How We Got to Sesame Street: Highlights from the Haifa Film Festival

• Published date: 23 September 2021
• Author: HANNAH BROWN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Director Marilyn Agrelo, producer Ellen Scherer Crafts from Street Gang, senior Sesame Street producer Benjamin Lehmann and Alona Abt, one of the founders of the Hop! children's media group and a producer of Rehov Sumsum in Israel will participate in the online event.

The documentary is a smart, funny and entertaining movie about the smartest, funniest and most entertaining series ever for young children. But it is also moving, because it tells about the serious mission that drove those who created Sesame Street: to try to make up for educational inequality between black and white children and to try to stop underprivileged children from falling behind in school.

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The documentary, which is geared at adults, explores the perfect (and perfectly wonderful) storm of elements that came together to create the show. It is not a comprehensive documentary about the entire history of the show, which began running over 50 years ago and it does not get into certain controversies (the period it covers ends long before the scandal involving Kevin Clash, the puppeteer who performed as Elmo and left after he was accused of having sexual relationships with underage teenagers) and cannot fully cover all of the high points of the show's music, the magic that many celebrities brought to it or the indescribable popularity of its Muppet characters, that led to hugely lucrative merchandising deals, which insured that the show will never run out of funds.

But it gets into the what made the show unique and important, as it details how the idea to meld an educational show with a very entertaining one came about when television producer Joan Ganz Cooney and Carnegie Foundation vice president Lloyd Morrisett started kicking around ideas in 1966 for a show that would use Madison Avenue techniques to teach urban children. The show was created with funding from Carnegie in 1969.

It was an instant and huge success for Cooney and her collaborator, director/writer Jon Stone, whom the documentary presents as the unsung hero of the show, since Cooney, being the rare woman in television, got the lion's share of the publicity. They worked with both educational experts and seasoned comedy writers to create a show they hoped would appeal to the target audience.

STONE WAS instrumental in making the show what it became in many ways, but two stand out. One is...