Caroll Spinney Leaves ‘Sesame Street’ After Nearly 50 Years | Hacker News Reader

Caroll Spinney Leaves ‘Sesame Street’ After Nearly 50 Years

nytimes.com

177 pointsuptown44 comments

Nothing but respect for Sesame Street and everyone involved. Thank you to Caroll Spinney for being part of an enriching but entertaining cultural institution. Similar to Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street is/was TV at a different pace with different goals.

Since Caroll Spinney played Oscar The Grouch, here are some fun Oscar facts: Oscar's favourite desserts are spinach sardine chocolate fudge sundaes and mashed bananas with ice cubes and cold beef gravy. Oscar is Canadian, born in New Brunswick.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7TDiqoH5LE

He is also known for bringing life to Big Bird, and, by extension, Granny Bird!

Not exactly hacker news, but Sesame Street stuff is pretty closely tied to hacker ethos...RIP.

I'm not even 30 yet everyday the news is reminding me how I'm actually aging. I still remember watching Sesame Street as a young kid on PBS, and I remember over the years being surprised how the series is still on going, especially when my nephews were born and my sister soon started watching Sesame Street with her son. Seems like a retirement well-deserved.

I still remember when Mr. Hooper died. Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood are/were both amazing shows for how they handle topics like death.

The Hooper's-death episode made a big impression on me when I was 3 years old -- it was actually the first frank discussion of death that I can remember being party to. The part where [if I recall correctly] Gordon and Olivia help Big Bird understand that 'Mr Looper' is not coming back is seared into my mind. How Spinney managed to convey so much emotion with only voice and body language is a marvel. I also clearly recall identifying with Big Bird's attachment to his teddy bear 'Radar.'

Big up Spinney!

youtube of big bird/Hoopers death. I think Spinney did the drawings Big Bird hands out.

https://youtu.be/gxlj4Tk83xQ "NSFW, unless you want everyone in the office to see you crying."

from comments on Gothamist: http://gothamist.com/2018/10/17/big_bird_caroll_spinney_good...

One great example at how good he was at conveying emotion with Big Bird was when Big Bird had a guest appearance on The West Wing. Didn't say a word, and the scene lasted all of about ten seconds, but was still hilarious.

I grew up on it too but a full generation earlier. Even now when some unlikely coincidence surfaces the number 12, sometimes this song[0] still pops into my head.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZshZp-cxKg

I knew what that was before clicking.

It was either the pinball one or the ladybug picnic one.

Sung by the Pointer Sisters!

I had no idea.

Thank you Caroll Spinney for helping teach generations how to be compassionate, patient and respectful of your neighbors. You brought to life custumes and characters that will forever define Americana

fifty, FIFTY YEARS! Ah ah ahhhh!

Enjoy retirement, many fond childhood memories thanks to you and your crew.

I'm just gonna put it here because I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ul7X5js1vE

Sesame Street had so many great creative and musical segments before it turned into the Elmo show. It didn't talk down to children or insult their intelligence. It inspired children rather than just try to hypnotize them with colors and repetition to shut them up for an hour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acBixR_JRuM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JWwOzEDGss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG1nCrnUim4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cg71djeZfos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3N8ZW6fCa4

I love most of the old musical bits, but there was an animated short music video called "Carefully" that scarred me for life. In it, a kid is running down the hall and then a dracula pops out at him from a broom closet or something.

Of course, it was meant to be just one of a long list of situations in which one must proceed 'carefully,' but I was deathly afraid of vampires and closed doors for years.

I remember one where Bert and Ernie are exploring an Egyptian pyramid and the mummy comes to life... that scared me for the longest time. I guess the show has its own Nightmare Fuel page on TV Tropes for a reason[0].

Unfortunately, one episode where Margaret Hamilton reprises her role as the Wicked Witch of the West aired once and was banned after angry letters from parents complaining about how it terrified their kids. I'd like to see that one day.

[0]https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/SesameS...

I'm with you on the mummy one, that scared me too.

It always perplexed me though, why they thought the Count's lightning-thunder-and-bats routine [when he completed a count] was too scary and nixed it -- seemed pretty tame to me -- maybe the noise rattled kids?

Ah yes! The great Tom Lehrer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dB2Ff8H7oVo

Electric Company.

Brilliantly. Did he do that after he'd retired from music?

1) Amazed that someone recognized and located this, especially considering how inaccurate my recollection was

2) Couldn't help but watch it, now fully re-traumatized

I had assumed he already left. His voice seems pretty different from the 80s when I watched.

If you're into a long biographical documentary, check out http://www.iambigbird.com/ which you'll have to rent or buy (at least in the US).

Seems like a lot of the content is not create in-house. There’s a lot of filler between scenes with the cast and muppets. Always wondered if they were projects submitted by college students or artists.

It's all created in-house. The "commercial break" segments have been part of the show from the beginning, and are there because the target audience has a naturally short attention span and needs something to break it up.

congratulations to a lifetime achievement. give the man a cookie!

I don't think kids watch sesame street anymore as they used to, at least from what I have seen with my kids, it is just another tv show among many others and not that influential.

