Why does Sesame rely so much on Fairy Tale characters lately?

[Drtooth]

I kinda wanted to title this "Dang, Sesame Street! Why you got to be so Fairy Tale all the Time?"

Anyway, am I the only one that thinks that with all the go to character Sesame Street has that they overly rely on special guest fairy tale characters to teach certain concepts (this season, behavioral ones) when they have plenty of original characters to use in their place? Really seems that since the 90's they ratcheted up these kinds of appearances, but went completely overboard the past few seasons. Now, I'm not counting Baby Bear since he transitioned to actual cast member and became something in his own right. But it's like every episode Little Bo peep needs help help, Jack be Nimble is jumping all over the place and needs help, Red Riding Hood needs help... what ever happened to using the huge bank of characters they have? Not saying they need to bring characters back from obscurity, just their current roster.

I feel there's the necessary weasel here that they only have so many puppeteers on set filming so many episodes and they remedy that with one shot characters if certain puppeteers don't have a large assortment of main characters. But can't we have an episode where Big Bird has a problem and needs help or Snuffy or the Count or something? Sesame Street has great original characters that stood the tests of time and culture. Why wouldn't you want to use them instead of public domain substitutes?

 

[Oscarfan]

My theory: certain Muppeteers who don't have main characters but are available frequently enough (Tyler, Stephanie, Peter). Thus, they have the performers, just not legit characters for them.

 

[D'Snowth]

I've been thinking the same thing lately about the more Fantastic Muppets, such as talking/singing foods and such. Granted, SST's always had 'em, but it just seems like those have been getting a lot of attention as of late as well, particularly back around Season 36 or so when they started pushing healthy eating habits.

I guess there's just no demand for more "reality" based characters like there used to be like Dr. Nobel Price, Forgetful Jones, Biff and Sully, Mumford, the kinds of character that you are more likely to encounter in real life.

 

[Drtooth]

My theory: certain Muppeteers who don't have main characters but are available frequently enough (Tyler, Stephanie, Peter). Thus, they have the performers, just not legit characters for them.

I feel that's a part of the problem, like I said. I'm sure in the writing stage they're goaded to use as few characters as possible for budget reasons. And of course the obligatory "reuse every puppet until we feel we've got our money's worth." It feels like it goes beyond that. Like writing broad parody fairy tale characters is extremely easy or something because you don't need character development on one note jokes that rely on fairy tale stories. I kinda get that, but it really stinks that the big draw characters, even Elmo, take a back seat to repetitive "help a fairy tale buffoon" plot lines. Especially since there's a nice chance for character development and conflict when the regular characters have problems that need to be solved.

I've been thinking the same thing lately about the more Fantastic Muppets, such as talking/singing foods and such. Granted, SST's always had 'em, but it just seems like those have been getting a lot of attention as of late as well, particularly back around Season 36 or so when they started pushing healthy eating habits.

I guess there's just no demand for more "reality" based characters like there used to be like Dr. Nobel Price, Forgetful Jones, Biff and Sully, Mumford, the kinds of character that you are more likely to encounter in real life.

It's a shame, since those secondary and tertiary characters really built the series up when certain A-listers couldn't be available. Not every episode was going to star Big Bird or Oscar or Bert and Ernie, but goofy, fun characters like the ones mentioned always had a spot. And when they had the day in the limelight, the writers went wild with them. Placedo Flamingo having a crush on Maria one episode, Biff and Sully fixing something to the annoyance of the human cast members. If there's anything woefully missing from Sesame Street today it's goofy adult Muppet characters being the focus of street stories. I understand the need to focus on child relatable characters (why Elmo was and is so popular), but how come fairy tale characters and strange relatives of them are the go to when they can just create some new ones if they can't reuse older ones?

I'd much rather see some parody wordsmith character (Edgar Allen Poolcue, Charles Chickens, Emily Dickensandwich... whatever) trial and error write a shallow parody of one of their works than Judy, the somehow relative of Beauty from Beauty and the Beast needing help to write a "unique" story about a girl and a pony. I know it's a kid's show for little kids, but that episode was inexcusably bad, dull, and even a 2 year old can pick apart the illogic of a story about a girl and a pony being "unique." We need more parody characters existing outside of their own, self contained "we're still relevant" shorts. Just anything please but repetitive moron versions of fairy tale characters that are surprisingly just smart enough to breathe needing help from Elmo storylines.

 

[minor muppetz]

And if there's so much focus on one-time characters, then they don't need to worry about working around any performers schedule (though the episodes will still involve some main characters, like Elmo, Abby, or Telly).

