Muppet genealogy obscurata
ukelele pointed me to this -- an NPR piece on new Sesame Street episodes dealing with Elmo's coping with his father's deployment with an unspecified branch of the military, presumably to Iraq.
(I had to overcome my visceral loathing of Elmo to listen to this. Perhaps because I enjoyed Sesame Street in too analytic a way in my early youth, I am horribly annoyed by most of its innovations since, from the various new theme songs to the 1985 making-real of Mr. Snuffleupagus to the Lovecraftian awfulness that is Elmo. I am a clear example here of the axiom: Sesame Street should be embargoed from kids who might grow up to be continuity zealots.)
Anyway, what occurred to me here is that -- Elmo has parents! I know, I know, this is no surprise to any of you youth-culture literati, but I had never digested this fact. I had remembered Sesame Street as having fairly clearly followed the old Disney rules: Only horizontal and diagonal family relations, never vertical, are allowed on-screen; characters might be brothers and uncles and nephews, but were never parents or children. I'm sure you know the phenomenon: childrens' television characters with limitless supplies of nieces and nephews. For instance, Bert was possessed of two aunts, an uncle, a brother, and a nephew, but neither forbears nor offspring. Big Bird had an uncle, an aunt, six cousins, and exactly zero prior or subsequent generations of seven-foot-tall mutant parakeets. Cookie Monster had a niece, nephew, and sister, but with a single exception in a musical number in '77 no parents.
So I did some research (The indispensible research tool here is the Muppet wiki). Until the mid-80s, muppet parents were rare on-screen (although various muppet parents appeared in print before that, indeed to an extent that makes one wonder if different rules were used in print than on the screen). A small number of nuclear families are present in very early seasons, mostly in one-off sketches. In the mid-80s, grandparents began to fill out the nepotic relations, and in the years after that parents seem to have become ubiquitous. Muppets reproduced like psychotic little puppet bunnies with time machines, producing first their grandparents and then their own parents in great numbers. By the late 80s, muppets were no longer the families-of-nephews of the cartoons but an actual felt-and-fabric ecosystem.
I wonder what the written or unwritten rules really were that made vertical family relations forbidden for a decade and then ubiquitous. It seems such an odd phenomenon, and such an abrupt change, all the odder and more abrupt since it happened when I was no longer watching the program -- the moment you turn your back, they start to spawn reverse generations! What a world of wonders those colorful puppets lived in, unaware!
(And yes, I have always been obsessed with reverse-engineering the rules and dynamics of fictional worlds, but I do hope that this is a common thing: Surely all 5-year-olds wonder about the taxonomy and anatomy of muppets, or long to put a Twiddlebug Muppet under a magnifying lens or an Anything Muppet under a scalpel to learn their natures in more self-directed detail? But these are thoughts one learns not to share aloud at that age; they distress and confuse.)
(I had to overcome my visceral loathing of Elmo to listen to this. Perhaps because I enjoyed Sesame Street in too analytic a way in my early youth, I am horribly annoyed by most of its innovations since, from the various new theme songs to the 1985 making-real of Mr. Snuffleupagus to the Lovecraftian awfulness that is Elmo. I am a clear example here of the axiom: Sesame Street should be embargoed from kids who might grow up to be continuity zealots.)
Anyway, what occurred to me here is that -- Elmo has parents! I know, I know, this is no surprise to any of you youth-culture literati, but I had never digested this fact. I had remembered Sesame Street as having fairly clearly followed the old Disney rules: Only horizontal and diagonal family relations, never vertical, are allowed on-screen; characters might be brothers and uncles and nephews, but were never parents or children. I'm sure you know the phenomenon: childrens' television characters with limitless supplies of nieces and nephews. For instance, Bert was possessed of two aunts, an uncle, a brother, and a nephew, but neither forbears nor offspring. Big Bird had an uncle, an aunt, six cousins, and exactly zero prior or subsequent generations of seven-foot-tall mutant parakeets. Cookie Monster had a niece, nephew, and sister, but with a single exception in a musical number in '77 no parents.
So I did some research (The indispensible research tool here is the Muppet wiki). Until the mid-80s, muppet parents were rare on-screen (although various muppet parents appeared in print before that, indeed to an extent that makes one wonder if different rules were used in print than on the screen). A small number of nuclear families are present in very early seasons, mostly in one-off sketches. In the mid-80s, grandparents began to fill out the nepotic relations, and in the years after that parents seem to have become ubiquitous. Muppets reproduced like psychotic little puppet bunnies with time machines, producing first their grandparents and then their own parents in great numbers. By the late 80s, muppets were no longer the families-of-nephews of the cartoons but an actual felt-and-fabric ecosystem.
I wonder what the written or unwritten rules really were that made vertical family relations forbidden for a decade and then ubiquitous. It seems such an odd phenomenon, and such an abrupt change, all the odder and more abrupt since it happened when I was no longer watching the program -- the moment you turn your back, they start to spawn reverse generations! What a world of wonders those colorful puppets lived in, unaware!
(And yes, I have always been obsessed with reverse-engineering the rules and dynamics of fictional worlds, but I do hope that this is a common thing: Surely all 5-year-olds wonder about the taxonomy and anatomy of muppets, or long to put a Twiddlebug Muppet under a magnifying lens or an Anything Muppet under a scalpel to learn their natures in more self-directed detail? But these are thoughts one learns not to share aloud at that age; they distress and confuse.)