Let me paint a bleak picture for you, Tough Pigs readers: It’s 1973, and the United States is in the middle of a significant oil and gas crisis. What does that mean? No funding for anything frivolous from PBS from any donors, private or corporate. Sesame Street was in its infancy and desperately wanted to produce a special to celebrate its fourth anniversary. What do our industrious pals over at Children’s Television Workshop do? Attempt to throw something up for about two hundred bucks, of course. And I’m not using the term “throw something up” lightly because this is… not a good anniversary special and it resembles vomit on a screen.
The main question when reviewing the fourth anniversary special is, what do you get for $200? Like a single actor on a poorly mic’d and lit set and, uh that’s about it. Also, if you think that the actor on set would at least be a supportive and comforting presence from our childhoods, like a Sonia Manzano or a Bob McGrath, think again. The only guy they could get was Kermit Love (who also served as a puppet builder on the show) as Willy the Hot Dog Vendor. Remember him? Here’s a blurry picture to refresh your memory:
Yep. That guy. Hey, I don’t hate him, but he’s not the most exciting one of all of them, is he?
Well, there’s a reason he barely speaks on the show, usually. The Sesame writers refused to work for free on this, too, so poor Kermit as Willy had to improvise all his dialogue. I wish I could show you full footage from this disaster, but very few copies of it still exist. In fact, I was mailed a grubby Betamax tape of this abomination just a few weeks ago in an envelope with a fake return address from someone apparently named “Coan Janz Gooney.” Anyway, I’ve tried to meticulously transcribe just a section of poor Kermit Love’s opening scene, which lasted for over half the special (too much to digitize, unfortunately):
“Well, hi, boys and girls. It’s me. The hot dog guy and boy… um… Sesame Street… it sure is four years old now… and uh… who can forget all the fun… numbers and letters and puppets that I built with my hot dog selling hands… I mean… uh… they’re not puppets… they’re your flesh and blood friends… You know them all: the two quarreling brothers, the blue fuzzy glutton, and the trench-coat lizard. Yes… yes… and the rest of ’em!”
This is really all I could get though. Poor ol’ Willy goes on like this for another 17 minutes.
What follows after this rambly monologue is a complete breakdown in form and structure for the special. Apparently, CTW couldn’t license their own interstitial Sesame Street clips (WTF?) for their own fourth anniversary. So instead, they got some guy (who clearly shot all these in their living room) to churn out stuff like this:
I can confirm, that was a collection of real clips from the special that I digitized. The rest was a little too disconcerting for me to share with you.
The special ends on one of Sesame Street‘s least famous Muppets, Sam the Robot doing this for like 12 minutes:
I guess the only thing left to say about the Sesame Street Fourth Anniversary Special is that… it’s a total nightmare and should be avoided at all costs? Yep. At all costs.
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by Louie Pearlman
