Sesame Street CD Boxed Set Track List

[Fozzie Bear]

Okay, gotcha. why do they call Australia "Oz" by the way?

 

[jellyman kelly]

umm, i dunno..i guess its just an abbreviation. i think maybe the word 'australia' can be a bit tough for some folk to wrap their tongue around...

 

[ssetta]

Ok, let's get back on the subject of the box set.

I am not happy with their selection. I would like to see the ones that were mentioned in this thread on there, too. And I wouldn't include anything that was post-Season 25. I guess I liked some of the old celebrity appearances, but not so much the newer ones.

 

[Erine81981]

Same here Ssetta. ok heres the ones I liked that r on there.

My top 5

The king of 8
This frog
Around, Through and Over
Stevie Wonders 1 2 3 Sesame Street
Whats the name of that song

Here r the ones I wouldn't mind hearing on there

Fur
Frazzle
Two Heads r better then one
Healthy Food
We r the monsters
I (from Grover)
Little Jerry and the Monotones
Little Chrissy and Alabets
Get along (one of my favorite Kermit songs)
Do Op Hope
I love my elbows
Tadpole
The everything in the wrong place ball
Honk Around the Clock
Honker Duckie Dinger Jamboree


Most of the ones I listed r on tapes or cassttes or Cds or other things I just wished they would do a lot more

They've had the best of Elmo, Ernie and Bert, Big Bird why not make them again but put more of these or their songs on CDs. I like most of the songs but since I either have them on Cds and other audio things its just not far to buy somthing that most of the songs I've heard so many times to hear again when I could hear them on the internet or at home. I'll still buy for some the songs but "HOPE" people "HOPE" theres another one made. Thanks for ur time.

 

[Phillip]

Here's some more info on the boxed set. The group photo was updated on Amazon and you can see it here.

http://www.muppetcentral.com/news/2003/070703.shtml

Also, here's another great article which includes a nice interview with Jeff Moss. He wrote a 68-page booklet that will be included with the CD boxed set.

Still singing to the beat of Sesame Street
The TV program is celebrating its 35th anniversary year with a huge box set containing the songs that have captivated, entertain

ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER

It's 1970 and Ernie is taking a bath.

He's got his nifty scrub brush and his very best friend to keep him company.

"Oh, rubber duckie, you're the one," sings the television Muppet.

"You make bath time lots of fun. Rubber duckie I'm awfully fond of you." If you're under the age of 55, chances are that Ernie's "Rubber Duckie" melody is more familiar than any 1970 No. 1 song. Just try humming Lee Marvin's "Wand'rin' Star."

And Ernie's little ditty taught a much more practical lesson than did Marvin in his ode to the ramblin' man.

Taking a bath isn't scary. It's fun.

That's the essence of Sesame Street - music and characters that are funny, instructive, intelligent and hip.

And that magic combination, which has made the children's program a worldwide phenomenon, is about to turn 35 years old. To mark the run up to next spring's 35th season, a retrospective three-CD box set called Songs From The Street is being released Sept. 2.

"Personally I can't believe I was lucky enough to be part of all this," says Christopher Cerf, one of the musical masterminds behind Sesame Street, on the phone from New York.

"There's no other place in the world where I could possibly have worked with all these artists and worked with the Muppets and kept a job for 30 years. And have the songs that I wrote 20 years ago still on television every week."

Cerf is a Grammy and Emmy winner who for more than three decades composed, wrote and produced Sesame Street's music.

Priced at $55.99, the box set is clearly being aimed at adults and particularly parents who are more likely to part with the money knowing that the songs hold many memories for them, as well as providing educational value for their kids.

The set weighs in at 63 songs in genres that range from country to modern r 'n' b, and that date back to 1969 when Sesame Street was founded. It also comes with 68 pages of liner notes written by Cerf. Destiny's Child, Tony Bennett, Johnny Cash, Céline Dion, Dixie Chicks, Melissa Etheridge, The Fugees, Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers, N Sync and Paul Simon are just some of the artists whose Sesame Street performances have been collected.

A tween T-shirt line, clothes and accessories for adults and home videos are all going to be released for the 35th anniversary. There are even rumours of a Hollywood Bowl concert.

"I consider the album a really joyous, fun thing, but when you're talking about nostalgia, that's certainly something that I feel," says Cerf. And not all that nostalgia is pleasant. Some of the people that Cerf says had a large hand in creating this wealth of songs aren't around to celebrate.

"A lot of my best friends did a lot of this ... Jim Henson and Joe Rapozo and Jeff Moss in particular; the three people who probably deserve the most credit for this album are all not here. It makes me miss them."

Muppets founder and Sesame Street creator Jim Henson died of a bacterial infection in 1990. Joe Raposo, who died in 1989, wrote the "Sesame Street Theme," "Bein' Green" and "`C' Is For Cookie," among others. And Jeff Moss, who helped create the characters Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch and Guy Smiley, died of complications due to colon cancer in 1998. He wrote both "Rubber Duckie" and "The People In Your Neighbourhood."

