Picture this: a Muppet innocently visits a cultural site, gets falsely accused of stealing paintings, is unjustly punished by a Saturday Night Live alumnus, and then has to sneak into a prestigious location to clear their name and catch the true thief.
Now imagine Sesame Street does the same thing the following year. (Ba-dum-tshh.)
Okay, all kidding aside, The Cookie Thief is a fun way to spend 45 minutes (the rest of the episode is padded with traditional Sesame interstitials). It’s got wonderful visuals and the classic Sesame sense of humor that makes the special breeze by. For those who haven’t seen the special, let me give you a quick summary: Cookie Monster, Elmo, and Chris visit the Museum of Modern Cookie, home to the greatest collection of cookie art. (That’s art where cookies are the subjects, not the medium. If you want to see pretty cookies, you’ve got to go to BuzzFeed like everybody else.) At first, Cookie Monster has trouble controlling his hunger-based urges, which runs him afoul of a museum security guard (played expertly by Carnegie Hall star Rachel Dratch), but he quickly learns to control himself before any art has been om-nom-nommed into oblivion. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for elements of museum guide Prairie Dawn, whose cookie-shaped badges and beret are gradually consumed. To be honest, I actually feel like Prairie has this one coming. After all these years, she should know Cookie Monster’s tendencies.
But as Cookie Monster calms his impulses, the museum’s best-known work, the Muncha Lisa, is stolen! And even though he was nowhere near the painting, neither was the guard, so she immediately blames our fuzzy-and-blue hero, just on a hunch. Despite Cookie Monster’s pleas of innocence, she dispatches the Cookie Patrol (Keystone Kops-style penguin museum guards, which is a great use of Muppet penguins) to kick him out of the building, but he manages to escape their clutches! So then it’s up to Cookie Monster and his friends to clear his name and find the true cookie thief! (Though to be honest, Cookie should have just headed to the nearest branch of the ACLU. Being accused of a crime and then thrown out of a museum just because the security guard claims to “know his type” would probably warrant a big enough lawsuit to keep him in chocolate chips for the rest of his life.) Along the way, there are some really funny fantasy sequences about the creation of these works of art featuring a certain cute, furry little artist’s assistant as good as he’s ever been, leading up to the apprehension of the true cookie thief!
I’m bad, I know. (But the real thief is fun, too, especially if you like a certain 1960’s Hanna-Barbera cartoon about solving supernatural mysteries and dogs with speech impediments.)
I may not know cookie art, but I know what I like. And I like seeing Cookie Monster get into goofy hijinks. If you like seeing Cookie Monster get into getting into said hijinks, you’ll enjoy The Cookie Thief. If you like seeing clever, detailed parodies of iconic works of art, you’ll enjoy The Cookie Thief. If you’re a curmudgeonly Muppet fan, and dislike both of these things, you should still see The Cookie Thief, if because it may be Fran Brill’s final work on Sesame Street performing Prairie Dawn, the character she made famous (with a very fitting final line). Sure, it may tread familiar ground to Muppet fans (namely the Tower of London and The Mallory Gallery), but it’s still fun to see characters being performed at their best, not to mention the serious amount of cookie art that could warrant multiple viewings on its own. All in all, it’s a pretty good way to spend an hour with some beloved characters. At least I don’t think my time’s been stolen, anyway.
Click here to pull a Thomas Crowne Affair on the ToughPigs forum!
by Matthew Soberman
