At this point, I'll be surprised if anything else comes out for the anniversary, or if Sesame Workshop suddenly starts a big anniversary celebration (though we still have several months before it's technically over), but the other day I thought of a good April Fools joke regarding an idea, but have decided against it because by then it might be too late to convince people that Sesame Workshop would suddenly celebrate the anniversary for the rest of the year. But since I decided not to go with that for this years April Fools joke, I'll write about it here.
I think (but can't remember for sure) I suggested maybe PBS or Sprout show a big Sesame Street marathon (like the Simpsons marathon on FXX, but a few days ago, I read that VH1 was going to air a record-breaking Saturday Night Live marathon, lasting 19 days (beating The Simpsons' 13-day marathon record), but then I thought why not have Sesame Street beat that record? So I was going to say that Sprout was going to air a 45-day non-stop Sesame Street marathon (at first I considered just a month-long).
I thought of a few options. One was for each day to represent a different season, with 24 episodes from the featured season (26 is the highest number of episodes from any season, so it's possible). I also thought about having certain days represent two whole seasons (with 12 from one season and 12 from the other), which would get through all the seasons quicker and then there could be themed blocks (like all of the Hawaii episodes or all of the "Slimey goes to the moon" episodes or every episode where it snows) or return to certain seasons.
And if there's a need to include more than just Sesame Street episodes, there could be hours featuring Sesame Street specials or direct-to-video projects or episodes of Play With Me Sesame. I also thought about two special hour-long compilations each day: One would be a highlight reel for whatever season is represented, and the other is a different themed compilation (like Big Bird clips, Ernie and Bert clips, Grover clips, alphabet clips, celebrity clips, etc.).
I also thought about saying that the whole marathon would be hosted by The Count, who would count the number of days and episodes that have passed (I wonder if they would actually record special between-episode interstitials for all the episodes in the marathon).
An exciting idea, but maybe too exciting even for an April Fools post. And if it were real, I could see many people from Muppet Central/Tough Pigs/Muppet Wiki who have Sprout arranging to watch/record the marathon in shifts so that Muppet Wiki can be sure to add more episode pages and complete guides with incomplete info (wait, does Sprout include commercial interruptions?). I don't think a digital recorder can hold 45 days worth of programming.