While people like Raposo and Moss wrote some of the earlier and more well-known songs, Cerf has had great success adapting current pop music for the show.

He rewrote the lyrics for the Spin Doctors' "Two Princes," which was co-sung with Zoe, Elmo and Telly. He turned Melissa Etheridge's song "Like The Way I Do" into "Like the Way U Does" and reworked R.E.M.'s "Shiny Happy People" into "Furry Happy Monsters."

But none of that compares to collaborating with the Dixie Chicks on their song "I Can Love You Better."

"We picked that together and we thought of the jokes together on the phone. I was sort of pinching myself because I love them. I really love them. They're really cute too.

"They really had time to sit here for two hours on the phone and laugh with me while we tried to figure out which of their songs would be the most fun to do."

That amount of collaboration with guest musicians doesn't always happen, says Cerf. But it's nice when it does. Sometimes he'll just come up with a gag or song that suits a certain artist. The idea then gets pitched to the musician or their management. If all goes well, they will think it's funny and appear on the show.

"Other times an artist will call up and say `I love Sesame Street, would you like me to come on?' And then you'll see if there's anything that they might have to perform already."

Cerf says that another high point in his career was when Little Richard performed on the show. He sang a song called "Rosita" to the tune of "Lucille."

"Trying to write in his style was certainly fun for me. Because rock 'n' roll was just new when I was a teenager and I love Little Richard. I never would have dreamed that I'd meet him, much less he would sing a song I wrote."

For all the guest appearances and witty rewrites it's easy to forget that Sesame Street was founded to use public broadcasting to promote the intellectual and cultural growth of preschoolers from predominantly disadvantaged backgrounds. To do that, the scripts and songs reflect a curriculum prepared by preschool educational experts.

Cerf says that writing music to a curriculum is not a difficult thing to learn, but it isn't automatically easy either. Not everyone likes doing it and some find it very restrictive.

"I, on the other hand, think it's a wonderful place to start. If somebody says to me, `We need a 30-second reggae song for Cookie Monster about the letter J,' I know what I have to do."

Sticking to the curriculum doesn't guarantee Sesame success. A large part of the show's appeal comes from its ability to interest both children and adults. Having Billy Joel sing "Just The Way You Are" to Oscar the Grouch is a good example of Sesame Street combining adult parody with positive messages that are aimed at children.

Parody is something Cerf is quite familiar with, having helped launch the magazine National Lampoon when he was a student at Harvard. He says that good writing for children includes adult content. "I think Dr. Seuss is a perfect example of that. Or C.S. Lewis is a perfect example of that, or Peter Pan is an example of that. Alice In Wonderland was really more for adults than for kids anyway."

Which gets back to the idea of selling a box set of children's music to grown-ups who've all hopefully learned Ernie's bath-time lesson. Like the mysterious bottle labelled "Drink Me" that telescoped Alice down to a mere 10 inches in height, Sesame Street's music has the power to bring us back to our childhood when the experience of washing up could be made less frightening by a rubber duck.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1061636443578&call_pageid=968867495754&col=969483191630

 

[Dave Thomer]

Wow. That's a beautiful thing. My expectations were tempered by the initial publicity's focus on the celebrity stuff; I had no idea they'd put so much stuff on it from just the regular cast. And the Aaron Neville "I Don't Want to Live on the Moon" might just guarantee the sale on its own - my wife and I both love that song and especially that version.

Even the third disc looks pretty good, balanced with the others. I'm probably more sympathetic to it than I might be because I have a 16 month old daughter who loves watching the show and hearing the music now, so the contemporary stuff is something I'd like to see. Plus, this is a 35-year retrospective. It should feature elements from every era of the show's history. If that means there are some acts on there that we might not hear anything from a few years down the line, so be it. In fact, that sort of thing is probably more useful in seeing how the show's music has changed over the years than just having the more timeless classics.

As for songs I'm looking forward to, there's Moon, Furry Happy Monsters, the Pinball Theme . . . beyond that, I'm still trying to decide.

 

[jeffkjoe]

All of the songs with rock stars are useless and a waste of track space! Boo!!!!

 

[Fozzie Bear]

They need to publish the "Rubber Duckie" chronicles, with all versions of Rubber Duckie and variations of songs ABOUT Rubber Duckie! That'd be neat.

 

[ssetta]

I also think they should have included some of the film songs from the 80s. You know, those Goldstein films? They've never been released.

 

[Boober_Gorg]

I just discovered an alternate version of "Everybody Sleeps" and I'm curious as to which one is on this box set. The first and last verse on it is as follows:

Everybody sleeps
Everybody sleeps
Every night we close our eyes
Until the morning creeps
Mountaineers on mountain tops
And divers in the deep
They like to sleep
How do we know, it's so
'Cause everybody, everybody sleeps

Can anyone fill me in? (and FYI, the singer on this version definitely sounds like Joe, and not that other guy )