kermits NEWS FLASH

[El Sesame]

why did they stop showing kermit the frog's NEWS FLASH sketch???
the last time i ever saw one was around 1990.
i liked that sketch!

 

[D'Snowth]

They still air some occasionally, in fact, I think a couple of years ago they aired the one where he was interviewing the little girl bird who had divorced parents.

 

[wiley207]

It's a bit more complicated than you think. Until the late 90s, they continued regularly showing the News Flash segments. If one was very lucky, he or she would be able to watch a really old Sesame Street News skit from the early to mid 1970s! But in 2001, Sesame Workshop bought the rights to the Muppets they air on the show, except for Kermit the Frog, who is also a "Muppet Show"-type Muppet. Now Kermit is owned by the Walt Disney Company. In order to air a classic News Flash, Sesame Workshop has to get special permission from Disney to do it. Most of the time, they succeed, and Kermit shows up in a newer episode on an old skit!

Also, around the mid-to-late 90s, they did some sort of tweaking that made it a bit harder to tell if a News Flash was from an earlier or later period. On pretty much all of them, they just slapped a generic version of the "NEWS FLASH" title logo onto the beginning of them, replacing some of the variations (1971-1975 skits had the logo usually all black-and-white or with the only color being a pink cloud outline; 1983-1986 skits had "NEWS FLASH" in red flashing off and on). The generic card looked like this...

http://images.wikia.com/muppet/images/9/9d/Firstday1.jpg

However, a good way to tell an older skit is to look at Kermit's fedora hat. If it's brown, it's probably a 1971-1973 special report.

http://images.wikia.com/muppet/images/f/f9/SSNews.Columbus.jpg


Here's a neat trivia fact: A couple of the news flashes debuted on important episodes of the show! The episode about Mr. Hooper's death featured a new News Flash about Kermit and the Princess that chooses a prince. The one with the adults discovering Snuffy had the one with Kermit interviewing the three pigs after their houses have been blown down.

Currently, we are having a lot of trouble on Muppet Wiki trying to identify most of the News Flashes' premiere episodes (when they first aired). Perhaps someone could help us?

http://muppet.wikia.com/wiki/Sesame_Street_News

 

[Kiki]

The stopped showing thoses sketches *possibly* because Kermit became a Disney thing... I mean that Disney owned him. I guess that's what Muppet Dude was sayin' but anyway. That's why we don't see more of Kermie on SS these days.

 

[Kiki]

They still air some occasionally, in fact, I think a couple of years ago they aired the one where he was interviewing the little girl bird who had divorced parents.

I thought they canned the idea of having a thing about divorce on the show... that's what an SS writer said in an interview when they wee gonna do a show 'bout it... I dunno.

 

[minor muppetz]

I thought they canned the idea of having a thing about divorce on the show... that's what an SS writer said in an interview when they wee gonna do a show 'bout it... I dunno.

It wasn't specifically said that the birds parents were divorced. The bird just talked about how her parents did not lvie together, but never mentioned why.

Also, regardless of who owns what, Kermit hasn't made too many new appearances on Sesame Street since the death of Jim Henson, even though Steve Whitmire eventually became a performer on the show.

Somebody mentioned that a generic card was used on all sketches starting in the 1990s. I think this change was made in the 1980s. I was born in 1984 and only remember seeing the same card on the show. Then again, according to Muppet Wiki, a different logo was used from 1982-1986, so I would have been alive for two years to see another one, but don't remember seeing it on the show (I only remember seeing that one at the start of the Sesame Street News clip montage in The Best of Kermit on Sesame Street, and at the time I wondered if that logo was used on the show).

I think Kermit wore his dark brown (or is it black?) hat for at least the first two years of Sesame Street News. These sketches apparantly began in the thrid season, and Kermit wore this hat in the sketch where The Count counted the Three Little Pigs, and The Count first appeared in the fourth season.

 

[minor muppetz]

I have read that the Newsflash segments originally did not have opening logos, and when the opening logos were created they were attached to future airings of most of the early newsflash segments that didn't have this logo, with some exceptions, and some Newsflash segments (like the Don Music ones) never had an opening logo included.

I wonder if the writers were just experimenting with having Kermit as a reporter in the first year of these sketches. Many people think that the Tortose and the Hare skit was the first newsflash (or, more appropiately, Sesame Street Sports). There, he was a sportscaster instead of a news reporter. And I think that was the only Sesame Street sports sketch. And there are two other skits that I know of which didn't have opening logos that seem a bit different from the usual Sesame Street News format, and looking at the pictueres at Muppet Wiki, they feature Kermit wearing his dark brown hat. These skits are the weather report, where Simon Soundman gave a weather report, and a skit where Kermit asks a real girl what sounds animals make. I would assume that those skits are from the first year of the newsflash.

 

[wiley207]

The "Tortoise and the Hare" skit did not feature a logo. And neither did a few 1974-1975 News Flashes. The Weather Report skit also didn't have a logo either. The one with Kermit and the little girl is a Muppet-Kid moment instead of a News Flash, so the opening doesn't show up. However, the others from 1971 to the present (except the Don Music skits) DID have opening logos at the beginning! See Muppet Wiki to check out how the logos first looked back then.

Oh, and on Kermit's brown hat, he had that in the 1971-1973 News Flash segments.