Television: Who’s Afraid of Big, Bad TV?

CHILDHOOD is the only time and place that grows larger as it is left behind. Two weeks at the seashore appear, in memory, as a floodlit Oz. The first airplane ride might have been to Venus. The early hours spent with radio, TV and films are the foundation of adult imagination. Yet when children grow up, they suffer some sad amnesia of taste. How else could former kids provide television programs designed to do nothing with time but kill it­as if, in Thoreau’s phrase, it were possible to kill time without injuring eternity? From the moment it was old enough to earn money, U.S. television has been squandering the country’s greatest natural resource: the young audience.

Until last year. Abruptly, the electronic babysitter moved onto a street called Sesame. It was a combination of the circus, a classroom and the Brothers Grimm. At first it was suspected of merely looking brilliant, compared with the boring horrors of standard children’s programming. Vulgarity and violence dominate children’s video: mice endlessly bombing cats, family “comedies” with dumb daddies, mischievous kids and dogs who wag their way into your heart, all accompanied by commercials as intense as the Chinese water torture (“Be the first on your block . . . Ask Mommy to get some . . . New! Big! Free! Wow! WOW!”). By now, even the most cynical promoters have begun to realize that Sesame Street is no fluke and that it is excellent in its own right, not merely relative to the rest of the junior TV scene. In its new series, just begun, the program proves that it is not only the best children’s show in TV history, it is one of the best parents’ shows as well.

From the first, kids treated Sesame Street like the yellow brick road. Its heavy stress of cooperation over competition, its amalgam of the wholly familiar and the totally exotic were irresistible. It was only grownups who expressed doubts. And who could blame them? For openers, the Street looks as if a toy truck had overturned in Harlem. There is no Disneyesque nostalgia for the inaccessible past. The place is in the unavoidable present; the clothing of the cast is well worn, the umber colors and grit of inner-city life are vital components of the show. Some other main ingredients: a 7-ft. canary, Big Bird, who waddles around the set constantly making mistakes. He may be the only adult-sized object in the world that kids can feel superior to.

Monsters run the joint. There is, for instance, a bundle of fuzz with pingpong-ball eyes and a sonic boom of a voice known only as Cookie Monster (no middle initial). His appetite is so fierce that, given a choice between ten thousand dollars and a cookie, he opts immediately for the latter. There are other creatures on the show, like Bert and Ernie­humanoids with cartoon hands, three fingers and a thumb. Bert, who has one frowning eyebrow, chivvies Mutt-and-Jeff style with Ernie, a bulbous-nosed charmer whose favorite sport is sitting in the tub, rhapsodizing to his rubber duckie. Oscar the Grouch lives in a garbage can. There he fulminates, venting such mock aggressions that by comparison a child in a tantrum is Little Mary Sunshine.

The human “hosts” are four: a black couple, a bright-eyed Irish tenor and a crusty old man. Each is wholly individual, but like the monsters, they all find that no problem can be solved without cooperation. Four hands, they demonstrate, are better than two. In a series of instructional songs, they show that there is no such thing as solo harmony. The show is unsponsored, but it has commercials­rhythmic breaks in the action to “sell” the alphabet and numbers. Its chief target is “disadvantaged” children, its announced goal the teaching of “recognition of letters, numbers and simple counting ability; beginning reasoning skills, vocabulary and an increased awareness of self and the world.” Its originator, Joan Ganz Cooney, now president of the Children’s Television Workshop, created a McLuhanesque environment for the show without having read the man because, she admits, “I can’t understand his writing.” A profusion of aims, a confusion of techniques; how could such a show possibly succeed? Answer: spectacularly well.

Spend a Lot of Money

According to its first report card, prepared by the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, N.J. (TIME, Nov. 16). Sesame Street has been sharpening the cognitive skills of poor kids by as much as 62%. In its first series, the show reached almost 7,000,000 preschool children every day, five days a week. The Rubber Duckie Song was on the charts for nine weeks. Big Bird became one of Flip Wilson’s first guests. Sesame Street won a Peabody Award, three Emmys and two dozen other prizes for excellence. Former Commissioner of Education James E. Allen saluted the show: President Nixon wrote a fan letter. Indeed, despite the show’s announcements that it has been brought to you “by the Letter Y and the Number Three,” Sesame Street has been backed like a Government bond, nurtured like a Broadway musical.

