Andy Chase

When I read about this article on Plastic.com, I got pretty sad. Starting next Monday, Sesame Street is switching to a new format geared towards 2 year olds. (For its first 32 seasons, the target audience was 3-5 year olds.)



Additionally, the show's 1 hour running time is being broken down into MTV-sized bites so that baby never gets a chance to develop anything like an attention span; the format we Gen-Xers remember is that each hour long episode would have a story woven among all the great old animations and educational shorts. So yes, even back then they were feeding us short little clips of stuff, but it was always bound together by that outer story line; you kept watching because you wanted to find out what happened next.



Now that story has been collapsed to 10 minutes, followed by 10 solid minutes of Elmo (I have a headache already), and some other 10 minute chunks.



Why the shift in targeted audience? Apparently 3-5 year olds these days are already too jaded to watch Sesame Street, what with being raised by the pseudo-mommies at the day care center as soon as their real mother is ready to go back to work.



I watched a lot of Sesame Street growing up, both as a 3-5 year old and as a 9-11 year old (what with my sister being 6 years younger & all.) I think the first sign that all was not well on Sesame Street was the introduction of Telly the neurotic monster. It's fine to use a neurotic character in a skit to demonstrate that things are almost never as big a deal as they seem, but what does it teach a kid when the neurotic character never grows out of the behavior?



The real beginning of the end was the introduction of Elmo, who as far as I can tell was the role model for all the hyperactive, poorly behaved children that run around our apartment building's courtyard screaming at the tops of their lungs. I still don't understand what purpose he's supposed to serve if it's not teaching kids to be spastic.



Sometime in the mid-late 80's they stopped showing most of the best animated shorts. Granted, many of them were heavy on the 70's psychedelic-disco style, but they were good.



Probably the biggest factor in the decline in the show's quality was the untimely death of Jim Henson. But this, this is the last nail in the coffin as far as I'm concerned. I hope that Noggin will continue to run "Sesame Street... Unpaved" so I can get my "12345 6789-10 11 12!" fix when I need it.



The other thing that bothers me about this is that I realize I sound like a baby boomer lamenting the demise of Howdy Doody (nothing wrong with that, of course; it's just hard for people from subsequent generations to relate), and that as I get older it's only going to get worse. And I'm only 27. If I'm not careful, I'll be a full-fledged curmudgeon by the time I'm 35.