So we got the kids the first volume of Sesame Street on DVD for Christmas. Here’s some trivia about the first show.
Did you know Oscar the Grouch was originally orange?
-
Some of the original characters were Oscar, Big Bird, Kermit, Bert and Ernie. Elmo and some of the other mainstays didn’t come along until later.
The first show had the “one of these things is not like the other” game and ended with the “this show was brought to you by the letters … and the numbers …” bit.
Carol Burnett was a guest star on the first show.
A juggling Jim Henson appears in the first episode.
Some things in the early episodes would never make it on kids TV today. In one counting cartoon the numbers are shown by flashers opening their trench coats to flash the numbers. No, really.
Bonus! – From reading Jim Henson’s Wikipedia entry I discovered that his Kermit the Frog dates all the way back to the 1950s TV show “Sam and Friends.”
RSS Posts Feed
Gee, I always thought they escaped from Mad comics Spy vs Spy.
Those aren’t flashers, those are street sellers of genuine Rolexxxxxes.
Ah, so they might be “ya wanna buy a watch” guys? That’s a little less creepy, at least.
I remember the 1-10 flashers. I loved them! I also liked when they got to a number, they’d do NINE. Nine slithering snakes. Or am I confused with another bit?
Get your mind out of the gutter. A flasher would open both sides of his/her coat; these guys are opening one side like dodgy salesmen showing their inventory of stolen watches. The dodgy salesman motif occurs again in the Muppet character “Lefty the Salesman,” who constantly tries to sell Ernie letters of the alphabet.
This isn’t Oscar. It’s a dude named Ian that got “canned” after the first episode for bad-mouthing Irish Catholics in Mr. Hooper’s Tavern.
Hey! I simply noticed another message in another weblog that regarded like this. How do you know all these items? That’s one cool post. http://www.sesamestreetgames.org/sesame-street-costumes-kids-happy