Sesame Street began in February 1966 at a dinner party given by Mrs. Cooney, then a producer for public television in Manhattan. Among the guests was Lloyd N. Morrisett, vice president of the Carnegie Corporation. Recalls Mrs. Cooney: “I was complaining about poor children’s programming. Something clicked in Lloyd’s mind: TV and preschoolers. Was I interested?” She was, fanatically­and shrewdly. By November, her report was submitted with the recommendation: “Spend a lot of money on this.” It was hardly the first occasion that funders had heard such a plea. But it was the first time they had ever met a persuader of Mrs. Cooney’s talents. By the time she was through, her Children’s Television Workshop had been granted $8,000,000 by the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, the U.S. Office of Education, and related Government agencies.

D-Licious

Mrs. Cooney consulted such diverse experts as psychologists and children’s book illustrators. Dr. Edward L. Palmer, formerly an associate research professor in Oregon’s state education system, worked with children across the country for 18 months, studying attention spans, areas of interest, eye movements. He and his researchers found that the most efficacious approach to learning fused the switches of commercial TV, the quick cuts from animate to live action. Transitions were out. “We learned that what bores kids is too much time spent on any one subject,” said Palmer. Also, “Sit and talk straight at them, and children think you’re giving them Walter Cronkite.”

So there is no anchor man on Sesame Street. Children wander through stores and around sidewalks, skipping rope and chatting with the hosts. Learning seems almost a byproduct of fun. Why lecture kids when you can wrap the lesson in a joke? Example: the cast passes around a Styrofoam letter J. Each one repeats, “J,” until the object reaches Cookie Monster. He booms: “D.” The cast choruses: “D?” Monster: “Licious!” And he eats it. Guest teachers drop in all the time. Laugh-ln’s Arte Johnson, in his traditional German helmet, discusses height: “Tall people bump their heads a lot and short people don’t.” Carol Burnett describes the various virtues of the nose, forgets one, and then remembers­just in time to sneeze. James Earl Jones recites the alphabet­so slowly that the kids impatiently shout the letters at the screen.

Sesame Street has the aura of ad lib, the spontaneity of a playground game with celebrities and characters. In fact, it is as meticulously planned as a semester at medical school. From Palmer’s research department, program subjects flow to the production office, then get channeled to Head Writer Jeff Moss, a veteran of the Captain Kangaroo show. Three weeks before taping, Moss and his writers develop a script. Theoretically, their ideal viewer is poor and culturally deprived. Actually, the show catches the preschooler almost before his society does. Thus Sesame Street is as popular with the well-to-do as it is with the slum dweller. The kids may spark to the astonishing variety of material, but no sketch is without its preordained aim. A game is played under the academic umbrella of “Environment and Multiple Classification.” Jet-plane and subway sound effects are listed under “Auditory Discrimination.” Big Bird settling an argument is designated “Different Perspectives.”

When it is polished to a sheen, the written material goes to the puppeteers and the live actors, who customarily work on separate days­except for Oscar and Big Bird, who mix readily with humans. Five tape machines are used to record and edit the show­and to mix in the animation that was done earlier in Hollywood. About two weeks later, the show is aired, bloopers and all. Indeed, Producer Jon Stone is rather proud of the bloopers. When a kid on the show asked Folk Singer Leon Bibb in mid-chant, “How come you’re sweatin’?,” it was left in.

Strong Father Figure

Though Sesame Street’s studio is modest­an old movie theater on Manhattan’s upper Broadway­the budget is an impressive $28,000 per show. Yet because of its wide popularity, the switched-on school reaches its audience at a cost of about a penny per child; “a bargain,” says Dr. Benjamin Spock, “if I ever saw one.”

