My Week with Sesame Home Video – Monday

Kynan’s World
Monday, May 20

Here’s the thing: when you’re a Muppet Fan Geek who openly contributes essays about Sesame Street to a Muppet Fan Geek website under your own actual name, it’s hard to find legitimate skeletons in your closet. Basically, I have no shame. There’s nothing I can confess to you people that will actually shock you.

(I’m assuming here that Tough Pigs readers can be roughly divided into two groups: Muppet Fan Geeks like me, who have filled their houses with Bear in the Big Blue House bath toys, and consequently can’t be shocked; and increasingly alarmed passersby who know nothing about Muppets, and stumbled across this site inadvertently while looking for information about porcine farm-dwellers of greater-than-average stamina, and consequently are shocked by everything.)

But here’s something that’ll shock all of you right down to your stripy, green and white socks: I grew up in a Betamax family. (I know. Please hold your pity till the end.) Browsing for rentals, our search was limited to one tiny, badly-lit ghetto corner of the video store, and the clerks’ ill-disguised loathing for us did nothing to alleviate our pain. We lived in this world of technological shame for years, because we didn’t know any better. It was like we’d invested thousands in Ugly Duckling stocks the day after everyone cashed in on the Beautiful Swan boom.

And — pssst — wanna know something even worse? Until 1991, for reasons that have never been made clear, the only video in our household collection was She-Ra, Princess of Power. And I’m one of four boys. (Contributions to my weekly psych bill gratefully accepted.)

So, like any well-to-do young comedy writer out on his own making his fortune in the world, I’ve been spending the last ten or so years of my life doing my damnedest to make up for my impoverished, Dickensian childhood, in the form of establishing a huge, unwieldy video collection (VHS only, thank you so very much), consisting almost entirely of dumb Muppet stuff. Including, naturally enough, 14 Sesame Street videos.

Sesame Street has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years in the home video market, and leading the pack by an orange nose has been the ubiquitous Elmo. Of my fourteen tapes, six are Elmo-oriented, either in packaging or content. Three are Elmo’s World tapes, and the topic of today’s piece will be two of those three: Elmo’s World: Dancing, Books and Music and Elmo’s World: Springtime Fun.

Obviously, as a single grown-up comedy guy with no kids, I’m not the demographic first and foremost in the minds of kids’ video producers. Kids are. (Unless everything I learned in business school was wrong, and I doubt that very much, since that’s where I learned the ever-reliable Ugly Duckling investment analogy.)

So I’m not claiming to be an Elmo’s World expert here — certainly not qualified enough to question why Elmo’s World even needs to be available on home video when Elmo’s World seems to be the single most-screened show on TV at the moment. (Media-savvy readers will recall the recent fuss over ABC’s much-publicized attempt to replace Ted Koppel’s Nightline with Elmo’s World News Tonight.)

But I’ll tell you who is an Elmo’s World expert — Three-year-old Kynan, the eternally young Child Within who dwells inside my Muppet Fan Heart, and who, let’s be honest, was largely responsible for my impulse-purchasing of fourteen damn Sesame Street videos. Conveniently enough, Three-year-old Kynan writes in a different colored font, so nobody will get confused. [ Note: Three-year-old Kynan does not, in actuality, talk in Upspeak, but I’ve transcribed it that way because it’s funnier. ] Take it away, Three-year-old Kynan:

Um, I really like Elmo’s World? ‘Cos Elmo’s like, funny? And Mr. Noodle? He makes funny faces? And also, cause Elmo has a goldfish? Called Dorothy? But I think really there’s like, two of her? ‘Cos all my goldfish died? In like, two days? So I think Elmo’s Mom puts a different Dorothy in every day? But she doesn’t tell Elmo? I think Elmo’s World is really great, ‘cos it’s fun, and silly, and you learn stuff? I guess? And Super Grover falls out of the sky on his tricycle! Can I go now? ‘Cos I wanna draw on the walls with my crayons.

I think you’ll agree, Three-year-old Kynan has a lot of insight into Elmo’s World that most of us couldn’t achieve through critical theory alone. Nevertheless, despite his perceptive comments, he doesn’t mention some of the aspects of Elmo’s World that we older viewers might consider pertinent. First of all, Kevin Clash and the rest of the puppeteers are really, really good. Elmo does stuff every single day that boggles the puppet enthusiast’s mind. The combination of traditional Henson puppetry, digital puppetry, animation and chromakey is just stunning, without ever being distracting.

Also — since I haven’t raved about Eric Jacobson yet, consider him officially raved about. Eric pops up in these tapes performing Bert and Grover a couple of times, and honestly, who can tell the difference between him and Frank Oz? (Side note: I honestly can’t understand how Sesame Street traditionalists can complain about Elmo’s World. In these two tapes alone, I saw Grover, Bert, Ernie, Herry, Prairie Dawn and even Twiddlebugs! Bless Sesame Workshop, they just keep right on giving.)

But really, three year olds and adult criticism aside, the ultimate test is this: Today I watched six episodes of Elmo’s World in a row. That’s a hundred straight minutes of Elmo, and I didn’t want to hit the eject button once. That’s the best praise a single grown-up comedy guy with no kids can give.

And remember: Three-year-old Kynan loves you.

Tomorrow: Saddle up and ride like the wind for Elmo’s World: Wild Wild West.

by Kynan Barker