I’m old. I stopped watching Sesame Street before Elmo was part of the cast, when the show was still an hour long on PBS. Created by the Children’s Television Workshop, now called Sesame Workshop, there are few people in the US born after 1970 who didn’t grow up with the show. It’s an icon of kids television and until recently was proof that a show didn’t have to change a lot to be relevant.
Times have changed. Now it’s on HBO and only a half-hour long. Many of the classic skits are a thing of the past. Is the show good? Maybe, but I do find it rather weak compared to what I grew up with. The question is whether or not Elmo is to be blamed. Granted, I really don’t care about Elmo since my favorite Sesame Street resident is Grover, but this video by YouTube channel Entertain The Elk is pointing to the red tickle addict as, if not the killer of Sesame Street, at least the marker for when the show took a downturn in what it was supposed to be. Let’s hear his case, and I have a few thoughts of my own.
Catch more from Entertain The Elk on YouTube
Not mentioned is that Elmo is used by other Sesame Workshop projects. The Furchester Hotel features Elmo as a relative of the owners who, according to the Muppet Wiki because I haven’t really watched it, likes the hotel so much he just hangs around. Cookie Monster is actually employed there as a room service and diner waiter. Then there’s Mecha Builders, an animated show that also has Elmo and Cookie Monster along with Elmo’s fairy bestie Abby as…and I couldn’t tell you why as I only saw one episode…robots who travel through some vortex to help people in need. Both shows are about teaching kids problem solving skills, though the science in the Mecha Builders episode I saw, in which they need to use a special pie to bounce a meteor off of the planet after accidentally eating the one aliens sent to do the job…well, I think you can guess how dodgey the science is after that group of words. Of course the Tickle Me Elmo doll was one of the must-have toys that turned into a fad that was unable to be replicated.
I agree that the shortened time, the “Elmo’s World” segment that ate up too much time when it was still an hour, and the deemphasis of the human characters all contribute to the issues with the show today. It doesn’t have the same charm as the regular show. It feels less like hanging out with friends on an unknown New York City street and more like a performance, and I’m not sure if today’s kids connect to it the same way we did. I’m also not sure they don’t since I don’t have kids (to my dismay and the rest of the world’s relief) and only one of my cousin’s kids is old enough to be remotely interested. Perhaps my cousin’s kids’ kids, which just rubs salt in that wound, but that’s my regret in life. It doesn’t look like the same show and I feel like today’s kids are getting ripped off.
However, if there wasn’t an Elmo, would the other changes still take place? Would it still move to HBO, lose half an hour because somehow today’s kids don’t have the same attention span for reasons nobody’s explained, and lose the charm of the original? I don’t know if Elmo himself, as much as I don’t care for the character, is the problem. CTW changed the name in the 2000s because they weren’t just doing TV shows anymore. They had a few movies, and were really pushing merchandise. There’s almost always been Sesame Street merchandise. In addition to a couple issue of the magazine I still have somewhere a set of books and a playset that can interact with Fisher Price’s “Little People” figures. I also have a Grover puppet that’s seen better days. However, there’s a lot more out there now, and between that and the move to HBO it’s evidence against the continued need for the government to pay for PBS along with all the corporate sponsors. I won’t get into that debate, but the point is the changes made might still have happened without Elmo, though putting more focus on him did pull away from most of the cast. Only Big Bird and Cookie Monsters seems to still be relevant along with Elmo, and as a Grover fan that makes me sad.
The other Muppets show up now and then but Big Bird, Elmo, Cookie Monster, and Abby seem to be the only regulars anymore, maybe also Oscar. I don’t watch much anymore but when I come across it or the spin-off media these are the only four I see with any regularity and the only ones that tend to show up in cameos on talk shows, TV shows, and commercials. You could count Kermit, but despite his Sesame Street origins he’s mostly known for the other group of Muppets that the Jim Henson Company sold to Disney, thus keeping the Street Muppets and Muppet Show Muppets apart. We won’t see another team-up of Muppets, with the rest still with the Jim Henson Company. The last one was the tribute to the late Jim Henson, unless there was another team-up I’m not aware of. The humans are pretty much gone, the skits that entertained the adults watching with their children but didn’t confuse the kids with references they couldn’t follow are a thing of the past, and there’s less connection to the characters inherent in the formula. That’s a shame, but Elmo isn’t the cause, but he is a marker of the changes.
Also, good on them for finally letting the people know Snuffy was real. It’s one thing if he was imaginary, but since he was real the joke got old along with concerns of trust between kids and adults.
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