Joe Hennes works at Sesame Workshop and is the co-proprietor of Tough Pigs.

Over the course of Sesame Street’s 43-year history, characters come and go.  Not everyone can be a Grover or Cookie Monster, lasting decades while still staying fresh and entertaining.  For every Big Bird, there’s a Roosevelt Franklin.  For every Bert and Ernie, there’s a Biff and Sully.  Despite the fact that these characters aren’t around anymore, we still hold a lot of love for them and the joy they gave us over the years.

One of our favorite examples is the great Don Music, the absent-minded composer who fought through his frustration to pen such classics as “Mary Had a Bicycle” and “Drive, Drive, Drive your Car”.  He showed us that creating art isn’t easy, and the final result isn’t always what you expected it to be.

You may not have known that Don Music is responsible for some of your favorite songs.  Before Mary had a little lamb, Don put her on a bicycle. Before Yankee Doodle put a feather in his cap, he cooked some fat spaghetti and called it macaroni. He even wrote a song about how to get to Yellowstone Park, which might sound strangely familiar to fans of the show.

Don Music’s talents weren’t relegated to just his musical career, as he was also the mastermind behind one of our country’s most important documents: The Declaration of Independence.  Don, playing Thomas Jefferson, plays his part in the American Revolution with the help of Grover, who attempts to bring him a new quill.  Just imagine, without Don Music, we might still be under the rule of the British government!

Don Music was performed by the infinitely talented Richard Hunt from his debut in 1974 until Hunt’s passing in 1992.  Several years later, the remaining Don Music sketches were pulled from Sesame Street after several children imitated Don’s unfortunate tendency to bang his head against his piano in frustration.

While Don Music may have hung up his baton and retired, he lives on in classic DVDs like Old School v.2, on YouTube, and in our memories, especially when we get a song stuck in our heads and we just can’t seem to remember how that last line goes…

The Sesame Workshop Blog

The theme this year was “Be Healthy, Be Active, Be You!” The day was focused on ways families could eat healthy and stay physically active, a cause to which both the first lady Michelle Obama and Sesame Workshop are dedicated.

To learn more about the White House’s Easter Egg Roll, click here. To learn more about Sesame Workshop’s commitment to encourage healthy living habits in our children, click here.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

Since November 2011, Baghch-E-Simsim, the Afghan version of Sesame Street, has brought laughter and important lessons about literacy, numeracy and cultural awareness to the children of Afghanistan. We’re excited to share with you this behind-the-scenes look at how one of our newest international co-productions gets made. To learn more about how Baghch-E-Simsim gets made, click here. To learn more about our work in Afghanistan, click here.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

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

Over 43 seasons, Sesame Street has featured hundreds and hundreds of famous actors.  Due to the law of averages, a certain percent of those actors will have gone on to receive a coveted Academy Award statuette.  And it seems that those averages are correct, because a lot of Sesame’s famous friends have an Oscar on their mantle.

Just last night, at the 85th annual Academy Awards, Anne Hathaway won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance of Fantine in Les Miserables. Hathaway stopped by Sesame Street a few years ago to sing “I Want a Snuffy for Christmas” with her pal Big Bird. Now you can add her to the long list of Oscar winners who count Big Bird and the rest of the Sesame Streetgang among their friends.

The earliest Oscar winner to have appeared on Sesame Street may not be a familiar one. Anne Revere, who won the Best Supporting Actress award for National Velvet in 1946, spent a brief time behind the counter at Hooper’s Store in 1977. She wasn’t the only Hooper’s Store employee to win an Academy Award: Natalie Portman, who won Best Actress for Black Swan, took over for Alan for a day in 2004.

Did you know that when Maria and Luis got married on the roof of 123 Sesame Street, they had an Oscar winner in attendance?  Luis’s uncle was played by veteran actor José Ferrer, who won an Academy Award for his role as Cyrano de Bergerac in 1950. Talent runs in the family!

In 1961, Shirley Jones (best known as Shirley Partridge on The Partridge Family) won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Elmer Gantry. 44 years later, she made her Sesame Street debut as Mrs. Goose, the head of Storybook Community School where Baby Bear and Abby attend school. So, she has one more Academy Award than Miss Sparklenose.

Two-time Oscar winner Robert De Niro obviously knows a thing or two about acting, so he gave Elmo a free lesson back in 2001.  In fact, he’s so good, he makes a better Elmo than Elmo.

Meryl Streep holds the record for the most nominations in Academy Award history, but surprisingly, she’s never appeared on Sesame Street. However, that hasn’t stopped us from paying homage to the actress with “Meryl Sheep,” who appeared with Oscar winner Susan Sarandon.

Singer Buffy Sainte-Marie lived on Sesame Street as a regular cast member from 1975-1981, and just a few years later, she won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Up Where We Belong” from An Officer and a Gentleman. It just goes to show, being on Sesame Street can lead to greater things!

