Many low-income families did not own a television set and were barely even aware of public television in 1969. Before Sesame Street could be introduced to these families, there needed to be televisions. The Workshop distributed donated televisions to daycare centers, housing projects, libraries and churches throughout New York City. Mobile viewing units brought the show to inner city neighborhoods, to Appalachia, the Choctaw and other Native American communities and to the children of migrant workers. The mobile classrooms offered facilities for fifteen children at a time to watch the show and participate in playful learning activities directed by volunteer teachers from the community.

Soon after Sesame Street aired, there was an overwhelming demand from parents and teachers for information on the show. To meet this demand, the Workshop partnered with local public television stations to produce and distribute promotional materials. Time, Inc. produced a set of parent-teacher guides to help identify the show’s curriculum goals and provide lesson plan guides for the classroom. By the second season, the Workshop created an outreach division called Community Education Services (CES) and set up 10 small satellite offices. The offices were staffed with 2-3 dedicated workers to work with populations in need in New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco, Oakland, L.A., Dallas, and Biloxi.

Even the Sesame Street Muppets and cast got involved in the outreach efforts. A touring cast including Gordon, Susan, Bob, Mr. Hooper, and Big Bird went on a seventeen city cross-country tour performing free shows for children. The tour included a stop at the Nixon White House to perform for the children of ambassadors from around the world. Jessie Jackson and his PUSH coalition in Chicago organized four shows in two days and reached over 10,000 kids in the Chicago area in 1970. In three years, the touring show was estimated to have attracted half a million children.

Bringing televisions to communities through television drives and mobile units, touring Muppets with the cast of Sesame Street, and operating field offices around the country were original, creative ways to bring Sesame Street into communities. Today, in Bangladesh, our outreach means that kids in rural areas can watch the show delivered by rickshaw in the country. In the United States, recent educational initiatives such as science education and military deployment, economic uncertainty and oral health are available for free download on the web. Each outreach effort is a simple extension of our mission to reach and teach children.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

It is hard to imagine Sesame Street without the delightful animations that teach things like letters, numbers, emotions and problem solving. Animations have been a part of the show since the pilot episodes. But back in 1969, the idea of using a series of short animations to act like “commercials” for letters and numbers was a true innovation.

When Joan Ganz Cooney created her proposal for an educational television show, she envisioned borrowing the techniques used in making TV commercials to help teach counting and literacy. Joan and the producers knew that kids were attracted to commercials on TV. What they didn’t know was whether they could successfully create short commercial-like segments for the show that would actually teach to the curriculum.

The search for animators began in August of 1968. During the next 14 months, producers commissioned artists to produce storyboards for short cartoons that taught letters, numbers, counting and words. It was necessary for the artists to create work that met the educational goals of the show but the Workshop placed little restriction on style or length for the pieces. With curriculum in mind, producers poured over storyboards and scripts and selected animations they thought could teach 4-year-olds about letters and numbers.

“The Story of J” was the first animation commissioned by Sesame Street in early 1969. It was designed to familiarize children with a single letter. When the cartoon arrived at the Workshop, the producers were relieved. As producer Dave Connell recalled, “All of a sudden, it worked. We could see somebody understood how to do this.” The cartoon runs just over a minute and shows two round-faced youngsters contemplating the fish hook configuration of an object lowered from the sky. The animation is narrated with a rhymed story involving Joe, a Junebug, a Jar, a Justice, a Jury and a Jail. It even includes the familiar tagline “Here Comes the Judge!” from Laugh-In, a show that was a direct influence on Sesame Street.

Producers then inserted the animation into an hour-long program of randomly chosen children’s television material as if the animation was a spot commercial interruption in the program.  The film was brought to a day care center a few blocks from the Workshop’s offices to be shown to children and was subject to an audience reaction test. The test results suggested that the producers were on the right track. “The Story of J” is such an important part of the history of Sesame Street because it proved that when done right, short animations could get the attention of 4-year-olds and familiarize children with the sound and sight of letters and numbers.

