I'm curious though- does he get residuals from all the gazillions of plays I'm sure the Falling Baker videos have gotten on SesameStreet.com and youtube.com?
I mean, they can't tell how many times someone
I was pretty much guessing that he still gets residuals. I don't know if Sesame Workshop has to pay residuals for online releases (I know some clips with outside music were included and eventually taken down). I thought I once read somewhere that everybody who's been involved with Sesame Street still gets residuals for their work (and I read an article from the late 1990s about John-John which said that, at least when the article was written, John-John still gets residuals from his appearances). And I think I heard that for commercial releases Sesame Workshop has to renegotiate residuals with everybody.
But then I figured the actor who played Gordon in the test pilots, the first of which is commercially available, would have to get residuals (and that they'd have to have his name on file). But somebody told me that back then contracts regarding residuals weren't negotiated until after the pilots were made, meaning that he only got paid once. I wonder how this would apply to inserts that originated in the test pilots.
And another thing to consider: I recall that a few days before the 40th anniversary DVD came out, the man who was the "One belly button" kid in Henson #1 made a post asking where he could find a copy of that formerly-rare skit. And that clip had been on sesamestreet.org for a month (of course I don't know if people get residuals after certain periods of time and it just happened to not be a residual period). I would have expected Sesame Workshop to have tracked him down and prepared to pay him for his appearances before it was commercially released. I don't think Sesame Street is one of those productions where people only get residuals for a certain number of broadcasts (and if it was, how would insert residuals work?), and of course we all know how rare it was for that segment to be broadcast. Of course in one of his posts he said that Jim Henson gave him 20 dollars for his performance, and his mom made him give it back. I'd hate to think how his residuals would have been handled due to that (having to give back residuals would be terrible).
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