I went about 35 straight years without watching the Cookie Monster on Sesame Street. I have to say, I am disappointed that he hasn’t experienced any emotional maturity, nor has he expanded his interests. The main thing that has changed is that this Elmo character came on the scene. Even though he’s a liberal activist, I don’t care for him. I do still enjoy Bert & Ernie, however, even though there is no truth to the rumor that they are gay.
Here are some other things to consider:
The TV series Friends undermined family values; Sesame Street taught ethnic minorities about civil disobedience; Happy Days had a subtle anti-Vietnam subtext; and the 1980s cop show MacGyver tried to persuade pistol-packing Americans that guns are bad. That, at least, is the considered opinion of Ben Shapiro, an investigative author and right-wing columnist who will publish a detailed exposé tomorrow telling how Hollywood producers, writers and actors have been secretly using TV to promote what he calls a “radical” left-leaning political agenda.
I get the family values bit. But I have to laugh at the idea that teaching ethnic minorities about civil disobedience is a bad thing. And wasn’t it a bit late to worry about civil disobedience by the time Sesame Street came on the scene in 1969? The Jim Crow laws were already gone. Also, are we still debating Vietnam? Where are the pro-Vietnam voices? And MacGyver? That guy could stop an army with nothing more than some duct tape and a box of Milk Duds. If you could do that, you’d be less interested in guns, too.
Our discourse is so stupid.
It was always troubling when Sesame Street was “brought to you by the number 3“. :::shudder:::
you mean the GAY number 3 and the socialist letter L.
Shapiro’s an idiot.
That said, the electric company used to have some pretty subversive drug humor. I think the video’s been taken down, but there was a great example I had linked to. It was an animated alligator filling 4 giant test tubes with liquid. Once filled, each test tube would become a letter, eventually spelling out the word “trip”. That’s when the scene melted away, the word “trip” turned into a tiny sailboat, and with weird organ music in the background, the alligator sailed into a psychedelic sunset.
Of course there is also “Puff the Magic Dragon”
on a related note, I was watching old HR Puff–n-stuff episodes last night on youtube and… well wow. That is some seriously hallucinogenic shit.
Paul Jacobs’ “Beginning, Middle, and the End” is pretty trippy, too.
Pterodactyls, Mrs. Fazzini, cavemen…..
I wonder if Shapiro came across Brother Kirk’s appearances on Sesame Street (not to mention the classic 1974 album, “Pete Seeger and Brother Kirk Visit Sesame Street”.
Brother Kirk was the Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick. In late 1964 he cofounded the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an armed self-defense organization whose mission was to protect the civil rights movement from the KKK.
The Deacons for Defense eventually had over 20 local chapters throughout Louisiana and Mississippi, and were instrumental in helping to force the federal government to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the rural Deep South.
For more, see Lance Hill’s book, “The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance & the Civil Rights Movement”.
It is a mark of how brutal and violent Jim Crow was that it moved a big, gentle bear of a man like Brother Kirk to take up arms.
Cookie Monster is actually my favorite muppet. He’s awesome. I mean, he’s a perfect metaphor for the pure, unbridled, compulsive American id.
And then they had to go and blaspheme with that “Cookies are a sometimes food” bullshit. Now THAT’S un-American.
Me and Elmo go up an alley, only one of us is coming back out, and he’s not going to be red and furry. That voice is like an ice-pick.
Elmo makes Gilbert Godfried sound like Morgan Freeman, or James Mason.
Those damn socialists at PBS are destroying our children’s beautiful little minds with concepts like sharing and racial equality and all that ramming of
gay muppet cockhippie values down our kid’s throats! They’re being indoctrinated right in their own living rooms! Ahhhhhhh! They’re even forcing pure-as-the-driven-snow white kids to speak Messican and Ebonics!!11!!3 out of 4 of his examples are the product of the Free Market at work. I guess the solution is to have government censorship of comedies?
Our discourse is so stupid because 4-year-olds like Shapiro get media time with relentlessly stupid, inconsequential drivel. There are at least a few dozen folks right on this site who could write circles around this ass, yet don’t have outfits like Regenry and Harper Collins marketing them.
It’s not accidental, either. It really isn’t. Distraction is the product, not the by-product.