Sesame Street Season 50 News and Rumors

[D'Snowth]

Are stained glass windows trendy in NYC these days? Because they seem to have become very fond of it on SS.

 

[D'Snowth]

At the risk of sounding like those immature fans who can't let anything go, I have to admit, I wonder if Joey regrets walking away from SS. His reasons for leaving were over all the changes SW were planning on making, like scaling back on characters - both human and Muppet (because contemporary kids shows have small casts), doing away with celebrity guests (because kids don't know who they are), and doing away with parodies and spoofs (because kids don't understand them). Really, just about the only thing SW delivered on was reducing the number of characters (especially humans), but other than that, we still see celebrities, and we still have spoofs. Well, okay, we have been seeing a decline in spoofs, but we still see plenty of celebrities.

 

[Oscarfan]

That might be true; they could've loosened things up a bit once they saw Season 46 fully on air.

The number of celebrities has certainly decreased (I've said this before) - compare season 45's total of 38 celebrity guests for just 26 episodes vs. season 48's total of 9 for 35 episodes.

The show is certainly less funny, to me. I don't need any pop culture jokes or references to get a laugh, but the lack of funny, clever one-liners and puns and funny Muppet sight gags is nil. And the spoofs are really lame to me now (the TV show ones are fine, but these new music videos are really really bad).

All that stuff Joey (allegedly, mind you) left over might still be around, but everything is distinctly more "kiddy," which is something the show never fully went for outside of EW or JTE. He knows what the potential the show has and under the new people and ideas they were given, I don't think he saw them being able to achieve it in the same way.

 

[minor muppetz]

A lot of the recent spoofs are online-only. I know that season 46 had "Orange is the New Snack" and past Cookie's Crumby Pictures segments (and maybe some other past segments) have been repeated since, but aside from all the online stuff, I haven't heard of any spoofs (maybe I should go back and look at Muppet Wiki's guides for all the season 46-48 episodes).

It seems like the show has scaled back on characters and parodies while the web videos have included them (of course adults seem to be watching Sesame Street stuff on YouTube more than the current episodes), the web videos have also included the human cast members who were otherwise dropped from the show.

While they did decrease the main character focus in season 46, I feel like we've gotten a lot more new recurring characters since then compared to the decade before. We've gotten Julia, Rudy, and the cast of Cookie's Crumby Pictures, we also got Rudy's father but I'm not sure how regularly he's appeared. And around that time they recast Herry Monster, who hadn't gotten dialogue in over a decade, even when Jerry Nelson was still heavily involved with the show.

 

[mbmfrog]

Wait a minute, wasn't the increase casting the same thing that occured in the lead up to Season 40 ?

With Abby, Chris and then Nela respectively in their intro Seasons into the 40th one. Wouldn't it just be a sense of Deja vu ?

 

[Pig'sSaysAdios]

Should we change the name of the thread, since this has basically become more of the thread about the 50th anniversary, rather than *season 50 itself? Or should we just start a new thread specifically for the anniversary stuff?

 

[Pig'sSaysAdios]

ToughPigs is doing a retrospective where they talk about one season of the show each week:
http://www.toughpigs.com/50-in-50-s1/
http://www.toughpigs.com/50-in-50-s2/

 

[sesamemuppetfan]

There's something I've been thinking a lot about lately: does anybody else think that throughout this year, SW will be coming out with 50th anniversary merchandise when we least expect it?

I mean...they announced almost everything they came out with for the 40th anniversary (particularly 40 Years of Sunny Days, and the big book- I'm too lazy to say its full name right now) more than a year before they came out, if I remember correctly.

Sure enough, earlier today I was at Target, when I came across some SS bedding sets, pillows, etc. (for kids) all of which had the 50th anniversary logo on the tags and the plastic wrap. (I meant to take pictures to show you all, but sadly my phone is currently out of storage...)

Does anyone else have the same thoughts?

 

[LittleJerry92]

It's definitely possible at this point!

 

[D'Snowth]

Well, I mean, they always come out with special anniversary edition merchandise, so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.