The reasons for its popularity can be traced to the opening days of casting. Television puppeteers of genius can be counted on the fingers of Ernie’s hand: Burr Tillstrom, who has his own NET series, Kukla, Fran and Ollie; Bil Baird, who operates a puppet theater in Greenwich Village and Jim Henson of Sesame Street. Fusing the best of puppets and marionettes, Henson coined the name and the creature, “Muppet.” For six years, Henson’s Muppets enjoyed a quiet, loyal following (including Joan Cooney) before they hit the big time on the Ed Sullivan Show. On the Street where they now live, the Muppets no longer do guest shots. Operated by Henson and Associate Wizard Frank Oz, they eclipse the “real” actors. Big Bird, in fact, gets more fan mail than any of the human hosts.

No actor could be found with the proper mix of informality and authority to fill the role of Gordon, a black schoolteacher. The staff wanted someone like Matt Robinson, one of the show’s producers, so Matt auditioned and won the part. He toned down his network accent, came on strong as the father figure many kids miss. So strong, in fact, that it emphasized the sweetness of Loretta Long, who plays his wife. She has been compared to a candy cordial, chocolate outside, syrup within. The rest of the cast is white: Bob McGrath, a singer with irrepressibly high spirits and voice; and Will Lee, an actor whose years on the McCarthy era blacklist made him perhaps more aware of deprivation. “I was delighted to take the role of Mr. Hooper, the gruff grocer with the warm heart,” recalls Lee. “It’s a big part, and it allows a lot of latitude. But the show has something extra­that sense you sometimes get from great theater, the feeling that its influence never stops.”

The show’s repeated numbers, its A-is-for-Ape approach, could make it only an electronic classroom, hammering data across. But there is something more: a Lewis Carroll-like humor, the cleansing sense of the absurd.

In its first series, Sesame Street used two clowns, Buddy and Jim, to illustrate problem solving. They were a walking Polish joke, one lifting and turning the other to screw in a light bulb, refusing a nail because it was turned the wrong way. In its new series, Big Bird helps Susan set the table­by putting the saucers on top of the cups. No child in the world would make that mistake­but every child delights in its ludicrousness.

Puppets who make soup of chocolate and spinach; creatures who ask for a ukulele to be mended and then eat the Instrument; a nose, like the one in Gogol’s short story, that assumes a personality and speech when detached from a face­these are the touchstones of enchantment that reach far beyond ghettos.

The program obeys an iron law of show business: the greater the hit, the louder the detractions. Marshall McLuhan, in a sense the show’s godfather, considers the whole thing naive. “Kids have graduated far beyond Sesame Street,” he declares. “TV has already exposed them to the lethal adult world, they know about that now, and that’s why they have no intention of growing up. They know that adult life brings the biggest game of all; whether it’s Mannix or Mission: Impossible, it’s all man hunting. TV is the cyclops, the eye of the man hunter.”

In short, McLuhanesque gloom as usual; the juggernaut future is here, so let us all lie down. But as Lewis Mumford indicates in The Pentagon of Power, what McLuhan is asking for is utter human docility. “The goal is total cultural dissolution­or what McLuhan characterizes as a ‘tribal communism’­McLuhan’s public relations euphemism for totalitarian control.” Thus Sesame Street is indeed opposed to the message, if not the medium, of the Master. The show’s civilized magic and surrealism seek to increase a child’s sense of himself, to dilate his imagination and his capacities.

Far more cogent criticism of the show comes from Urie Bronfenbrenner, professor of psychology at Cornell University. “The children [on the show] are charming. Among the adults there are no cross words, no conflicts, no difficulties, nor, for that matter, any obligations or visible attachments,” he says. “The old, the ugly or the unwanted is simply made to disappear through a manhole.” From the New Left comes the criticism that since the show’s emphasis is on achievement­learning letters and numbers­it is merely the bottom rung on the escalator to Charles Reich’s Consciousness II. From the Old Guard comes the suspicion that the “switched-on” classroom is aimed at the eventual displacement of the teacher by an unsalaried cathode-ray tube.

In conversation with TIME Correspondent Mary Cronin, Mrs. Cooney countered her critics: “McLuhan believes that content is irrelevant. I say, arrant nonsense. Can we doubt that if every time a commercial came on for the last 20 years and it said, ‘go to church,’ it wouldn’t have had a profound effect?” Toward traditionalists, Mrs. Cooney is reassuring: “TV has a very important role to play in education. Still, it’s just a big cold box, and just can’t replace a loving teacher who cares about a child.”

