The MuppetCast discusses how SW thinks kids wouldn't sit through old Sesame cause it's not fast paced.
Steve Swanson: Ms. Parente and the SW gang know their jobs and their work much better than I do, but my comment is this: A 3-year old growing up is still a 3-year old growing up. It doesn't matter if they're in 1970, 1990, or 2015. If I'm a young child, I don't know what pop culture is. I don't know that there are old SS pieces and new SS pieces. It's just Sesame Street. So, you as an entertainment company, you can certainly train me on how to have a shorter attention span, by showing me things that are quick-cut, and fast edits, and punchlines without setups to jokes. You can train me to want that, but I don't inherently want anything. I'm just a kid who wants to watch something that's fun.
JD Hansel: You make a good point, but the one issue there is that with SS, they're not the only program out there now that's trying to get the kids attention. And they're not the only program out there that's going to teach kids what pop culture is. To some extent they do, because kids are going to get some rough idea of what Jurassic Park is, from SS as we've seen through the parodies. However, if they're competing with all the stuff that's on Disney Junior as it's now called, and on Nick Jr, and all the different children's networks and TV shows, and also all the web content that there is for children, there's just so much there and everything else is at a fast pace, then SS just isn't in the same position it was before to say here's what good TV looks like. To some extent, they have to find their own spin on or their own version of what is out there in the rest of the media. They have to adapt, purely because of the massive amount of content that there is everywhere. And also just because, even if you are in some frighteningly sheltered home that doesn't have TV or anything of the sort when you're growing up as a child, you will still see lots of fast-paced stuff around you, in a way that we didn't see say 20, 30 years ago. And so because of that, I think that there are just so many influences that are training the child to expect a faster pace, that SS is not entirely at liberty to say here's a better pace for you, there's a lot of good content here as well.
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