What was the purpose of the episode numbers?

[JLG]

That is to say, what was the original purpose of prominently displaying them on screen the way they always have? I've been curious about that.
As far as I know, the only television shows that do this are the older CTW shows up through Square One TV, and also one outlier--- Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. If any other shows have done it, I've never seen it. It's unusual, to say the least. I love the numbers, personally (especially in the old days when the font used to be so huge) but I still wonder what their original reason for it was.

On that note, that leads to two other obvious questions----why did they temporarily stop doing it in the 1975 season, and then when they picked it up again, this time without the titles, why did they decide to go for the next 27 years without having any title on screen at all? Now that really WAS strange. Literally the only other show I've ever heard of that had no onscreen title was the original run of Batman: The Animated Series.
Having no title may be odd, but it kind of also created a weird familiarity. It's almost like SS was saying to the kids, "Eh. You know what show this is."

 

[minor muppetz]

I have wondered this recently as well. But at least it allows us fans to know what number applies to each episode (except for season seven, but Muppet Wiki has info on every season 7 episode thanks to program guides from the CTW Archives).

I also wonder what the purpose was of only including ending credits on the friday shows in the past.

 

[gbrobeck]

As for the episode numbers, the original purpose was because of the special Teacher's/Parent's Guides that accompanied the series, laying out specific activities and lessons to go along with each episode. The episode number being displayed on screen was so you knew which lessons/activities to use. I imagine the numbers were also useful to teachers who taped the shows and played them back for students (when VCRs came along) so they knew which shows their students had seen and which ones they hadn't. It was probably continued for tradition's sake.

And the Friday-only credits, a long credit roll like that takes up valuable time... especially on a show like Sesame Street where they wanted to use every moment available for teaching. However, the various unions at that time required a credit roll at least once a week, so they had to do it at least that often. Now that the number of episodes produced each season usually isn't divisible by five (typically 26) and that they can basically air in any order, they do the credit roll every day. There's no guaranteeing whether an episode will air on Friday or not.

 

[minor muppetz]

If the number was indeed shown for the purposes of the parenting guide, then I guess continuation of it after the guides ended (I've read that they stopped doing the parent guides after season 12, either that or the CTW Archives only has guides up to then) is what TV Tropes would call "the artifact". Though I know that there were program guides in Japan up until at least the late-1990s (and Japan showed the same Sesame Street as America).

I wonder if removing the episode number sequence was done similar to the "credits on friday only" reason, to save extra time. And with no episode number in the season 7 episodes, I wonder if they didn't know how to keep the numbers until a year later.

And thinking about the credits sequence, watching the season 1-10 closing credits I feel those are quite long for closing credits, especially when compared to other television show credits at the time.