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Summary
Summary
The story of one of the most important and beloved shows on television-how it got started, nearly failed, and was saved by Elmo
When the first episode aired on November 10, 1969, Sesame Street revolutionized the way education was presented to children on television. It has since become the longest-running children's show in history, and today reaches 8 million preschoolers on 350 PBS stations and airs in 120 countries.
Street Gang is the compelling and often comical story of the creation and history of this media masterpiece and pop culture landmark, told with the cooperation of one of the show's cofounders, Joan Ganz Cooney. Sesame Street was born as the result of a discussion at a dinner party at Cooney's home about the poor quality of children's programming and hit the air as a big bang of creative fusion from Jim Henson and company, quickly rocketing to success.
Street Gang traces the evolution of the show from its inspiration in the civil rights movement through its many ups and downs-from Nixon's trying to cut off its funding to the rise of Elmo-via the remarkable personalities who have contributed to it. Davis reveals how Sesame Street has taught millions of children not only their letters and numbers, but also cooperation and fair play, tolerance and self-respect, conflict resolution, and the importance of listening. This is the unforgettable story of five decades of social and cultural change and the miraculous creative efforts, passion, and commitment of the writers, producers, directors, animators, and puppeteers who created one of the most influential programs in the history of television.
Author Notes
Michael Davis has worked for the Baltimore Sun and Chicago Sun-Times. From 1998 - 2007, he was the senior editor and family TV columnist for TV Guide. Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street is his first book.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
People rarely look to find reality in TV shows, but to escape it. Sesame Street, the first educational program for children, is a happy exception, and Davis's true stories about the imaginary neighborhood only enhance the show's noble mission as well as its tone of frantic, fantastic realism. Looking beyond children's favorites of the 1950s-Captain Kangaroo, Howdy Doody, Miss Frances' Ding Dong School-four pioneering individuals asked, in 1965, "Do you think TV could be used to teach children?" Those pioneers-Tim and Joan Cooney and Lloyd and Mary Morrisett-would go on to helm "the world's most influential children's program," despite a lack of experience (Joan became an executive director with "no credentials except a BA in education"). Well-researched details and an unflinching eye make Davis's book continuously fascinating; beyond perfectly human tales of alcoholism, disease, psychotic breaks and affairs, he reports that Caroll Spinney, the man who would fill the towering, bright yellow Big Bird suit, weighed 42 pounds in the second grade and "answered to the nickname PeeWee." Davis also chronicles the barriers Sesame Street broke through, hiring women in powerful positions, reaching out to the black community with an "inner city ambassador," and addressing formerly taboo topics (breast-feeding, death) with care and sensitivity. Any grown-up fan will relish this account, gaining an even greater appreciation for the cultural contributions of Kermit, Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch and all their neighbors. B&w photos. (Jan.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Now viewed as an American institution, Sesame Street revolutionized children's television when it debuted in 1969. Journalist Davis, who wrote for TV Guide for 10 years, traces the ups and downs of the longest-running children's television show, airing in more than 120 countries. Davis recalls the impact of iconic shows such as Captain Kangaroo, the early days in the fight for using entertainment to educate children, and the mission of closing the education gap for poor preschoolers. Drawing on interviews with cast and crew members, he reveals much of the behind-the-scenes life of Sesame Street: the marriagelike relationship between the show's cofounder Joan Ganz Cooney and puppeteer Jim Henson, how Elmo was nearly discarded, the odd-couple puppeteers behind the odd couple Burt and Ernie, and the fights, romances, infidelities, joys, and sorrows of the crew some of it providing inspiration for shows. Davis also details the merchandising that saved the show financially, the corporate machinations behind the sale of the Muppets to Disney, and the ensuing controversy after the untimely death of Henson. Anyone who has ever seen Sesame Street, as parent or child or both will love the detail and exuberance of this book.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Looking back at 'Sesame Street,' just before its 40th birthday. IN 1981, when I was 6, about 10 million American children daily tuned in to the PBS show "Sesame Street" That same year, one of the writers for "Sesame Street," my real-life neighbor, asked if I'd like to appear on the show. It was my golden ticket, but crossing over to the other side of the television screen can be a demystifying journey. The "Sesame Street" soundstage looked like a facsimile of the televised world - small and (surprisingly) indoors. The Muppets were controlled by operators; we were told not to look down at them, And (here was Big Bird, stored in the middle of the set on a massive hook. When I reached out to pet him, a voice came from the sky: "Don't touch those feathers!" admonished one of Big Bird's creators, the remarkably named Kermit Love. The address of 123 Sesame Street was never quite the same. Yet to be cast out of the garden of television-land can be a learning experience. "Street Gang: The Complete History of 'Sesame Street,"' by Michael Davis, a former columnist for TV