State of Dishabille

On the New Left, she is less patient: “Why do they think black parents are striking the schools? Education is not a middle-class value, it’s the way to self-respect. The problem with the New Left in this country is that it has no historical roots. It’s made up of upper-middle-class kids.” On the relative blandness of the people v. the puppets: “Our target kids have enough conflict in their lives. We want our hosts to be an integrated group who treat each other with kindness and respect.”

Mrs. Cooney, however, has responded to some criticism. She accepted a suggestion from the National Organization for Women, and in the new series, former Housewife Susan has a job as a nurse. Mrs. Cooney also admits that in Sesame Street’s first year, “the children were too manipulated; the show was too tightly programmed to allow for surprises. Now, even if it means dropping a piece of animation, we are giving time for freer dialogue with the children.” The new director, Bob Myhrum, has given the show a more spontaneous air; actors blow cues, the familiar street is full of passersby, the set now seems a real neighborhood caught in a state of dishabille.

Almost every critic felt that the animated spots were overly repetitive, even for commercials, and Mrs. Cooney agrees; this year there will be less repetition. In response to complaints from inside and outside the staff that the show’s approach was too Waspish for its audience, Mrs. Cooney has approved a more emphatic ethnic style. A black Muppet, Roosevelt Franklin, has become a star. Miguel (Jaime Sanchez), a Spanish-speaking actor, will be an occasional host. The show will also be less male-oriented; a female writer has been added to give it a more feminine slant.

Even the Muppets were affected by alterations. For the first time in their history, one is being canned for selling out. Kermit the Frog is being canned for commercialism. When Sesame Street was just a glint in Joan Cooney’s eye, Kermit taped a special in Canada. When it was given a network airing, the frog was compromised. Or so Henson decided. Like Jim Thorpe, Kermit played for money, and now must relinquish his amateur standing. He is being phased out of the show. He will be replaced by such Muppets as Lecturer Herbert Birdsfoot and Sherlock Hemlock, a bumbling sleuth.

Daring Small Changes

The Street’s most significant alterations may be occurring in other neighborhoods merchandising other letters ­like ABC, NBC and CBS. For the first time, all three networks have appointed vice presidents of children’s programming. NBC cuts into Saturday morning programming with one-minute Pop Ups, spots designed to teach the use of letters. CBS has three-minute mini-documentaries called In The Know, featuring Josie and the Pussycats. ABC has announced a 1971 series, Curiosity Shop, produced by Cartoonist Chuck Jones (Roadrunner, Bugs Bunny).

Has Sesame Street really wrought profound changes in commercial TV­or merely defensive cosmetics? Says a Workshop executive, who was formerly a network programmer: “The networks appointed the veeps to keep the mothers’ groups quiet. None of the men has anything to do with buying kids’ TV shows. Listen, the networks are delighted with Sesame Street. They figure if it’s around, they won’t really have to do anything.” Sociologist Wilbur Schramm, whose specialty is communications, agrees: “The media dare small changes, but not fundamental ones; their whole impact is to retain the status quo.”

Until now, that status has been nothing to quo about. One of the most beloved legends of radio concerned Uncle Don of WOR radio who finished a broadcast and sighed à la W.C. Fields: “That should hold the little bastards.” The mike had been left open, the little bastards’ parents wrote in, and Uncle Don’s autogiro never again set down on the roof of Bamberger’s department store. In a sense, that minuscule conflict has occurred ever since. Cynicism has animated most children’s shows, from Howdy Doody to Magilla Gorilla. Bozo the Clown uttered fatuities between pitches in the ’50s. The golden age of the ’50s brought such entertainment as Kid Gloves (little boys boxing with gloves that “couldn’t hurt”) and Grand Chance Roundup, which gave the winner a one-week shot at the Pier groups in Atlantic City.