By the end of the first season, the Workshop had commissioned work from 32 animators and film producers. In the first ten years, the Workshop commissioned more than 1,000 live action and animation films for Sesame Street and The Electric Company. The Whitney Museum of Art curated a selection of the films as part of their New American Film Series in 1979. The animation on Sesame Street was groundbreaking in the way it borrowed techniques from TV commercials to teach and for the support the Workshop gave to independent animators and filmmakers. For forty-three years these artists’ creativity and talent have contributed to the success of Sesame Street. Check out some of the show’s iconic animations on SesameStreet.com.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

Beginning with the iconic opening lines to “The Sesame Street Theme” that opened the first episode, music has always played a critical role in setting the educational and creative standards of Sesame Street. Early songs such as “I Love Trash,” “People In Your Neighborhood,” “Green,” “One of These Things,” and “Rubber Duckie” (just to name a few) have a memorable and timeless quality to them. Many have become classics in their own right.

Take the song “Rubber Duckie,” Ernie’s classic ode to bath time toys.  Written by Jeff Moss, the song debuted on February 25, 1970 during Sesame Street’s first season. In the skit, Ernie, performed by Jim Henson, soaks in a bath and sings the song to his very favorite little pal. When the Workshop began releasing musical content from the show on records in the summer of 1970, “Rubber Duckie” was included on the very first album. The song went on to sell more than 1 million copies as a single and reached number 11 on the Billboard chart in 1971. It was nominated for The Best Recording for Children Grammy in 1970, losing out to The Sesame Street Book and Record, which itself contained the song. Since then, the song has been included on 21 different albums released by the Workshop.

“Rubber Duckie” inspired follow-up songs like “Do De Rubber Duckie”, “D-U-C-K-I-E”, and “Put Down the Duckie.” During Season 25, Little Richard sat in a bathtub at the piano and performed a rock-and-roll version of the song. In a skit from 2000, Ernie convinced Bert to sing the song as practice in the even that Ernie wouldn’t be around to sing it to his friend. The song has been recorded in Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Spanish and Dutch. In 1996, a German version of “Rubber Duckie” sold 1.8 million copies. The English version on Sesame Street has almost 14 million views on YouTube.

Jeff Moss, composer and lyricist of "Rubber Duckie"

The words and music for “Rubber Duckie” exemplify Jeff Moss’s writing style – fun, energetic, sentimental, and entertaining. Moss was invited to join Sesame Streetas the original head writer, composer and lyricist in 1969 – a job he thought would last for six months. He ended up spending more than two decades as a writer and composer for the series and penned many of show’s best known songs including “Rubber Duckie,” “People In Your Neighborhood,” “I Love Trash” and “I Don’t Want to Live on the Moon.” In an interview in 1998, Moss explained his approach to song writing. “I don’t look at writing for children is that different than writing for anybody else,” he said. “The emotions that you write about are for the most part the same as you would write about for anybody. You just do it with a vocabulary of experience that children will understand.” In 2007, Princeton University ranked Moss among its top 20 most influential alumni, citing the effects of his songs and characters on the Sesame Street audience.

Music and singing have always been an integral part of the material taught on Sesame Street. Some songs even had success far beyond the show’s reach. On any given night, in any city or town, in houses with young children, “Rubber Duckie” is still sung as part of the nightly bath time ritual. Hearing the song at any age reminds us of something Jeff Moss once said. “All of us have a great deal of child left in us.”

The Sesame Workshop Blog

How would you update a classic? Take a treasured story from one era and spruce it up for a new century’s readers?

Sesame Workshop has produced over 1200 books in a variety of formats since the early 1970s. Part of the philosophy of our publishing group is the willingness to tell stories in whatever formats will attract and reach preschoolers. Animated book apps and e-books are the most recent formats in which Sesame Street characters have come to life. For the Workshop, an eagerness to create books in emerging digital formats is tempered by the need to balance innovation with our mission of education. It is a delicate balancing act, but one that the Workshop’s publishing group has pulled off time and time again.

In September, Sesame Workshop partnered with Callaway Digital Arts to produce an app version of the classic storybook The Great Cookie Thief. The story of The Great Cookie Thief originally aired as a Muppet segment on Sesame Street in 1971. Later the script became the basis for a storybook published in 1977 by Western Publishing. The story takes place in an Old West watering hole where residents talk about their collective problem: a thief who has been stealing the town’s cookies. Townfolk compare the attributes of a suspicious character (Cookie Monster) with an image on a wanted poster to determine if he is indeed the Great Cookie Thief.

