The Sesame Family Robinson Sets Sail for the Blogosphere

A brand-new blog gives readers an intimate look at how an offbeat Sesame Street couple juggle twin baby girls and demanding professional lives

Sesame Workshop is continually pushing the limits of the interactive experience, which would explain why it won the 2009 New Approaches—Daytime Entertainment Emmy, which recognizes the use of new media (associated websites, webcasts, and interactivity).

This year alone, Sesame Workshop has made a big splash in the world of broadband. It launched the hugely successful and highly innovative Electric Company website (which between January and the beginning of September 2009 had received four million hits, with a whopping 13 million videos streamed), and it also launched “Family Connections,” a social networking-like website that enables military families to stay connected via a safe, creative online experience.

And it’s only getting better.

On October 2, Sesame Workshop is unveiling a brand-new blog called “Sesame Family Robinson.”

The blog’s creative team is Marty Robinson, the puppeteer behind Snuffleupagus and Telly Monster and a Sesame Street fixture since 1981, and Annie Evans, a writer who has been with the show since 1994. The two met and fell in love while working together on the show, and recently got married on the set! And in January, Evans gave birth to twins, Ripley and Lyra.

Their friend and colleague, Nadine Zylstra, Assistant Vice President, Programming, Digital Media at Sesame Workshop, approached the couple about chronicling their lives as parents and Sesame Street veterans. They eagerly accepted the challenge. Robinson makes short films for the blog, and Evans writes the copy.

“The blog gives you such an insight into Sesame Street — a real behind-the-scenes look, but in an interesting way because they’re parents,” Zylstra says. “So not only are you behind the scenes, but you’re behind the scenes at the Emmys while she’s breastfeeding her twins. So it feels special. It feels like a point of view that moms would be interested in. The other thing is that Marty and Annie are enthralling. They offer this unique point of view. They’re quite eccentric. And that’s quite interesting to people.”

BLENDING THE PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL

“It weaves in and out of our professional and personal life,” says Robinson, kissing the twins goodbye as the nanny takes them out for their morning walk. “So it’s got a natural progression and evolution with the gestation, birth and the growth of the twins. Then, kind of how that interacts with our professional life — how we deal with them as parents, and how we deal with them as professionals as well.”

“I started making these funny films,” Robinson adds. “One of the first little films that I made with this whole thing in mind was a very simple little thing of this particular character, HandyMan. I put little work boots that go on the end of my fingers — and I lift up my fingers and they walk along. So I did this film of this little guy scaling the mountain of Annie’s pregnant belly. He just climbs up very slowly and methodically, traversing and rappelling and finally getting to the top and putting a little Sesame Street flag in her belly button. And the camera pulls back and you see that it’s actually just Annie and I clowning around.

“Some of the films are just about work, some of them are just about the girls, the twins. And Telly Monster as the commentator asks questions to Annie’s stomach [Robinson lapses into Telly Monster’s familiar voice]: ‘Telly Monster here with some burning questions: How do babies stay clean? Find out!’” Telly Monster’s question is then answered in a hilarious video sequence.

Robinson is a one-man band — he shoots the videos himself with one hand and performs with the other.

“Guerrilla-style,” Evans laughs.

NEW PARENTS, YOU’RE NOT ALONE

But the blog has a serious side, too.

Evans coped with the strain of bed rest as well as post-partum depression. “Hopefully, a mother on bed rest who reads the blogs about me being on bed rest will have someone to identify with,” she says. “That birthing twins is a hormones disaster for the first month and a half. So having people to identify with is important, but really we just want people to laugh and enjoy the posts and movies.”

“The whole getting pregnant, staying pregnant, birthing process was pretty much as hard as it could be,” Robinson adds. “And yet we stuck with it, we got through it — we didn’t let it destroy us. We just stuck with it. I have a feeling it’s more of a common journey than people think.”

“I think, lastly,” Evans says, “we’d like people to get another insight into Sesame Street in general, because we are planning on doing a lot of posts and films about backstage on the show and what it’s like to be writers and workers on it — all the effort that goes into making this product that we are so committed to.”

What do they hope readers will take away from the bog?

“We’re older parents, putting it bluntly,” Robinson says. “We’re not nervous. We’ve got kind of a laid-back style. It’s a really loose, funny, happy household we keep here. Not a lot of rules, but everything gets taken care of.

“A lot of people really feel like they’re just alone out there, that the experiences they have are just kind of lonely and unique and that they’re just some crazy oddball. What maybe Annie and I can do is be even odder than everyone else — to kind of take the hurtfulness out of being an oddball. It’s something that Annie and I embrace. Being a couple of goofballs.” 

10/01/2009