This is discussed in an interesting story posted here on HN a few days back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18233763

Part of the article compares the popularity of Sesame Street content to ChuChu.

My son never got into it, I wish he did. Still, I think the audiences are still around and it's still influential.

Sesame Street attempted a Palestinian version, that was an amazing feat. https://www.npr.org/2018/06/26/623646528/the-legacy-of-an-is...

Now the show is on HBO, which is a paywall, but at least it is then released later to wider audiences.

It just depends. If you dont have cable and can only receive one broadcast channel its probably PBS. If you keep the younger ones away from electronics they will watch PBS Kids and love it.

Once they get older and they get their hands on electronics they would much rather watch the seizure inducing fast cut shows on disney or nickelodeon because those shows are designed to appeal to kids instead of teaching them something.

The worst thing (IMO) though is youtube. They'll watch those horrible toy channels of parents pimping out their kids or the creepy ones where the adults pretend to be children playing with the toys. Hundreds of hours of toy commercials.

Then when they get a little older they start watching youtubers doing "challenges". And before you know it they are watching logan paul ching-chong-ping-pong his way around asia or watching fortnite on Twitch.

And at that point, your kid is ready to graduate to uninformed barely-literate ignorant citizen with no attention span and no ability to think critically.

whew Ok... got that out. I feel a little better.

I mean YouTube is bad but nothing can compete with the existential horror of Barney or the Teletubbies. Again again! three minute video loops to infinity

Plenty of my fave 80s cartoons were basically extended toy commercials. He-Man, Voltron...

It was interesting to watch those in eastern Europe. I knew he-man but never saw any commercial. They'd be wasted time as well, because you couldn't buy those toys anyway, so only the show itself remained.

I actually haven't learned about the toy part of those shows until my 20s.

That is fascinating. The lends of other people's experiences.

Although living in a rural area in the U.S. there were a lot of shows I was aware of but never really got to see all that much because they were on cable and having only a handful channels limited options. He-man being one of them. But it is interesting how much a kid picks up with those shows with just the most minimal amount of content.

I needed those paragraphs about YouTube and Twitch, thank you

YouTube is what you make of it. There is a huge amount of excellent content for kids. Two examples of channels I'll let my six year old daughter watch just about any time she asks are SciShow Kids and Cosmic Kids Yoga. There are plenty of others, but those are her current favorites.

It's definitely important to curate what kids are watching, but that's true of any medium.

PBS has new shows that seem pretty good, like Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood (cartoon spin-off of Mr. Rogers), Martha Speaks, Word Girl, Dinosaur Train. Others skew more toward the Nick Jr. school of shows, like Wild Krats, Curious George, etc.

Ironically it is kind of hard to find old school Sesame Street on PBS. It's not even really a PBS show anymore; its new episodes air first on HBO, which sends a shiver down my spine just to type.

We don't have cable, but basically never turn on the TV for the kids. All "TV time" for my kids starts with loading PBSKids.org or NickJr on the laptop. The content is all age-appropriate and the sites are navigable by a kid. (NickJr is way better in this regard.)

The only time my kids see YouTube is if I load up a specific video for them--then I close it. You're 100% right that it's not a safe place to let kids surf around.

The choice to double down on all Elmo, all the time broke it.

My son got hooked on the 80s versions that were/are on Netflix a few years ago.

This. I was born the year that the Sesame Street premiered and it was part of my morning toddler routine in the early 1970s. Watching the show with my daughter in the 1990s, I noticed Elmo's presence transmogrify from just another Muppet character to having his own segment. As his airtime expanded, that scratchy, helium-stricken voice could no longer be borne by my sensitive ears. To me, that was the death knell for Sesame Street. Kudos to Mr. Rogers for not giving Henrietta Pussycat her own segment ("Meow meow I'm da meow meow bomb meow meow").

Elmo is an interesting study in the evolution of Sesame Street for many reasons. Big Bird was created to be the avatar of the children watching, and there is an interesting generational shift around the show as Big Bird become such a symbol of the establishment that children stopped seeing themselves in Big Bird and a new "child advocate" niche opened up for Elmo to fill. For Mr. Spinney, getting a puppet into that role was an intentional design choice, and for Mr. Clash getting a puppet into that role was a lightning-in-a-bottle lucky moment in the zeitgeist shift and creative renewal of the show. Arguably the show would not have survived if it didn't showcase Elmo as it did, given whatever that generation shift was that happened.

I would hope that there are entire Anthropology and Sociology graduate theses devoted to that shift, because it is fascinating to this lay observer.

ha, I can hear Elmo & Abby singing right now in the living room.

Don't get me wrong; this man's a U.S. national treasure. But when I come to Hacker News, I expect to see hacker news. The mods really need to start clamping down on this stuff. I can go to reddit or nearly any other site on the internet to have learned about this. What does this even have to do with startups?

You're right. And it's not really rewarding to be down-voted when you and me, and others point this out.

There is a slow but steady trend towards plain news on HN.

It's like opening a kitchen drawer to get a fork and seeing that someone in the house is replacing the forks with cups. And they can't seem to understand why they're just slowly making this drawer completely redundant.

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