In the process of transforming the show segment into a book, editors needed to capture the spirit of the story while meeting the curriculum goals of literacy and relational concepts (comparing objects).

Work on a book involves a lot of give and take. There are complex negotiations between illustrators, authors and editors to balance the creative vision for the book with what is appropriate and educational for young readers. When I pulled files from Sesame’s archive, illustrator Michael Smollin’s early sketches revealed notes from the book’s editors, asking him to rethink scenes with cowboys gambling, remove a cowboy’s pistol, and make sure only milk was served at the bar.

Illustrations also needed to remain consistent throughout. The fringe on a cowboy’s shirt, stitching on boots and the placement of the wanted posters needed to look the same from spread to spread.

The most notable request from the editors was for stronger female representation. When The Great Cookie Thief aired on Sesame Street, no female Muppets were written into the script – only cowboys and Cookie Monster. In a memo to Workshop editor Anna Jane Hayes, the team at Western Publishing was passionate about filling that gap: “We are very much concerned with avoiding sexism in our books and hope to include nothing that might seem to be demeaning to women. Therefore, we ask that you take special care in your presentation of the “dancing girls” here. … It is important also, that at least one more woman be included in a position of importance – as a cowgirl with a speaking part.”

The use of speech balloons was an effective way to use dialogue originally written for the show. Yet the placement of speech balloons affects how well young readers follow and understand the story. Editors repeatedly questioned: Do the balloons respond to each other and make sense? The positioning of the tail on a speech balloon could make all the difference in understanding who was talking. Use of overlapping balloons helped make it obvious when two sentences needed to be read in sequence.

When the Great Cookie Thief was adapted for an app, characters were re-drawn digitally, animated, and given voices. New technologies meant more interactivity between the reader and the story, so additional lines of dialogue were written to prompt the reader to participate, not just passively watch the action unfold. To create the app, editors at Sesame Workshop worked with programmers and designers at Callaway Digital Arts to update the book for the new digital format while still maintaining the educational themes of the book.

The interactivity of the app pulls young readers in by asking them to help the characters in the book. It’s the reader who makes comparisons between the wanted poster and Cookie Monster. To encourage this participation, it was important for children to relate to the characters acting as models for action in the story. Editors decided to make a child character already present in the book as gender-neutral as possible. In extra lines written for the app, gender-specific “he” and “him” terms were replaced with “the kid.” Puppeteer Fran Brill was asked to provide the voice, since she’s proven adept at performing both male and female characters on Sesame Street. She was able to create a voice that kids could interpret as either a girl or a boy – whichever helped them engage more with the story.

Callaway’s designers and programmers pored over 100 books from the Sesame Street library before choosing The Great Cookie Thief to adapt as their most recent project. The story won their vote because of its Cookie Monster star (a favorite character among the programmers) and the potential for interaction suggested by the illustrations and dialogue. There was also the hope that the story’s humor and the vintage look would appeal to adults, helping to promote a shared family experience.

The original plan was to adapt just the storybook into a simple story app. But as designers worked with new technologies they couldn’t resist adding a virtual photo booth where parents and kids can create their own wanted posters by adding props, googly eyes, and mustaches to self-portraits and Muppet characters. Editors and artists added wry humor to additional dialog and animations. When a cowboy hunts for his glasses to examine the wanted poster, he first pulls out an array of odd props from his jacket, including a sly homage to Steve Jobs. These additions help with the flow of the story and reward readers for lingering longer on a page.

For Senior Editor Betsy Loredo, working on book apps has required a tectonic shift in her thought process as an editor. In The Monster at the End of This Book, Grover desperately tries to keep the reader from turning the pages of his story so they will not reach the end of the book. When the story was developed into an animated app, it was difficult to imagine how to adapt it digitally when the whole concept revolved around physically turning pages. By accepting the idea that terms like “book”, “page” and “turn” were metamorphosing into something different for kids growing up reading books digitally, the possibility for what a book might become seemed limitless.

Understanding the evolving media children are using to read and having a presence in that media means that Sesame Workshop will continue to use books to extend Sesame Street’s curricular goals, no matter how kids turn the pages.

The Sesame Workshop Blog