Make classic Sesame Street available online (petition)

[sesamemuppetfan]

Also hot take: they should've knocked off that whole "130 episodes a season" thing ages beforehand. Less episodes would allow them to put the money toward bigger, more involved episodes (like that one with Jeff Goldblum as the Indiana Jones knock-off). And it also wouldn't have starved the writers of material and the need to create characters to fill in the gaps of Ernie, Bert, Grover and such (i.e. Professor D. Rabbit or Chip & Dip).

If you don't mind my asking when do you think they originally should have cut down on the number of episodes each season?

 

[MuppetSpot]

I think 78 episode would’ve been the best.

 

[Oscarfan]

If you don't mind my asking when do you think they originally should have cut down on the number of episodes each season?

I don't know why they even did it in the first place (especially when season 2 came and they apparently went like, "Let's do an extra 15 episodes this season!").

I think 78 episode would’ve been the best.

Considering the show airs 5 days a week (yeah, I know some stations do weekends too), an even number like that wouldn't really work (the only reason they went with 26 for awhile is because there's 26 letters in the alphabet). 65 would've been just fine if you ask me.

 

[D'Snowth]

According to Lou Berger (I think), there were talks about cutting it down to 24 like most primetime series seasons are, but that's when he brought up the subject of there being 26 letters in the alphabet, adding, "Which two are we gonna fire?"

What's interesting, though, it that a lot of kids shows these days seem to be going to 26-episode seasons anymore, so it's not like if SS stuck with 26 episodes a season it would have been unreasonable. In fact, I really don't see why they bumped it up to 35/36 or whatever it is, considering a good hunk of each season is just repeats from previous seasons anyway (yeah, I know they've been doing that for decades, but still).

 

[minor muppetz]

I really like the street scenes back then, especially when they shifted to having the street scenes link together for an actual storyline, as opposed to the more broken-up, vignetted format they did moreso in the 70s (something Caroll Spinney has said he actually prefered).

Do you mean Spinney preferred the random street segments or the more connected street segments?

 

[RadioWizard]

I’m referring to these clips:

SURPRISE TOO?!?! Wow...now I'm pretty bummed.

 

[YellowYahooey]

It's rather sad, because when you think about it, this has been a problem for over 25 years now. When Barney came along in 1992, SS found themselves having to compete like crazy 1 year later...and then it happened again several years later when Blue's Clues and Dora the Explorer gained a large amount of popularity. Looking at what kids are watching nowadays, it really has me worried about Sesame's future. The toddler my mom babysits is really into Paw Patrol as well as the Disney princesses. Other than that, I'm not sure which children's shows are all the rage at this point, but it does make me wonder about Sesame's post Season 50 future.

I agree, it is sad. A show that is considered an American institution is falling out of favor of children around the world. Some international versions (including Canada's "Sesame Park") got cancelled over the years. Kids these days are so much into shows involving Disney princesses, Maya the Bee, Bubble Guppies, and of course, computer games.

I also think children's involvement with the mighty computer is also keeping kids away from television, including "Sesame Street", whose popularity was at its peak possibly during the first half of the 1980s. The generation who enjoyed such show greatly, are now in their 40s, possibly getting closer to their 50s. It's such an old show now, and one side of me feels the show should just go off the air. Sesame Workshop seems to always try to find ways to continue making money, continue to glorify the show, and keep it on the air as long as it can, and maybe make the Guinness Book of World Records. Either way, I have a feeling shows like "The Young and the Restless" and "The Price is Right" will likely have longer runs than "Sesame Street" will, and those shows are performing much better than "Sesame Street" is as of lately.

Also, regarding the vignette format of street scenes, I do remember seeing on Muppet Wiki, an episode from late January 1987 whose plot read "Just another day of inserts", and another episode guide had a plot that read simply "Just another day". And that was during a time when scenes link to form a storyline were becoming commonplace.

Now, by 2002, the storyline was made into one gigantic consolidated street scene, before a film segment, and the "number of the day", then another street scene, then "Journey to Ernie", "letter of the day", and "Elmo's World" features were shown, and less exposure of the classic segments, and if any classic segments were shown, some were edited to the extent of not enjoyable. There was a 2003 episode that had the classic "2-2-Train" segment from the 1970s, and the last few seconds was cut before the transition into another street scene. That new format was horrible, and it makes me glad I stopped watching in the 1980s when I did.

As for the comment about the talks about cutting the season down to 24 episodes per season, and the argument over letters of the alphabet, I look back at "Sesame Park" and realize that despite 50 episodes per season, some letters were not featured in a season. One season never featured the letter D, in fact. The final season never featured the letters E, N, O, Q, U, X and Y, and the letter M had heavy exposure in that final season, including the finale which went out a normal episode. I think, personally, one of the letters that should be dismissed is X, since there is a very minimal number of words that start with X. The question of what other letter should be dismissed is arguable - I'd say alternate among Q, Y and Z per season.

Maybe the cutting down to 24 episodes per season may explain the reruns that are being shown per season nowadays. The episode count is still 35 per season, but maybe only 24 fresh episodes are produced now and the other 11 episodes are repeats. If it were their choice, they could devote just over half the season to fresh content and the other portion being devoted to reruns. During its final years of being funded by PBS, the number of fresh episodes were cut down to 18, and while 26 episodes per season was still commonplace then, that explains why there were 8 episodes devoted to reruns.

If the show doesn't produce any fresh episodes after Season 50, I'd say the final seasons will air in indefinite reruns, just like PBS did with "The Electric Company", where they reran the same final two seasons over and over again like there was no tomorrow in the early 1980s, and likely got dropped by PBS affiliates by 1984 or so.

 

[YellowYahooey]

I do know, according to Wikipedia, after "Sesame Park" was cancelled, the Canadian Muppet characters were displayed in the CBC Museum in Toronto, though Dodi was likely an Anything Muppet borrowed from the American version for the Canadian segments.

 

[D'Snowth]

Do you mean Spinney preferred the random street segments or the more connected street segments?

The former.

 

[minor muppetz]

Maybe this would be better for another thread, but considering the talk of them cutting the number of episodes down to 65 in season 30, perhaps also combined with putting Elmo's World in the last 15 minutes, I wonder if they ended up doing more segments than they thought they could do. It seems like season 30 was the first to have re-edited Summer reruns, with segments replaced, and many of those episodes had certain segments replaced with segments that have otherwise never aired on the domestic show. Of course there have been many segments produced for one season but introduced the next, so I don't really know why they didn't just put them in the next season.

But it also seems like since around season 30, there's been a lot of segments produced for the domestic show that have never aired in any episodes of the domestic Sesame Street, but have aired internationally, on Play with Me Sesame, have been released on video (though it seems most of those were on Play With Me Sesame DVD releases), and have been released online in English. And who knows? Maybe there are much older segments from the 1970s and 1980s that were made for the American version but have only aired internationally (I guess we'll know once the wiki has guides for every episode and sketch listings include early segments with no earliest known appearance number).

In thinking about the old episodes having unconnected street scenes, I wonder why certain episodes repeated two years later had to have nearly all the same street stories, if they don't really have a connecting plot anyway. Couldn't more street scenes have been repeated as inserts? It's also interesting that the scripts seem to have one writer when they could have had multiple writers write their own street scenes and put them together (then again, I know many of the scripts transcribe Muppet, cast, and maybe celebrity inserts, and I doubt the episodes writer wrote all of those new inserts, though I get the feeling that the scripts don't note writers for each segment).