Muppet genealogy obscurata

[nonnihil]

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

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

No, I can't say I ever wanted to put a Twiddlebug under a microscope. And the lack of parents and kids didn't particularly bother me in the same way it doesn't bother me for a random single adult human character in a work of fiction: yeah, they presumably have parents, but it's not relevant to the story, so why should I worry about it? (Actually, the thing that bugged me was when the muppets were treated as explicitly child-like, because I generally took them to be *adult* muppets. The muppet-show muppets are clearly adults, with jobs and love lives and homes in cities that they don't share with family. The sesame-street muppets are more ambiguous, but still: they live on their own, like the human adults, which makes them adults. So when parents *did* show up, it always bugged me, because suddenly Grover was a *child* as opposed to goofy and child*like*.)

I don't remember muppet parents on the screen, then I don't remember nieces and brothers and uncles either.

I remember mothers and/or grandmothers for both Ernie and Grover in print, when I was a kid.

[ukelele]

I don't think what bothered him was the lack of parents, but the fact that they didn't exist at one point and then they did at a later point; why did they become allowed, and how did previously nonexistent parents come to be? It's continuity-breaking. Pick one and stay with it; no crisis on infinite muppeverses.

What I hypothesized is that when we were growing up people still had some concept of childhood as a separate stage, one in which children might merrily play together and construct their own weird worlds with only minimal supervision, so you get the Sesame Street world of then, in which you have all of these characters (of admittedly indeterminate age) existing clearly on a child's level and according to a child's logic, and in which adults are merely incidental and, in fact, actually of a different species (the only definitely adult characters were humans, not puppets). Whereas now, we've gotten so child-centric that everything's about the parents, and the concept of children having lives of their own existing independently of experiences their parents have carefully structured for them and continuously supervise is not merely mysterious but actually anathema, so if children can't exist independently of parents, parents must exist on Sesame Street. Mind you I suspect children still think they live in their own worlds and find the childlike characters the relatable ones -- in fact I dearly hope they find the adult characters a bit puzzling and intrusive, because I wouldn't want to be raising a legion of obedient and conformist adults, though I fear we are -- but it's adults, not children, who write the show.

[arcanology]

I would totally buy the hardcover collected edition of Crisis on Infinite Muppeverses.

[madmanatw]

I SEE PRE-CRISIS DC MUPPETVERSE!

[ilai]

I see a lot of muppet deaths... oh no THINK OF THE CHILDREN!