Of course, in the last few years, there have been a couple of fairy tale-themed video releases. I wonder if this will start to be more common (it seems like in the last few years we have also gotten an abundance of new letter and number-themed videos in such a short amount of time, in comparison to the amount of letter/number videos in the years before, let's say before 2010). Those as well as the old Big Bird's Story Time VHS all feature a good amount of Sesame Street News segments (even if the last two videos have two that were previously on video and two that weren't, and both having one of the same news segments from the previous fairy tales-themed video). Following this trend, if so many episodes involving fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters leads to more of these videos, then it gets us more Sesame Street News segments on videos, thus more classic clips on video and more Kermit segments from the show. Of course they don't have to feature so much Sesame Street News - there are a lot of fairy tale/nursery rhyme segments,both classic and current, that are not Sesame Street News. And most of these videos have "Story Time" in the title - they could include segments on non-fairy tale stories (I'd like to see a video release full of story segments read by the cast). I also find it odd that Silly Story Time and Fairy Tale Fun pretty much had to have the street stories followed by short segments relating to the fairy tale featured in the street story. Why not include more fairy tales? And oddly, neither of those releases had any Baby Bear street stories (there were episodes where Baby Bear told the story of what the Three Bears did during their walk as well as the time Baby Bear and Telly rewrote the story as "Goldilocks and the Four Bears").

 

[Drtooth]

And if there's so much focus on one-time characters, then they don't need to worry about working around any performers schedule (though the episodes will still involve some main characters, like Elmo, Abby, or Telly).

Again, already said that and had the feeling. They can have other one shot characters on the show that aren't fairy tale based. Then again, some times those characters have to be hyperactive/annoying/too dumb to live as well (15 and that Penguin this year for example). But most episodes feature a popular character, unfortunately in a sidelined role playing second to the one shot. It's almost as if they want to take away any semblance of antagonism or complexity to character relationships. Yeah, sounds like I'm over analyzing things, but it's like how when Abby first appeared, she was shy and inexperienced and was prone to be more emotional, now she just sits their smiling and waving with Elmo. Somehow, I would love more of these behavior based episodes to feature the characters themselves. I LOVE stuff like Cookie Club and that one where Elmo was too excited to win the game show. Why can't we see more of the characters acting up instead of some hyper Fairytale character?

More over, it really seems that Sesame Street is keen on recycling scripts over the course of a season. I blame initiatives for it. But it really seems that the behavior/self regulation initiative has forced them into the "crazy loud obnoxious character randomly appears on the street and the main characters have to help them" plotlines. Weirder still, not all the episodes this season that feature that specific plot were self regulation. The one where Telly builds a bike for a bird (which was brilliantly handled by the way with a smart choice of character), and the Quincenera one, which, bizarrely didn't feature a single behavioral Aesop though it desperately needed one. Heck, you can't even blame the initiative since they've had lots of these episodes before that anyway.

 

[D'Snowth]

More over, it really seems that Sesame Street is keen on recycling scripts over the course of a season.

You don't supposed that being on for 45 years that they're running out of ideas for stories. The hurricane arc from 32 was a big deal, but as it turns out, that wasn't the first time the street was hit by a hurricane.

 

[Drtooth]

There's a difference between recycling scripts over the course of several years, or a decade, and then there's extremely similar/exactly the same episodes in the same season. Sometimes even right after each other.

Sesame Street has indeed been on long enough and they can recycle stories from previous seasons. Which is what they should do. Don't get me wrong. We've seen that with Cookie getting the Cookie Flu which was essentially remade from an episode with The Count.

But ever since the last decade when they started with the initiatives, they had pretty much the same episodes with small variations. The nature initiative, as I said in another thread, was a painful example. I'd say this behavioral psychology initiative is just as bad, but at least we got some great Cookie Monster moments out of it. Don't see why so much of this hinges on random fairy tale characters. Today's episode is all about Mother Goose bringing a bunch of Nursery Rhyme characters to learn "strategies." And that's directly after 2 other Fairy Tale based character episodes. Eh, at least Big Bird's in it, but why not have Big Bird learn to relax and calm down? Why are they taking the tension away from popular characters? I don't get it.

Really seems that the fairy tale thing started slowly creeping in since the 90's. And yeah, we got Baby Bear out of it. I'm not saying the show was ever 100% grounded in reality, but since the Fairy Tale/Nursery Rhyme character take over I think it lost that essential "New York Street where anything can happen" to "Wacky world where literary characters exist."

 

[minor muppetz]

One thing I thought about, if the frequent use of fairy tale/one-shot characters is so they don't have to worry so much about if a certain performer is available, could this be why so many of the daily segments generally don't feature appearances by other established characters? They tend to star one or two characters, but then if other characters make appearances, they're generally one-shot characters, so the writers can go ahead and write the scripts without worrying about, for example, if Eric Jacobson is available to perform Grover in an episode of Elmo the Musical or if Martin Robinson's available to perform Telly in a Super Grover 2.0? I'm sure with most of these segments they do several a day, knowing that the lead performers can be scheduled to do them (and since the performers are already performing the host characters, they're arms are already full to perform their other characters).

Of course Elmo's World always included at least two cameos by other characters, and I think that number extended to three when the e-mail segments were added, but I feel that's a little different from the other daily segments. I get the feeling that various portions of each episode were recorded at different times, and with its format that is easier to do.