Are there Season 1 shows floating around?

[Oscarfan]

And I love how people take it for granted. Rare stuff is appearing online all the time and people start asking for more greedily.

 

[hooperfan]

And I love how people take it for granted. Rare stuff is appearing online all the time and people start asking for more greedily.

Oh, yes...I know...some people who write comments on my channel won't exactly ask for something, they *demand* it...or I always deal with people who ask "How come you don't post the full episodes?"...it gets a bit tiring after a while...especially after I explained myself many times...but the positive vibes far outweigh the bad...

 

[D'Snowth]

Been there, done that. Like how I've said before I have uploaded all I have of a certain older show, and people still ask when I'll post more... of course, part of the problem is that some people can't simply take the time to read the description sometimes.

 

[fuzzygobo]

Oh, yes...I know...some people who write comments on my channel won't exactly ask for something, they *demand* it...or I always deal with people who ask "How come you don't post the full episodes?"...it gets a bit tiring after a while...especially after I explained myself many times...but the positive vibes far outweigh the bad...

Maybe because of my age, I appreciate your posts more than most. Who knows. But it does seem like a disappointment when people "DEMAND" all 4,000 episodes. Seems to me the people that demand more appreciate it less.

 

[mr3urious]

Oh jeez. I want to turn this thread into a spitting on the grave of RealVideo. As I'm saying younger members of this board will not appreciate how Youtube changed classic Sesame fandom the way us older fans will. I remember having to download clips on college computers that took 10 minutes to load for like 30 seconds of footage.

Oh yeah, RealVideo was a real piece of smoo. I may have had problems with Windows Media Player and QuickTime in the past, but at least they were functional.

 

[D'Snowth]

I've never had problems with Windows Media Player... QuickTime, on the other hand, that's pretty much made specifically for Macs, so you either have to download QuickTime, or download codexes to watch .MOV files. Then again, back in the XP days, you had to download codexes to watch .AVI files... computer technology sure has improved.

 

[Drtooth]

And I love how people take it for granted. Rare stuff is appearing online all the time and people start asking for more greedily.

I'm sure it's really bad when you have a wealth of stuff but not the time to put all of it up as well. And not everyone who has Sesame Street on VHS has every single thing ever on tape as well.

But the thing that annoys me is when classic fans whine that none of this stuff is on the show proper anymore for whatever reason, yet so much of it is online that can be watched at their own convenience. Would anyone really want to sit through the same Abby's Flying School for the offset chance that something from the early 90's at the earliest will manage to pop up when a quick click can give you real hard to find gold?

Oh yeah, RealVideo was a real piece of smoo. I may have had problems with Windows Media Player and QuickTime in the past, but at least they were functional.

Yeah. And the frame rate was choppy as crap anyway. I remember watching some stuff on the old Toontracker site. Fuzzy, pixilated garbage footage that took forever to load... and you would have previously had to have loaded RealPlayer anyway... that was another like 5 hours of your life...

 

[JLG]

I guess, from some of the wording above, that tape trades are completely a thing of the past? No one does them anymore at all? I guess if so that wouldn't be surprising, but in a way I'm sorry to hear it. I haven't done any since 2006 or 2007, but I'd always kept doing more in the back of my mind, because as nice as it is to have these things a click away, there's something nice about having a "consistent" collection where everything is equal, so to speak, instead of being scattered across different formats. Ah, well.

Well do I remember the "dark days" spoken of above. I don't remember seeking out many Sesame clips online, but I was looking for Square One a lot, and found that old fan site whose name escapes me that had a bunch of video clips. The quality varied, as I recall, but some indeed were pixelly with terrible frame rates. YouTube made all those kinds of sites instantly obsolete. But I had that same experience of waiting impatiently for them to download on the machines in my college's computer lab.
I first started attempting to seek out old stuff in 1999 at the tender age of 16, having been curious about it for about a decade by that point. I actually wrote a letter to CTW and asked if there was any means of seeing old stuff at all. I had no idea Noggin existed until I got a reply. (Unfortunately I can't remember where I put that letter and don't remember the name of the lady that wrote it, but I can tell you that it was a personal reply and a very nice one.) But even if it had been available in my area, I didn't have cable, anyway, so Paley Center was my only option. But what an option it was, for back then. I still remember what a thrill it was the first bunch of times I went to watch its limited selection. I mean heck, even just the theme song---I hadn't heard the original version for seven years by that point, and I had had no expectation of ever hearing it again, really. Isn't it crazy to think that, now?

Not long after that, purely by chance I discovered that some kids I used to babysit had a bunch of taped episodes from early in the decade. With the mom's permission, as long as I was quiet about it and didn't take a lot at once, I smuggled several home with me, one at a time. Now I wish so badly that I had gotten more, but I was too timid. If only I'd known. A few months later I found out that many of the remaining ones had been taped over with (AUGH) Survivor episodes. It killed me. Especially since many of the tapes had been recorded in EP mode, allowing for as many as seven or eight episodes a tape! I can't even think about it.

But it wasn't until 2002 that I chanced on the old Sesame chat forum on Yahoo, leading to my occasional ventures into tape trading. And that's how #2820, #2840, #2895, #2978, #2979 and #2980 came to "surface." Those were the "survivors" that I unwittingly rescued from, well, Survivor. (Though I've since discovered via Muppet Wiki that apparently somebody else out there happened to also have #2980, which is fine because my copy was missing the last five minutes.)

But boy----I can't imagine how my 17-year-old self who wrote to CTW would have reacted if you'd said that eight years later there would be this enormous explosion of accessibility. Same goes for all of us, I'm sure. Our minds would have been blown.

 

[Drtooth]

Tape trades are alive and well according to activity still in the tape trade thread, but they're pretty uncommon.

Youtube and SW's own webpage have been a boon to fans. Plus, a Netflix account yields a few extra full episodes, though they're only the ones from iTunes and amazon. There's still a lot left to uncover, sure. I'm actually confident we'll see most of it in time. But new media has made Sesame Street clips, even international ones (if for a limited time) incredibly accessible.

 

[minor muppetz]

People are talking about old video sites like RealPlayer... I don't think I ever used those. I know when I first got the internet I watched a few video clips online, but not many, and I can't remember what service was used.

I previously said that with so many rare treasures from the first season online now that I'd be satisfied if these were the last classic Sesame Street content we got this year* (there's still two more weeks left), and anything else would be like a bonus. But if anybody wants to give copies of more rare episodes to put online, may I suggest it be episodes from seasons 11 and 12? Or several rare episodes from the second season?

*Of course, I'm not talking about stuff that fans had for years (like Noggin episodes) but hadn't put online.