Just one year after Marlee Matlin won her Academy Award for Best Actress in Children of a Lesser God, she appeared on Sesame Street to sign the words to “Just the Way You Are”, while Billy Joel sang a modified tongue-in-cheek  version of the song to a particularly cranky Oscar the Grouch.

Not all of Sesame Street’s Academy Award winners are actors.  Composer Alan Menken, who won Oscars for his work on The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Pocahontas also contributed a few songs for Sesame Street, including “What Is Friend?,” “Martian Family,” and “It’s Gonna Get Dirty Again”.

Marisa Tomei surprised everyone when she won the Oscar for Best Supporting  Actress for My Cousin Vinny, but it wasn’t nearly as big a surprise as when she dressed like a diner waitress in the story of the Monkey King.  Yep, that’s a thing that happened.

If you’ve got to learn about how to act afraid or surprised, it might help to have award-winning actors to teach you how.  Both Julia Roberts and Tim Robbins have appeared on Sesame Street with Elmo, and ended up giggling at Elmo’s antics rather than show their intended emotions.  Maybe they’re not as talented as presumed . . .

After a big Oscar win, Academy Award winners like Halle Berry and Nicole Kidman have put aside their statuettes to present the Word on the Street.  Halle Berry appeared with Elmo and a slightly less adorable tiger to talk about “Nibble”, while Nicole Kidman got “Stubborn” with Oscar the Grouch.

After proving his musical talents in Ray, Best Actor winner Jamie Foxx brought his pipes along to Elmo’s Christmas Countdown, where he performed in a Nutcracker medley.  Meanwhile, we already knew that Best Supporting Actress winner Jennifer Hudson could sing, which she proved with “Carol of the Bells” in the same Christmas special.

More than just Oscar winners have appeared on Sesame Street. Many of the hosts of the Academy Awards ceremony have found their way to the most famous street in the world.  Carol Burnett and Richard Pryor appeared in the early days of Sesame Street. Jon Stewart and Chris Rock were both featured in the classic Elmopalooza. The triple-threat of Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, and Whoopi Goldberg all had memorable moments on Sesame Street. Ellen Degeneres and Alec Baldwin both presented Words on the Street, and Chevy Chase made a brief cameo in the Sesame Street film Follow That Bird.

To see videos of all the Oscar winners who have appeared on Sesame Street, click here.

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

Teaching children about science, technology, engineering and mathematics, known as the STEM subjects, is an imperative we here at Sesame Street take seriously.  STEM is not just a major part of the television show’s curriculum; Sesame Workshop makes print books, e-books, and mobile apps aimed at teaching young children about STEM.

Teaching STEM is a passion of ours, which is why we approached Ridgefield Academy in Connecticut to see if any of their teachers wanted to use our book Simple Science Experiments with Elmo and Friends, published by Dover Publications, in the classroom. That’s when we were introduced to Jerry Nash, a science teacher a Ridgefield who saw a way to take this teaching opportunity a step further.

He had his eighth grade students at Ridgefield Academy film the first graders who conducted the experiments. Then he had a group of third and fifth graders do a voice-over for an instructional science video he made. We were blown away by the time and effort Mr. Nash put into bringing Simple Science Experiments with Elmo and Friends to life. We wanted to feature a few clips from the video (see above) in the hopes that teachers and parents might be inspired to think about new ways they can make science fun and relevant for young children.

If you would like to learn more about Ridgefield Academy and the great educational work they do, click here. If you want to get a copy of Simple Science Experiments with Elmo and Friends, click here. And Mr. Nash wanted to let you know if you have any questions about his approach to teaching science, you can reach him here.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

When I was approached to participate in From Broadway with Love – A Benefit Concert for Sandy Hook, I knew that Sesame Street had to be a part of it. I wanted to rally as many of the cast as possible. Emails and phone calls were sent out, and before you knew it I had group of talented volunteers: Alison Bartlett (Gina), Sonia Manzano (Maria), Bob McGrath (Bob), Roscoe Orman (Gordon), from the human cast, and Muppeteers  Carmen Osbahr, Pam Arciero, and Tyler Bunch, performing Rosita, Grungetta, and Herry Monster, respectively. We decided that the song “Just One Person” would be the perfect fit for the benefit, because it is a song about hope, community and love. It seemed to be the right message:

If just one person believes in you

Deep enough and strong enough believes in you

Hard enough and long enough

Before you knew it someone lese would think

If he can do it, I can do it

Making it two

Two whole people who believe in you…

And Sesame Street believes in the children. We have for decades.

But the night was more than just a show – far more. We all knew the gravity and context of the situation. Before the show began we were asked to meet with some of the family members who lost loved ones. It was hard for me to take that first step into the room, because I was afraid that my own sorrow for these innocent people would get the better of me. But the magic and heart of the Muppets made all of that worry disappear. Rosita, Grungetta and Herry were able to bring smiles to the children, which of course brought comfort to the parents. And they greeted all of us like friends, as if we were always part of their community. I guess, in a sense, we were.

