Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street Maps the History of a Revolutionary Kids' TV Show That Still Has Plenty to Teach Us
Time
5/7/2021
When
Sesame Street first hit the public-television airwaves, in 1969, the target audience of kids aged three to five took to it immediately. But older kids, and even college kids, watched it too: If its goal had been to “sell” preschool kids on learning their alphabet and numbers, the way advertising sold goods to consumers, its methods of doing so were so hip and entertaining that everyone wanted a look. Its set, a semi-realistic ramshackle street inspired by real-life late-1960s Harlem, served as an anchor for a kind of groovy learning variety show for kids, featuring neo-psychedelic animated segments in which numerals and alphabet letters danced and squiggled across the screen, not to mention a full neighborhood of performers—both human and Muppet—that, for lots of kids, would come to be a de facto family.