In the ’60s, the networks let Nietzsche take its course: the superhero abounded. Birdman pulverized wrongos with solar power. Spider Man flung his webs around the villains. The Fantastic Four included The Thing, a repulsive brute who destroyed his enemies by stomping on them. Some cartoon shows dispensed with animation entirely. Marine Boy showed a static caricatured face with human lips that spoke the lines.

Such on-the-air pollution continued until the Kennedy and King assassinations caused a tide of parental and congressional revulsion from violence. By that time, broadcasters had evolved a highly sensible plan. If “adult” evening programming was immature, why not allow it to rerun during the children’s hours, where it might meet its intellectual level? Thus the Flintstones’ “Pa’s a Sap” approach now runs every day. Bewitched is a daily staple; so are The Beverly Hillbillies and F Troop. Today the rerun is no longer a method of picking up the small change; it is programmed into children’s video. An animated segment costs the networks about $60,000. The cost is amortized over a period of two years­which includes five reruns. Anything after that is gravy. The gravy stains are spotted on the endlessly repeated Jetsons, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Top Cat.

Get Your Friends Up Tight

Not all the shows have been triumphs of vulgarity­just most of them. In between the mice-bombing-the-cat and Samantha-fixes-the-plumbing repeats, there has been some tasteful and educational fare. Mr. I Magination took kids on gentle fictional trips, won awards­and lost sponsorship. The science-oriented Mr. Wizard lasted 14 years, was canceled in 1965. Ding Dong School, starring Dr. Frances Horwich, was a gentle, preschool program that provided a nannyish instructor for a babysitter. She, too, became an unreplaced dropout.

The reasons were always pathetically simple. A commercial spot on a weekend morning costs a sponsor an average $7,500. For that kind of money he wants lots of zeros behind the sales figures. Nothing could be harder than the sell for G.I. Joe with his own flamethrower; for Dune Buggy Wheelies (“Man, they’re out of sight . . . get your friends up tight”); for seven bendable, flexible outer spacemen. For those sponsors, the action is in canned-laughter series or manic cartoon shows that are allowed up to 16 minutes of commercials per hour­double the usual rate allowed by the National Association of Broadcasters Code. Enlightenment? It belongs in the classroom, or TV’s own ghetto, the UHF channels.

Today, kids who cross the Street and wander to other channels have a narrow choice. Some typical programs:

Romper Room (Syndicated): Many advertisers nourish the impossible dream of an hour-long commercial. Few realize that it is already here in Romper Room. Action for Children’s Television, a pressure group of Massachusetts parents, once complained to Bert Claster, the show’s producer, about its treatment of children as consumers in training, programmed to buy only the Romper Room brands of toys. Replied Claster: “This is commercial television, isn’t it?” Indeed it is.

Captain Kangaroo (CBS): Now in his 16th season, the Captain (Bob Keeshan) has never set his sights above 3 ft. 5 in. Says he: “Most people are doing children’s shows until something better comes along. I never had a desire to do programs for adults. Children are a very warm audience.” Keeshan (formerly Clarabelle the Clown on Howdy Doody) uses the Walter Cronkite approach, addressing the camera directly. His Miltown mood indicates that if the sky were falling, it would be about as important as a broken crayon. The gentleness tends to reassure parents, but children are more often caught up in the lively puppet sequences by Cosmo Alegretti. “We program the gentle side of life,” claims Keeshan, an approach that includes gentle lead-ins to cereal, toy, shoe, and game commercials.

Archie’s Fun House (CBS): Filmation is a leading producer of Saturday-morning TV with 2½ hours, including that masterwork of animated fatuity, Will the Real Jerry Lewis Stand Up? Both Jerry and Archie are marked by strong anti-intellectualism (teachers are dumb or sadistic; scientists talk with burlesque accents). Both shows are lavishly produced, but Archie shows bigger profits by far. Incorporating all the old malt-shop wit of the comic strip, the hour-long marathon features film clips of kids giggling, and promotes rock-Muzak­two of the songs have sold more than a million copies. Yet the Archie studio is skilled enough to do some sparkling letter “commercials” for Sesame Street. Studio Head Norman Prescott, who has learned that you can have your buck and pass it, too, explains: “It all starts and ends with the network. We might prefer to teach, but nobody is buying that from us.”

