A Monkey Book Report

I've made my love for Sesame Street well known on this blog so when I found out this book was out there in the world I had to read it. After weeks of it being checked out from my local library I finally snapped it up at the Johnson City Public Library.

I finished it last night and I can tell you that it's a very well written, engaging history of the TV show that literally changed the face of children's TV. It moves quick and covers lots of ground. My only quibble with it would be that the author spent too much time, fully one third of the book, on the time that it took the folks behind the show to get it on the air. For me, I wanted to him to dig deeper into the history of the show during it's airing and he could have glossed over some of the details about the endless meetings they had before the show hit the airwaves. But honestly, that's a minor thing compared the the book as a whole.

This book gave me a whole new appreciation for Sesame Street and the other Children's Television Workshop shows, such as The Electric Company. These two shows influenced generations of kids, writers, artists, puppeteers, and TV as a whole beyond measure. Our cultural landscape would be as barren as Nicole Kidman's womb during her marriage to Tom Cruise without the shows that the CTW put out. I was a huge fan of their work before I read this book and I'm an even bigger fan now knowing what they went through to get these shows on the air.

Here's some random facts I learned from this book:

• Captain Kangaroo was a major dick but he had a wicked sense of humor. For example one night someone left a cage that contained two small monkeys next to a cage of raccoons. The raccoons killed and had partially eaten the monkeys. They went ahead and used the raccoons later that day on the show and when someone remarked how long the tails on the raccoons were Captain Kangaroo said, "Do you think they might have a little monkey in them?"
  
• Actress Holly Robinson Peete is the daughter of the guy who originated the character of Gordon on Sesame Street.
• Most of the white folks on the staff of the show hated the Muppet character of Roosevelt Franklin, but all the black actors felt the character was not offensive and that black kids needed a character they could identify with, so they kept him on for a few years.
  
• Jim Henson had balls the size of Texas. He refused to let Disney bully him into selling them the rights ot the Muppets on Sesame Street when he sold his company to them. The rights to the Sesame Street Muppets stayed with Henson's family and the CTW, and as a result they've made all parties involved millions of dollars through the years.
• The show was a product of it's time and it could never ever be green lit in today's environment. By a product of it's time I mean that the late 60's and early 70's were a time when some rich folks felt like they had an obligation to reach out and help ghetto and underprivileged kids, and this TV show was an attempt to do just that. And it succeeded wildly. Today, the TV industry is too profit hungry to green light a show like this. And most rich folks today don't give a shit about the urban poor.