Against Big Bird, The Gods Themselves Contend In Vain

[scott_lynch]

I was a hard-core Sesame Street viewer from about 1979 to 1984, and my memories of the show are the sort of deep nostalgic tangle you'd expect, with a great deal of idiosyncratic noise blended into the signal. So, for many years, I carried around a vague but emotionally vivid recollection of a Sesame Street episode in which Big Bird and

Comments

[sartorias]

Why didn't I get to see THAT one when I had to sit with my daughter and snore through fifty billion all-alike episodes?

[scott_lynch]

Heh. Sesame Street is probably a little different for those of us who experienced it from 2-7 rather than 30-35. ;)

[sartorias]

Yep. It was a relief when she, about three and a half, decided one day she'd had enough--not only did everybody consider Big Bird a liar because they wouldn't believe about the Snuffelupagus, but "Everybody is a boy. They don't have any girls."

Unfortunately, her next big crush was Disney's Babes in Toyland . . .

[joenotcharles]

Huh? When did Sesame Street ever "not have any girls"?

[sartorias]

The reruns that my daughter was watching during the early eighties were all the shows from the seventies, and pretty much all the characters were 'he's. Ernie, Bert, Cookie Monster, the Count, etc--all her favorites were all 'he.' She was three, and she noticed it.

[joenotcharles]

Oh, I wasn't thinking about the muppets at all - I was thinking about the adults like Linda and Maria, who were all there from the beginning. And that every time I can remember a group of nameless kids, they're a mix of boys and girls. Hm, muppet-wise all I can think of is Prairie Dawn, but I'm not sure if she was around in the 70's. (And I guess Grover's grandmother.)

[sartorias]

Yeah, my daughter paid no attention to the adults. The important "people" (her vocabulary) were the Muppets, with whom she identified.

[mmcirvin]

The Muppet cast always had massive gender imbalance. In those days there was only one female Sesame Street Muppetteer: Fran Brill, who played Prairie Dawn.

In recent years they've tried to rectify that a bit.

[mmcirvin]

...Though, when I was little, I think Big Bird coded as female to me, since he had a high-pitched voice and maybe because I thought "Caroll Spinney" was a female name (though he is also Oscar the Grouch).

I also thought Bert and Ernie's relationship was father-and-son.