Your Thoughts: Sesame Street Season 41

[nayrbgo]

New guy joining the talk! -- In the past seven years, I've watched more of the recent SS because of my son, but it really mostly made me want to jump on YouTube to see the episodes and clips that I love so much. I have a hard time with the new clean look on SS and really just about everywhere in the mainstream media these days. How do you keep watching it without judgment? Is that possible? Share with me the guiding light of the new seasons that I am missing. . . .
Bryan

 

[The Count]

Episode 4224: There's An Ap For That!
Sponsors: E, 11.
Airdate: November 3, 2010.
Season: Season 41.

Cold Opening: What's the Word on the Street?
Hexagon.

Street Story:
Baby Bear greets everyone after ordering his bowl of porridge from Chris.
Telly's trying to practice the Boingarooney trick on his pogo stick... Hmm, I smell a Toughpigs inspired wrestling reference. Can you dig that?
Enter Mac with his new i-Pogo, hyping its Boingarooney and camera and telephone and porridge cooling capabilities.
Clever little potshot at Mac telling the person on the phone not to call him there at that time.
This whole shpiel plays like a funny informercial, complete with its own episode-titled song.
Yes... There's an ap for that!
Telly ends up trading his old pogo stick for Mac's i-Pogo complete with instruction manual.
Telly needs to press the hexagon Auto-Boing icon... Er, no, that's the Eject icon, funny bit. The triangle's the correct icon. Too bad it just keeps boinging out of control. Er no, that was the Milkshake icon. He needs to double-click the triangle. And we revert to the milkshake setting when he commands the i-Pogo to go faster.
Was that Big Bird trying to sort his birdberries or just Chris?
Telly stops boinging, then has to click the rectangle Boingarooney icon.
Mac returns to offer Telly the new i-Pogo 300.
Baby Bear: "I thought this was the new i-Pogo."
Mac: "Not any more."
Good quotes...
Mac then gets a call about the newer i-Pogo 3000 and has to boing away.
Telly finally does the Boingarooney on his own old pogo stick without falling off.

Celebrity/Muppets: Ty Pennington? with Abby explain "hexagon", Abby conjuring different shapes until she gets it right.
Ty: "But you don't know how many sides and angles a hexagon has..."
Right, and that's what's going to pad this bit out, duh!
Abby gets it right... Turning Ty himself into a hexagon.
Letter of the Day: What's on Me that Starts with E.
Murray wears and has ears, an elephant trunk, and earrings.
Animation: Sesame English Cookie Monster: E for Elephant.
Affs: Cubby Creature, repeat from earlier this season.
Number of the Day: Murray and the kids count out 11 fingertips and farm animals.
Animation/Song: Nice song, don't rully know what the title would be...
Ode to Eleven?
Eleven, Don't You Be So Sad?
Super Grover 2.0: Nest Moving Day, New! !
Oh no... They're going with the classic comedic bit of moving a baby grand piano all the way up into the bird family's nest.
Grover tries flipping the piano with his super spatula. Then he just lets some balloons float him up up and away, getting tangled in Mrs. Bird's laundry rope line. The birds fly the laundry rope to the bridge, tieing one end to the piano, ultimately feeding the rope in through a pulley to lift the piano.
Grover sounds like he's belittling the bird family because they aren't as superheroey as he is... Leading to them solving their own problem.
Muppets: Murray plays Sounds of the Street, hearing some birds, car horns, and a tapdancing octopus.
Song: What I Am. *Gets ready for the rant of repeating other material than the special segments in the same season. And yet, wasn't that part of the early seasons? I mean, watch Old School Volume 1 and Jazz Number 2 gets repeated twice or thrice in the same episode.
Animation: Music boom patterns?
Elmo's World: Drawing, is this new?
Closing: Murray rewinds to announce the sponsors.

In terms of the street story, this was another good one. They really played the clash of technological advancement vs. old-fashioned man (er monster) power.
Also... This i-Pogo instruction manual reads like stereo instructions.
*Hears Harry Belafonte music in the background.
Oh, sounds like Zoe must've gotten an A in math, that's our Little Miss Countalong.

Till next time.

 

[Oscarfan]

You're kidding me? They re-used "What I Am?" already? They have a whole library of stuff to choose from. Even though they don't show any classic segments anymore, there's still plenty of recent material that they could've used. There's no excuse.

EDIT: And on the subject of the early seasons, they didn't really have a choice but to re-use stuff multiple times in an episode. 130 hour-long shows is a lot of time to fill, especially when you're just starting out. However, today we have less shows and less inserts in each show, so they could easily fill each one up with a different set of inserts, instead of the same things from this and last season.