The entire evening was, as I’d later tell my colleagues, one of the most important things  I’ve ever done as a cast member of our remarkable show. The tone was critically important to get right, and the director and writers did a brilliant job of finding that right balance. The Muppet characters got to bring some lightness and humor, and we humans got to thank all the people who are trying to begin the process of healing in a devastated community. What is special about what we do is that our show represents both community and heart. And we were all a part of this show because it brings a little light, a little warmth to people’s lives.

We opened the second act of the show, and when Rosita, Grungetta and Herry popped up from behind the Muppet wall, the burst of applause was deafening. And when the human cast walked out, that same wave of appreciation swept over each one of us. As I looked out into the audience, I could see children waving and smiling to the Muppets, and parents openly weeping. It was overwhelming. During rehearsal I asked Carmen to alter one lyric in the song, from “If he can do it, I can do it” to “If she can do it, I can do it.” And I asked her that when she sang this lyric, to think of Victoria Soto, the teacher who saved many of her students by hiding them, and died trying to protect them. So when this part of the song arrived, I was crying, and looked over to see each one of cast with tears in their eyes. I was so moved by the moment that I flubbed the lyric of the song – singing through tears is a skill we’ve yet to master — but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about me, or my performance. It was about so many other much more important things: the solidarity of community, grieving, honoring, remembering, and ultimately, healing.

A parent of Newtown came up to me and said, “Thank you for being able to say many of the things that we are feeling and still are not quite able to express.” Seeing the kids with big smiles and laughing while parents were openly weeping in the audience showed the magnitude of how impactful it was for all of us to be there. And not just us from Sesame Street, but the families as well. Tyler called them “superheroes” for simply being in the house after such a devastating loss – and he’s right.

What is special about what we do is that our show represents both community and heart. We are all a part of the show because each bring a little light, a little warmth to what we do. And I made a vow to myself that I when the time is right, we’ll bring more warmth and more light — I will make some visits up to the Newtown and to continue the healing process. It takes just one person.

The Sesame Workshop Blog

I am never quite sure what my daughter is thinking about as we interact.  I’ll watch my child’s reactions as I read her a book and I wonder whether she is thinking about the words that I am saying, the printed words on the page, the pictures I’m gesturing toward, or something else entirely.  And, when I see her completely mesmerized by something we’re watching on television,  I often wonder what aspects of the program she’s absorbing. One way to get ‘inside’ the minds of young children, especially children too young to articulate their thoughts in words, are studies that measure children’s neural activity while they engage in everyday activities like listening to stories or watching educational television. Such studies can not only help us understand which pieces of information children are processing in everyday situations, but how their brain is filtering, reacting to and registering the content to which they are exposed.

In a recent report published in the journal PLoS Biology, we demonstrated that the patterns of neural activity that children exhibit while watching Sesame Street predict their performance on school tests.  Children and adults all watched the same Sesame Street video as we measured their neural activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We then examined the neural activity over the length of the video for children and adults. We found that the degree to which children showed adult-like brain responses in certain brain regions predicted their math and verbal knowledge levels.  Our results thus indicate that Sesame Street is effective at eliciting patterns of neural activity that are related to children’s school performance.

On the basis of a long line of previous research, we knew that a region of the brain called the intraparietal sulcus supports mathematical reasoning in adults, while a region called the inferior frontal gyrus (or “Broca’s area”) is critical for verbal abilities. In our study, we found that children with more mature neural activity in the intraparietal sulcus had higher math test scores whereas children with more mature neural activity in Broca’s area had higher verbal test scores.  Moreover, in the intraparietal sulcus, a mathematics-related brain region, children showed stronger neural activity during the Sesame Street scenes that were related to counting and numbers compared to other topics.  This tells us that children’s brains were filtering the mathematics-related content of the Sesame Street video into a region of the brain that processes mathematics and suggests that children are in fact thinking about numbers when they encounter them in an episode of Sesame Street.

In designing the study, we chose Sesame Street because it is mainstream: all of the students and professors in our research group had watched Sesame Street as children, or were otherwise familiar with the program.  In pilot MRI testing with children, we found that children were consistently engaged and entertained by the Sesame Street video.  A serious challenge in our developmental neuroimaging research is that young children often become bored and restless after a few minutes in the MRI scanner, which makes it difficult to get accurate brain images.  We did not find that to be the case when we showed them Sesame Street.  Thus, the effectiveness of Sesame Street in this research study was quite clear.

Our results are exciting because they provide the first evidence that children’s brains are doing important work while the children are left to do something that they might do naturally on their own: watch Sesame Street.  This gives us a window into what children’s minds are doing organically, in the real world – something which parents are often curious about, and something that, if understood, could unlock important secrets of children’s cognitive and neural functioning.

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