Guide, now offers the behind-the-lens story, the first comprehensive account, of this 39-year-old show. The book details the awesome lengths that "Sesame Street," undoubtedly the most workshopped and vetted program in the history of children's television, went through to captivate its young authence. The show's music and quick cuts concealed its educational ambitions. "Commercial breaks" advertised numbers and the alphabet through Jim Henson's Muppet pitchmen: the Count, Grover and Cookie Monster. Kermit the Frog, wearing a trench coat, told fairy tales through news flashes from Rapunzel's tower. Meanwhile, the urban street scenes at the center of the show communicated the social values of a progressive culture. Here was TV at its most sublime, but also an entrancing product of a liberal age, something Mom was happy for us to watch. The "Sesame Street" story begins on a Sunday in December 1965. At 6:30 in the morning, 3-year-old Sarah Morrisett tuned in to the test patterns while awaiting her cartoons to begin a half-hour later. Her father, Lloyd Morrisett, an experimental psychologist and a vice president ol the Carnegie Corporation, took note. "It struck me there was something fascinating to Sarah about television," he says. "Sarah Morrisett had memorized an entire repertoire of TV jingles," Davis writes. "It is not too far a stretch to say that Sarah's mastery of jingles led to a central hypothesis of the great experiment that we know as 'Sesame Street': if television could successfully teach the words and music to advertisements, couldn't it teach children more substantive material by coopting the very elements that made ads so effective?" The thought of using the trappings of television for progressive ends seemed anathema to most intellectuals, who were wholly skeptical of this mass-culture medium, but Morrisett brought up his observation at dinner with Joan Ganz Cooney, the future creator of "Sesame Street." In the mid-1960s, as one of his grand social initiatives, Lyndon B. Johnson took up the cause of National Educational Television (later known as the Public Broadcasting Service), a lackluster confederation of chalk-dusted channels. Like the show she developed for PBS that would define the network, Cooney was steeped in the ideals of Johnson's Great Society. In New York, while working in publicity for commercial television, she was introduced to William Phillips, co-founder of Partisan Review, the small but vastly influential journal of highbrow leftist opinion. In her spare time, Cooney did publicity for Partisan Review and produced a fund-raiser at Columbia that was attended by Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy and Lionel Trilling. Cooney's ability to transcend the divisions between high and low culture defined her success at "Sesame Street," which brought Madison Avenue advertisers and game show creators together with New York intellectuals and the education department of Harvard. Lloyd Morrisett, through his connections at the Carnegie Foundation, helped Cooney line up the millions in grants to cover the research, writing and production needed to create a show that could compete with the commercial networks. McGeorge Bundy, one of "the best and the brightest" in the Kennedy administration and by then president of the Ford Foundation, sharpened the show's political edge by homing in on the children of the urban underclass. "Sesame Street" would be the television equivalent of Head Start, the federal child-welfare program founded by Johnson in the belief, Davis writes, that "the tyranny of America's poverty cycle could be broken if the emotional, social, health, nutritional and psychological needs of poor children could be met." In its high ideals and comprehensive approach, "'Sesame Street' came along and rewrote the book," Davis says. "Never before had anyone assembled an A-list of advisers to develop a series with stated educational norms and objectives. Never before had anyone viewed a children's show as a living laboratory, where results would be vigorously and continually tested. Never before in television had anyone thought to commingle writers and social science researchers." "Sesame Street" turned the entertainment ol children's television into a science, as the program was extensively tested with nursery school authences through a "distracter" machine that gauged children's eye focus second by second during the run of each show. It is no coincidence that the program proved to be so popular. When early studies determined that its street scenes were faltering, Jim Henson brought about a final breakthrough. At (he time, his Muppets were relegated to the "commercial" segments as cut-aways from the street-based story line. For this, Henson drew on his own experience. He had originally developed Kermit and the Muppets for commercial work; his 1950s show "Sam and Friends." with its zany ads for Wilkins coffee, has now found a second life on YouTube, Over the objections of researchers, who had advised against mixing the fantasy of the Muppets with the reality of the street, Henson developed Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch to be central characters on the main stage, both driving and subverting the program's self-seriousness. Davis tracks down every "Sesame" anecdote and every "Sesame" personality in his book, and the result is more an oral history than a tightly organized narrative. The development of the show's characters, as well as the performers' own lives, can be illuminating. Bob McGrath, who has played Bob from the start, once enjoyed a pop singing career in Japan. Gordon, the neighborhood's black role model, played by Matt Robinson and then Roscoe Orman, was named for the photographer Gordon Parks. The character Susan, Gordon's stay-at-home wife, was once denounced by feminists. Emilio Delgado and Sonia Manzano joined the cast in the '70s as Luis and Maria after protests against the show's lack of Hispanic