 

[Drtooth]

BEST... EPISODE... OF.... THE....SEASON! Just for mocking Apple and their followers. A pogo stick in which the pogoing is an afterthought? BRILLIANT! And they even did a caricature (sorta) of the "I'm a Mac" guy as Mack. I hope Apple doesn't get sour about this like they did with Ellen. Plus, you can't go wrong with a Baby Bear/ Telly plot.

And HEY! Phil Dunfie! 3 stars from 2 of my favorite TV shows in one year, 2 of them on the same show and married to each other on said show.

Lonely 11 is PROOF Sesame Street needs to do more open calls for animations. There are so many inhouse ones that just fall flat and stink... look at the Chibi-chibi Cookie-chan segment for the millionth time. I know SS doesn't like submissions or anything and they commission those by themselves... but they NEED to get new, energetic blood into these animations. That way we'll never have to see Mural painting kids and Hello Kitty segments produced for other international shows waste anyone's time again.

Finally a NEW Super Grover segment. Really liked the pun of him helping the Robin family, and the little Robin becoming a little superhero at the end.

You're kidding me? They re-used "What I Am?" already? They have a whole library of stuff to choose from. Even though they don't show any classic segments anymore, there's still plenty of recent material that they could've used. There's no excuse.

I'm guessing that might have to do with the Katy Perry skit. But there IS no excuse for reusing something like that. Super Grover and Abby segments are bad enough, but a long musical number, even a good one, is bull. But most of the rest of the episode was good, so I can't really complain.

 

[The Count]

Yeah... Believe me, there's an untapped gold mine they could be making use of from the various Classic SST clip sources on YouTube and their video player (which I've never rully been able to make use of myself).

Oh well, nothing for it but to trudge-trudge streaka-streaka onward with our reviews Shane.

 

[nayrbgo]

I'll have to check out the iPogo bit. That sounds like a new idea on the show that I'd enjoy.
Which makes me wonder -- do the new seasons have any of that edge that we loved in the first 10 or so years (depending who you ask, of course!) ?
Mocking Apple seems like a relatively worthwhile risk, but it doesn't really address strip mining to build the nanograms of computer chip technology.

Video Analogy -- Will we ever get the 2010 equivalent of this kind of sass? -- Orange Oscar's Debut 1969

 

[Drtooth]

Well, I mentioned this before, but SS tries to be edgy every so often... unfortunately, there was a couple cases of it backfiring. Among others mocking Fox News (which IS the Grouchiest thing on TV, you don't have to subscribe to any political side to know that) and apparently "brainwashing" kids to be liberal by mocking something that has a bad rep anyway. And that was something that happened 2 years before anyone even realized it. They had to do SO much damage control over the situation... not to mention the Katy Perry thing.

Apple has been pretty much the monolithic company it advertised against back in 1984, under the guise of the hip new fresh thinking idea company (that EVERYONE was getting into... that's really free thinking). Ellen made a cute little gag on her show about her clumsily using an iPhone, and Apple complained, forcing a comedian to go back on a joke. YOU NEVER force a comedian to go back on a joke. Especially a harmless one. It's bad press. Now, if Apple gets offended and makes Elmo say "No! We're just kidding! It's FUN to wait in line for days for the glitch ridden firsts of something you'll gladly throw in the trash in a week when the new one comes out!" then we're gonna know if SW has to walk on broken eggshells.

But nothing was quite as satisfying (until this episode) as their stab at Disney with "Preschool Musical" which ended with the tagline "coming soon! Preschool Musical 2 and Preschool Musical 3, and Preschool musical the stage show, and preschool musical the ice show and Preschool Musical the preschool musical." They deserved that.

Barring "that's what she said" moments, there is the occasional "over the kid's head" innuendos, if VERY VERY mild. The Desperate Houseplants segment ended with a plant saying "that gardener knows what a plant needs!" I'm surprised no one caught them on that.

 

[nayrbgo]

Thanks for the perspective, Drtooth! That was helpful. I'll look for those clips you discuss.

I just found a thought-provoking article on GoogleBooks about Susan, Gordon and Roosevelt Franklin in 1973 from "Black World" magazine. Here's the link. It starts on page 12.

I guess my brain is puzzling over how the "controversies" today appear so far about offending image or corporate strategy, and less about race, class and power. . . which I know are important issues to the original Children's Television Workshop.

Bryan

 

[antsamthompson9]

Sorry about talking about the new episodes now. I've been strested out lately with my parents. The spider one was decent. Leslie's voice for the spider sold it for me. The Snuffle Sneeze one was pretty good. Not funny, but good. The latest one was awesome! The new Super Grover 2.0 was funny. I donno if anyone noticed but, Matt preformed the boy named Matt in the "There's an App for That" song.

 

[antsamthompson9]

You're kidding me? They re-used "What I Am?" already? They have a whole library of stuff to choose from. Even though they don't show any classic segments anymore, there's still plenty of recent material that they could've used. There's no excuse.

I know. Right? The season is getting annoying with all the reused segments.