May 24, 2003
Muppet Book Club
"Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree"
Book : Part 1 -- Part 2 -- Part 3
Commentary : Part 4 -- Part 5 -- Part 6
Cookie Monster, Untamed
Danny
Horn:
This is re: the unrepentant Cookie Monster.
I just got an old Sesame Street Book Club book called "Don't Forget the Oatmeal" -- (1980, wr by BG Ford, illus by Jean Chandler, if anyone cares) -- which is about Ernie and Bert going to the supermarket to buy oatmeal. (Hilarious surprise ending: They forget to buy the oatmeal. Bada bing.)
Cookie Monster shows up while they're at the store. He finds his way to the cookie aisle, and has a 5-page cookie-eating binge, where he essentially shoves the store's entire cookie stock into his mouth and ends up slumped on the ground, full, just like at the end of "Cookie Tree."
Then they do this completely nauseating thing: Ernie and Bert help him clean up the mess. "Ernie and Bert helped Cookie Monster put things back where they belonged and reminded him to pay for the cookies he had broken and eaten. They left just one bag of cookies in his cart."
Then on the next page, we actually see Cookie Monster pushing his little cart up to the cashier with one bag of cookies and a carton of milk. Which I just found completely horrifying.
It's amazing to me that they published the essentially antisocial, anarchist "Cookie Tree" in 1977, and then the embarrassingly nerdy "Oatmeal" just three years later. Why does Cookie Monster have to be tamed? Why do we have to worry about every little "message" that kids might pick out, like it's okay to eat all the cookies without paying for them?
What happened in those three years that suddenly sucked the life out of Sesame Street books? I'm starting to think Reagan was to blame.
Tom Holste:
Ugh! Everyone has to be so careful and sensitive these days. I remember reading a Muppet Kids book that belonged to a little cousin of mine. (Too Many Promises, 1991, wr by Ellen Weiss, illus by Tom Brannon.) Little Piggy and Fozzie were pestering Little Kermit about something all through the book. Then at the climax, they're pestering him on the schoolbus.
Finally, Kermit stands up and shouts, "WAIT A SECOND! I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE!" Then the author quickly adds, "Kermit stood up, right on the school bus. Then he remembered that he wasn't supposed to do that, and he sat down with a plop."
Safety precautions work like a vacuum on dramatic moments.
If it was that big a deal, why set the scene on the bus in the first place? The author can place the characters wherever she feels like it. For that matter, if they really want to drive the point home to the kids, make it a cautionary tale. "As soon as Kermit said this, the bus came to an unexpected screeching halt, sending Kermit flying through the air and splatting him against the window." That'd make the kids behave themselves the next time they're on a bus.
Scott Hanson:
What I love about vintage Sesame books is their ability to take the fantasy that's been created in all its craziness on the show, and transform it into this alternately skewed dimension all the more wacky than before to fit the needs of the moment.
Reading these books as adults and looking at their chronology, it's amusing to see just how little sense (on a grand level) went into making these little items that have become modern treasures. For example, reasoning where the forest is in relation to Sesame Street is so silly. The writers didn't even give it a thought. It was natural for them to say that Cookie Monster can be in a forest in one moment and then Sesame Street in another. This all despite the fact that we know that Sesame Street is supposed to be located in the middle of the city.
It's so pure that the writers didn't give it a thought. It's almost as though they subliminally set us up for these very types of conversations years later. Any minute now, we may all get up and proceed to complete a program that was written into our little brains decades ago by the pencil strokes of Joe Mathieu. Cool!
Danny Horn:
I agree, I think it's a great strength of these books -- and Sesame/Muppet stuff as a whole -- that the rules of the fantasy are kept flexible.
Nothing about Sesame Street is stable, especially not in the books. Are the Muppets kids or adults? Is Grover a waiter or a kindergarten student? Do they live in the city, in the suburbs, or on a farm? The characters and settings shift around, based on what's needed for that story.
I think that freedom makes the Sesame books way more appealing than, say, Flinstones Kids books, where the characters always have to live in the same place and do the same things.
Actually, I think that flexibility of character and place is part of what allows for the anarchic ending. (I'm still comparing "Cookie Tree" to the "Oatmeal" book.) When there's a single, coherent setting -- like the Sesame Street supermarket -- then you end up getting all anal-retentive about whether we've messed up the cookie aisle. Having a fuzzier, less restrictive fantasy space, like in "Cookie Tree," gives some room for the characters to make a mess, or not learn their lesson perfectly, and it's okay to just move on to the next thing.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of course, Emerson was talking about the Muppet Babies contradicting The Muppet Movie, but I think it's relevant to this discussion too.
Book : Part 1 -- Part 2 -- Part 3
Commentary : Part 4 -- Part 5 -- Part 6