Sesame Street is like a fossil record or tree cross section for attention span in television. Some of the older Sesame Street clips like the one about milk, are trippy long format art pieces. Very very different than the quick cuts / short segments that happen today. Whether that’s good or bad is up to you. I suspect the old style simply wouldn’t compete for viewers today. A bonus: Stevie Wonder playing Superstition on Sesame Street might be my favorite “music video” of all time. [this video]
Stevie Wonder performing Superstition on Sesame Street.
How could they include that and not this? [this video] Edit: Youtube commenter claims the kid rocking out on the stairs is "my cousin Lenny Kravitz". Plausible. Am I being naive?
Stevie Wonder Superstition performance with a kid rocking out on stairs.
We received two PBS stations at the farmhouse where we lived in the early '70s, so obviously I watched Sesame Street twice a day. If you haven't seen Stevie Wonder's performance of Superstition on the show in 1973, I highly recommend it: [this video]
Stevie Wonder's 1973 Superstition performance on Sesame Street.
Sesame street was considerably funkier, psychedelic and kind of gritty. Elmo was a herald of a much cleaner and sort of infantilized Sesame Street. The massive commercial success of the Elmo toys especially made it feel like it had become very commercial and a lot less grassroots. [this video] [link]
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