Plaza Sésamo: “Yo Crecí con Plaza Sésamo!”

The Muppet cast of Plaza Sésamo

You know you’re doing a pretty good job of producing a show when a country’s vice president gets out of his airplane seat to shake your hand. Plaza Sésamo executive producer Ginger Brown certainly got a kick out of it when it happened to her. She was on a long flight from Bogota to New York in April 2007 when she sat next to a charismatic man who was tickled pink to learn that she worked on the Latin American version of Sesame Street.

“Ah, Plaza Sésamo!” he exclaimed. “The vice president of Colombia is on the plane, and he loves your show.”

Brown remembers that Vice President Francisco Calderón “ immediately came up and shook my hand and got all excited and talked about his kids, and how much his kids loved Plaza,  and how important it was in terms of …  educating children in Latin America.”

“Yo crecí con Plaza Sésamo!” Calderon exclaimed, which in English means, “I grew up with Plaza Sésamo!”

Calderón is in good company. Many Colombians grew up with Plaza Sésamo, which first aired in 1972 on Televisa and was broadcast for four seasons. It returned in 1994 as one of Sesame Workshop’s first international collaborations with local production teams; Sesame Workshop, Televisa and Discovery Kids Latin America have collaborated to produce six seasons of the program since then. Currently airing in 34 countries, the show gives children an early start on pre-school learning, while also focusing on diversity, gender equality, and health.

Embracing the diversity between the United States border and Tierra del Fuego

Since Plaza Sésamo airs across much of Central and South America, the show’s creators work carefully to create content that appeals to children in a variety of countries.

The production teams base their animations and live action films in countries throughout the region. Between 2000 and 2003 alone, Sesame Workshop produced films and animation for Plaza Sésamo in Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Peru.

Plaza producers are also eager to introduce their viewers to the many cultures that thrive in countries across Latin America, so they create material that represents children from each section of the vast region, and have worked on local live action films in Argentina, Guatemala, Colombia, Mexico, and Chile.

“The way to really reach out to kids is to continually produce materials in all the very diverse countries,” Brown explains.

In this way, children see their own country and culture represented, and they also learn about the countries and cultures in neighboring countries. As different forms of Spanish are spoken in some of these countries, Plaza uses Colombian Spanish, a more neutral form.

Young Colombian viewers recently had a chance to include their voices on the show. In 2006, Sesame Workshop and the World Heart Federation began a three-year collaboration to teach Colombian families how to maintain a healthy heart and live a healthy life. As part of this Healthy Habits for Life initiative, the two parties decided to have children present these topics themselves, so they brought in two animation companies – one in Bogotá, one in Cali – to conduct a children’s animation workshop.

A group of four- to eleven-year-olds learned how to write scripts, draw storyboards, and use a program called After Effects to create animated footage. The children wrote their own stories, developed characters, chose music and sound effects, and used their own voices for the characters.

One animation, “Super Zana y Sus Amigas” (“Super Zana and His Friends”) is about a carrot -- Super Zana -- who rescues children hypnotized by candy. Along with his fruit and vegetable friends, he teaches the children to eat a balanced diet. His name is a play on words, too – in a slang sense, “Super Zana” means both “Super Carrot” and “Super Health.”

The children’s segments, which incorporate the lessons learned from the Healthy Habits for Life initiative, are part of Plaza Sesamo’s eleventh season, airing in 2008.  

Similarly, through a project in Argentina, teenagers worked on live action films, featuring six- and seven-year-olds, that captured vignettes of Argentinian children’s lives and brought the country to life for Plaza viewers across Latin America.

A set that reflects Latin America as a diverse whole

While showing many aspects of life throughout Latin America, the team also wished to create a set that would immediately make sense to any child throughout the region. When working with a designer to update the set in 2003, they decided to base their new set around a mercado, which is a small market that is central to life in towns all over Latin America.

“The mercado is the place where people in a small town go for all their shopping needs – food fruit, even, sand for their houses,” says Televisa’s Plaza Sésamo executive producer Javier Williams.

Williams explains that the mercado is a quintessential sight in any Latin American town. He says that the buildings housing these markets are typically brightly colored – lots of purples, pinks, blues, and other colors. The new set incorporates these vivid colors, and sets them against brilliant lighting that mimics the bright Latin American sun.

Alice in Wonderland meets Indiana Jones

As the culture is still largely male dominated, especially in rural areas, Plaza Sésamo creators decided to make gender equity a major focal point.

Lola (Plaza Sésamo)

“We had to find a different way for kids to look at gender equity and the way to do it was to create equal opportunities,” she says.

They achieved this through The Lola Adventures, a series of segments that chart the experiences of a four-year-old girl Muppet. While Lola had been on Plaza for a long time, viewers enjoyed The Lola Adventures format so much that producers decided to keep going. Lola is emerging as a favorite with both girls and boys, and her personality is so active and adventurous that she manages to transcend gender roles.

“[The] goal is to portray girls as active and adventurous learners,” says Brown. “Often girls are given passive roles, so we wanted to model Lola as just getting out there all the time.”

The series shows Lola flying like a butterfly through Mexican forests, climbing mountains in Peru, and talking to statues that relate a fascinating history lesson. Fearless Lola parachutes down Brazil’s Iguazu Falls, and in one wildly imaginative episode, she climbs into a submarine and goes on a journey through her own heart!

“She is Alice in Wonderland meets Indiana Jones,” explains Brown, “but for Lola, Wonderland is literacy, letters, numbers, and culture, and the wild adventure is learning to read and write and exploring the diversity of a child’s world.”

Now in its twelfth season, Plaza Sésamo is well on the way to creating a new generation of children who may one day grow up to be vice presidents or presidents of their countries. Sesame Workshop looks forward to the day when members of a new generation greet us with ecstatic exclamations of, “Yo crecí con Plaza Sésamo!”

Funding Partners
Tetra Pak
World Heart Federation (Colombia)

Production Partners
Discovery Kids Latin America
TeleFutura
Televisa

Broadcasters
Discovery Kids (Latin America)
PBS
Televisa
TeleFutura
Univision (Puerto Rico)

As of March 2008, Plaza Sésamo is airing in the following countries:
Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda
Argentina
Aruba
Bahamas
Barbados
Belize
Bermuda
Bolivia
British Virgin Islands
Cayman Islands
Chile
Colombia
Costa Rica
Cuba
Dominica
Dominican Republic
Ecuador
El Salvador
Falkland Islands
French Guiana
Grenada
Guadeloupe
Guatemala
Guyana
Haiti
Honduras
Jamaica
Martinique
Mexico
Montserrat
Netherlands Antilles
Nicaragua
Panama
Paraguay
Peru
Puerto Rico
St. Kitts & Nevis
St. Lucia
St. Vincent & The Grenadines
Suriname
Trinidad & Tobago
Turks & Caicos Islands
United States
Uruguay
US Virgin Islands
Venezuela