H.R. Pufnstuf and The Bugaloos (NBC) represent a vigorous attempt to utilize the freedom of cartoons, the whimsy of puppets and real actors. Heavily costumed, a group of slapsticians carom off each other, accompanied by raucous witches. The shows are uneven, but their comedy is genuine. The producers, Sid and Marty Krofft, are fifth-generation puppeteers whose initial success was the spicy adult show Poupées de Paris. Today several Krofft troupes tour the country. Claims Sid Krofft: “We were an adults-only show, and when the whole world went tits, we decided to go back to children. We’re not in politics and we’re not educators. We’re here to entertain.”

Wonderama (Syndicated) is a 13-year-old, three-hour-long, Every Bloody Sunday party, encouraging kids to every capital sin except lust. An affable man offscreen, Host Bob McAllister manically encourages kids to spray each other with whipped cream, or to play musical pies­last one to stop at a cutout target gets a faceful. Everyone in the 120-child audience receives at least half a dozen gifts­and a chance to wave at the folks back home. During the six-hour taping, the kids are given soda and ice cream (sandwiches were once dispensed, but too many kids threw up from excitement). Brand names are reeled off at a rate that seems like two per minute­plus commercials. The show is so successful that Wonderama gets 4,000 requests for admission each month. Presumably, a parent registers a child for Groton and Wonderama upon birth: a kid must wait four years to get on camera.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (NET): “You make each day a special day by just your being you,” announces Fred Rogers on each show. The message could be written in Karo syrup, but behind the modulated tones there is a calculation and a moral. Rogers, 41, is an ordained Presbyterian minister with ten years of broadcasting experience. His goal, he says, is to “help children recognize jealousy, rage, sadness and trust as facets of loving and being loved.” His NET program is, in the deepest sense, a Christian show, aimed at a reassurance and realization. A typical song speaks of nakedness, “some are fancy on the inside, some are fancy on the outside”; a typical low-keyed show is devoted to a trip to a hospital or to the barber. In each case, the child is treated as a person of intelligence and sensitivity­unlike the audiences on most rival shows. “It is no secret that commercial children’s TV has reached an all-time low,” Rogers testified at Senate hearings last year. “At best, most of these programs are a waste; at worst, some of them encourage pathology.”

Plato’s Cave

Even the worst shows are occasionally capable of entertainment­and even enlightenment. “Besides,” says a major Hollywood packager, “it’s not fair to compare commercial programming and Sesame Street. Give me $8,000,000, and I can come up with educational programming too.” But ABC’s Chuck Jones sees Sesame Street much the same way kids do­as an entryway. “O.K., Sesame Street isn’t perfect,” he says. “But it began something. Walt Disney opened up character animation. Sesame Street opened children’s TV to taste and wit and substance. It made the climate right for improvement.”

Adds David Frost: “Americans tend to believe that everything foreign is better than anything American. But Sesame Street is the best children’s program I’ve ever seen. It is true international TV. And it’s a hit everywhere it goes.” By next year, everywhere will include 50 countries, including Japan and South America and the Philippines. Foreign versions are being prepared; by 1971, it will have a side street­a program aimed at children seven to eleven, teaching reading and writing.

How far will Sesame Street’s influence reach? Perhaps only as far as the door of the networks, and no farther. Kids get the TV their parents deserve, and unless the public raises its voice, there is little reason to expect lasting change. But there is reason for optimism in the fact that the U.S. has begun to understand, and to measure, TV’s power over the imagination as well as over behavior. It is, of course, irresponsible to make TV the heavy in every social psychodrama, from urban uprisings to the Viet Nam War. Yet who can dispute that television­day and nighttime­is a child’s sixth sense of the world? Watching a child wide-eyed before the screen, who can doubt the anecdote of Plato’s cave, where creatures were chained forever watching shadow play, while the true world moved outside?

If U.S. children are to gain some undistorted knowledge of society, and of themselves, television must change. Producers could do no better than stroll by Sesame Street, or better still, watch the way a child creates works of power and imagination­by drawing flat but seeing round.