My Week with Sesame 2003 – Thursday

Published: April 10, 2003

New and Improved
Thursday, April 10

The arc for this column is apparently that I’m just getting happier and happier. I started out on Monday complaining about the AOL ads, and on Tuesday I was just completely freaked out, but right now, I’m just loving Sesame Street. They’re just kicking it this year, in ways I didn’t even expect.

And it’s not just the street stories, as I talked about yesterday. The inserts have gotten better too. They’ve kept the good ones from last year — Cookie Monster’s funny Letter of the Day bits, and Rosita’s sweet Spanish Words — and then they took all the dull ones and either changed ’em or threw them out completely. (Except for Baby Bear and Hero Guy, which somehow squeaked through again this year. Baby Bear, I love ya, but Hero Guy has got to go. He’s a hero, he’s a guy, he’s annoying. Can his little animated ass and find yourself a decent friend, like Telly or somebody.)

Anyway, last year one of my major issues was Journey to Ernie, which was endless and didn’t make any damn sense. They’ve still got Journey to Ernie this year, but it’s a vastly improved segment that’s actually coherent and sometimes even fun.

If you’re joining us late, Journey to Ernie is a problem-solving segment where Big Bird is searching for Ernie in a computer-generated environment. Last year, Ernie was hidden in a box — no reason for that — and Big Bird would basically make arbitrary decisions. If he found the box that Ernie was hiding in, then we’d see an Ernie skit. If he found another box that Ernie wasn’t in — and there was no way to tell which was which — then we had to start all over again from the beginning. It was not a good segment.

So, who woulda thunk it, they went and solved the problems of the problem-solving segment. It’s all different now. Big Bird is still searching for Ernie, but Ernie isn’t in a box — he’s just hiding somewhere in a strange environment. There’s actual clues, and if there’s no way for Big Bird to make a reasonable decision, he doesn’t go anywhere until he gets a clue.

In one segment this week, Ernie was in a world of music, and Big Bird had to listen to hear something that sounded like Ernie’s laugh — which ended up being a pair of maracas — and finally found him by following the sound of his voice. In another segment, Ernie was hiding in a jungle, and Big Bird tried to track him by following the pattern of his shirt, and the shadow cast by his hair. There’s clues the whole way, and reasonable explanations for when a clue turns out to be a dead end — like when Big Bird thought he saw Rubber Duckie, but it turned out to belong to Bernie the Lion. “We’re getting close!” Big Bird said. “We’ve made a Journey to Bernie!”

It’s just way more coherent and pleasing, and when Big Bird finally finds Ernie, they sing a happy little song, and then they show an Ernie sketch. I guess the thing that pleases me about the whole thing is that they really didn’t have to change the segment. I’m sure it won’t boost their ratings a bit when word hits the street that Journey to Ernie makes sense this year. They just did it because it made the show better, and the producers actually care about making a better show. Bless their little blue hearts.

Ditto for a new segment called “Global Grover,” which is just as cute as can be. In this segment, Grover does little sketches about what he’s learned from traveling around the world, and those skits frame a film clip of kids from other cultures. Obviously, we don’t really get to see Grover in Bali or Nigeria or anything — that would get expensive — but still, the film clips are kind of fun, and everything tastes better with Grover.

My favorite this week was Grover trying to be a Chinese acrobat, and utterly failing to jump through a hoop. Then he shows us a film of a little Chinese boy going to acrobat school — and we get to see tiny kids practicing to do the most amazing acrobat tricks. Then we see the same kids doing a live performance, and they’re totally amazing.

I very rarely say this about a Sesame Street film clip that doesn’t involve Muppets, but I would actually watch this clip even if it wasn’t on Sesame Street. It’s actually interesting and fun, and you could imagine walking across the room to turn on the TV and watch it. The fact that we then get to see Grover falling on his face is just gravy.

Plus, I don’t know if seeing African kids in school or Chinese kids practicing to be acrobats is going to make today’s pre-schoolers grow up to be all one-world one-love and groovy about everybody loving each other or anything, but I for one think it’s worth a shot.