Sesame Street

Guide Note

Sesame Street is a long-running children's educational series that features live actors, Jim Henson's Muppets, and film shorts. It is intended to provide both education and entertainment for preschool-age children, and is the most highly-acclaimed program of its sort in the world.

Fast Facts

1. Network: PBS (1970-Present)
2. First Aired: November 10, 1969
3. 4,160 Episodes
4. Seen in 120 countries
5. Created by: Jim Henson
6. Won 109 Emmy Awards
7. One of the longest running U.S. television shows

Sesame Street was created in the late 1960s by the production company, the Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop), under the direction of Joan Ganz Cooney and Ralph Rogers. The publicly-funded show debuted nationally in late 1969 on the NET, or National Educational Television network, which was renamed the following year to PBS. By the second season, the characters and formula were refined to recognizable form (Oscar the Grouch was originally orange, while Grover was originally a nameless brown entity). The show changed relatively little for decades, although film shorts were periodically rotated in and out of circulation, characters added, and actors replaced. In 2002 a major revamping took place, such that older segments of the show were no longer interspersed with newer ones.

Early sensations among the show's Muppet characters included Ernie and Bert, Kermit the Frog, Cookie Monster, and Big Bird, as well as the canonical blue Grover and green Oscar the Grouch. In the 1980s, Elmo emerged as the muppet of greatest influence, first gaining a separate segment at the end of the show, and then a spin-off show (and DVD empire) with Elmo's World.