's a repeat of the episode with the fairy dust bunnies.
Number of the Day:
leads another dancing-stomping bit this time to find the number of the day, in today's case 4. The only interesting twist is how they apply this to Thursday's episode, Numeric Con, where the number will be 0.
Animation/Film: Counting 4 Chickens.
Muppets: Birdwalk Empire.
Muppets: Murray learns how to plant crops at farming school.
Elmo the Musical: Bird the Musical.
Other Observations.
It seems Sesame Street likes the number 4 for their season premieres, this is like the fourth season I can think of to feature it as their numeric sponsor.
This episode was the first time hearing Ryan Dyllan's Elmo, and I liked how he's taken over for Kevin.
I really like the fact that they did away with the Murray/kid intro tune-ins, the show flows much better this way. But by the same token I'm not impressed in the least with their dance/clap/stomping Letter and Number of the Day intros. Cookie's Letter Games and the Count's Organ were much better than this.
Will wait till at least Friday to see if they show a better handling of the main between-show segments like Super Grover 2.0 and Cookie's Crummy Pictures.
Good start, a highly pun-filled premiere.