The New York Times re****ts that those shows we loved as a kid have now been
deemed unsuitable for children. DVDs of early "Sesame Street" episodes
contain
a warning that "these early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for
grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child":
Back then--as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS
Nov. 10, 1969--a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find
herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her
hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to
meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but... well,
he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk
and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole. . . .
I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of "Sesame
Street," how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for
toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the
parody "Monsterpiece Theater." Alistair Cookie, played by
Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later
gobbled. According to Parente, "That modeled the wrong
behavior"--smoking, eating pipes--"so we reshot those scenes
without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether."
Which brought Parente to a feature of "Sesame Street" that
had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered
Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably
miserable--hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert,
too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact,
is especially sun****ney except maybe Ernie, who also seems
slow.) "We might not be able to create a character like Oscar
now," she said.
If it weren't for "South Park," there'd be nothing for kids to watch
today!
--
It is simply breathtaking to watch the glee and abandon with which
the liberal media and the Angry Left have been attempting to turn
our military victory in Iraq into a second Vietnam quagmire. Too bad
for them, it's failing.
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