characters. Will Lee, who played the store owner Mr. Hooper, came through the Yiddish theater and the radical Group Theater, and was blacklisted in the '50s; Lee's death in 1982 became a defining moment when "Sesame Street" chose to address the news directly on the air. Northern Calloway, who played Mr. Hooper's young assistant, David, proved to be on even more tragic case: by the time I appeared on camera with him, according to Davis, Calloway was medicated with lithium after a violent psychotic breakdown; a manic-depressive in and out of treatment, he remained on the show through the late '80s, but died in 1990 after suffering a seizure in a psychiatric hospital. Davis lingers on such gossip. I could do without dwelling on the drinking habits of Captain Kangaroo (Bob Keeshan, forever jealous of the acclaim for "Sesame Street") or several of the book's other trivial details. Do we really need to know that Cooney served boeuf bourguignon, "a traditional French country recipe ... on Page 315 of the first volume of 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking,'" to Lloyd Morrisett at their 1988 dinner? Far more interesting are the failings and criticisms of the lavishly praised show. Terrence O'Flaherty, a television critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, accused "Sesame Street" of being "deeply larded with ungrammatical Madison Avenue jargon." Carl Bereiter, a preschool authority, said, "It's based entirely on audience appeal and is not really teaching anything in particular." And Neil Postman complained that it relieved parents "of their responsibility to teach their children to read." The real challenge to the show came in the 1990s, around the time Joan Cooney retired as chairwoman of the Children's Television Workshop, the program's nonprofit governing body. Once revolutionary, "Sesame Street" came to be seen as a dated reminder of urban decay, while the purple dinosaur Barney took children's television out to the clean suburban schoolyard. "None of Barney's friends lives in a garbage can, and none grunts hip-hop," National Review cheered. In response, "Sesame Street" made an ill-fated attempt at urban renewal, developing an extension to the set called "Around the Corner" that seemed "less like Harlem and more like any gentrified up-and-coming neighborhood in America," Davis writes. Professional child actors were regularly employed for the first time. The broken-window theory may have worked to clean up New York, but not so for "Sesame Street" - as its empire expanded abroad, ratings eroded at home, and the gentrified set was abandoned. "Sesame Street" ceased to be a reflection of its surroundings. Early on, the writer-producer Jon Stone rejected the traditional trappings of children's television: "Sesame Street" would have "no Treasure House, no toy maker's workshop, no enchanted castle, no dude ranch, no circus," Davis says. But this is what "Sesame Street" had become, and perhaps what it really always was: an urban fantasy world born of '60s idealism. Davis has written a tireless if not altogether artful history of this unique place. Here, finally, we get to touch Big Bird's feathers. Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch both drove and subverted the show's self-seriousness. James Panero is the managing editor of The New Criterion.
Kirkus Review
Voluminous and populous, though patchy history of the "grandest and most ambitious experiment in children's television." Distilling scores of recent interviews, former TV Guide editor Davis spins his tale around two central figures: Joan Ganz Cooney, a founder and longtime CEO of the Children's Television Workshop; and the inimitable Jim Henson, an inspirational, enigmatic genius whose fuzzy creations are still familiar to nearly everyone who ever sat in front of a television as a child. Both receive heavy, deserved doses of idolization. They didn't work alone, of course; in fact, the author trots in so many supporting characterssome to play recurring roles, others just for a sound bite or twothat lines or scenes from the show itself seldom elbow their way onstage. No matter: Even behind the scenes there were full measures of comedy (a prank ad campaign pairing Cookie Monster with a brand of kielbasa) and tragedy (Henson's early death and Northern Calloway's severe, ultimately fatal, bipolar disorder). Not to mention melodrama, irony, dissipation, brilliance, triumphs over critics and multiple reinventions. Davis is too fond of cute turns of phrase ("in most cases, Muppets marinate before they mature") and he occasionally repeats anecdotes. Also, he spares barely a glance at Sesame Street's seldom-better-than-second-rate print spinoffs. Still, there's plenty to relate about the 40-year-old show. Readers less interested in the puppets than the human castand perhaps disinclined to lug around such coffee-table histories as David Borgenicht's Sesame Street Unpaved (1998) or Louise Gikow's Sesame Street: A Celebration of Forty Years of Life on the Street (2008)may be drawn to it. Somewhat ponderous, but contains enough original material to fill Oscar's cozy can. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Caroll Spinney (carollspinney.com), the voice of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch and winner of the Library of Congress's Living Legend Award, here narrates journalist Davis's gentle yet often surprising look at Sesame Street, the world's longest-running (40 years) and widest-reaching (120 countries) children's show. This will be a sure-fire hit in just about every library; highly recommended. [Includes a bonus interview with Davis and Spinney; the Viking hc was recommended "for all reference and browsing collections," LJ 12/08; visit www.streetgangbook.com for a bonus chapter profiling Roscoe Orman, who played Gordon on the show.-Ed.]-Joseph L. Carlson, Vandenberg Air Force Base Lib., Lompoc, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
