Sesame Street – Beijing Kids

Sesame Street Live in Beijing!

Fresh out of ideas for this weekend? Find your way to Sesame Street, where all of your beloved characters, like Elmo, Big Bird and Grover will be there, along with their new friend Sunny.

In a recent Global Times interview with performer Kevin Wheeler and Vincent E. Egan, President/CEO and Executive Producer of VEE Corporation (the company responsible for launching Sesame Street Live in 1980) as they share their insight into why Sesame Street remains popular to date and how they put on such captivating performances.

For ticket information on Sesame Street Live, click here.

Childhood Memories: You Never Really Get Over It

beijingkids — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 03:53:12 +0000

I recently brought back an assortment of books, toys and supplies from the States for my daughter. Among them was a “Sing-along with Elmo” book that features a puppet of every toddler’s favorite furry monster and lyrics to the song “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”

At first, the sight of a bug-eyed little red monster wriggling around in a hole cut out of the middle of a book completely freaked Marianne out, but she eventually got over it and now giggles with glee whenever we whip out Elmo.

Like the ubiquitous Fuwa, which seem to induce a sort of ecstatic trance on virtually every child, Elmo’s designers were definitely onto something when it comes to toddler appeal – witness the stories of parents literally fighting it out for those Tickle Me Elmo dolls back in the 90s.

I raised this analogy to my Beijing-born wife last night as I tried explaining how Sesame Street, of which she’s only seen the occasional snippet, helped shape the minds of an entire generation of North American kids*. While she found my descriptions of the assorted characters – Kermit, Cookie Monster, Grover, the Count, Oscar (I even threw in a few Muppet Show characters, Ms Piggy and Animal) – amusing, it was one of those “you had to be there” situations; Sesame Street is simply one of those things to which mere words do no justice.

*Elmo, as some may recall, was a later addition to the cast (introduced some time in the 1980s) – a sort of “Grover-on-steroids” that marked the beginning of the Sesame Street Marketing Machine.

C is for Cookie

beijingkids

Thirty-somethings like me will probably never get over their Sesame Street nostalgia fixations, so allow me to indulge a bit, if you will, with this NPR On-Air interview with everyone’s favorite furry-blue cookie devouring monster.

Blog: Fuzzy Icons

beijingkids — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 02:05:33 +0000

While taking a decidedly low-key vacation with my family in sunny Los Angeles, I found a few hours yesterday to channel surf through some mind-numbing American daytime TV. Being on the verge of fatherhood, I could not help but stop on the local PBS affiliate to check out Sesame Street, the long-running children’s television program known around the world for its numerically and alphabetically-obsessed anthropomorphic animals.

It was much the same as I remember it, and I was amazed to see some of the veteran actors, including Maria and Gordon, still at it after all these years. On the other hand, some of the newer characters – i.e. Elmo – lost me; and I couldn’t help but notice the differences in the new voices of the muppets (Kermit the Frog, Ernie) once voiced by the late creator Jim Henson – I’m old school like that.

Speaking of old school, I recently discovered that one of my favorite rappers, MF Grimm, was one of the earliest kids on Sesame Street (he got on the show after being recommended by his neighbor Morgan Freeman). How he went from riding on the back of Mr. Snuffalufagus to being paralyzed from the waist down after a drug-related shooting is beyond me, but the man’s story is still quite remarkable. And now that Harvard and the UN are recognizing the show for its profound international influence, it’s indeed heartening to see Sesame Street carry on in this age of crass merchandising and thirty-minute long toy commercials.