When the Children’s Theater Workshop’s Sesame Street first aired on television in 1969, it was a revolutionary new show aimed specifically at preschool children–an audience previously untargeted by television programming. Exhaustively-researched and tested on real audiences of preschoolers, this “experiment in kid programming” aimed to teach preschoolers the alphabet, numbers, body parts, rhyming, and basic reasoning skills while thoroughly entertaining them.
Through the use of humor, the amazing puppetry of Frank Oz and Jim Henson, animation, the incredibly catchy music of Joe Raposo and Jeffrey Moss, and a fast-action pace borrowed from the television commercial format, Sesame Street was, and still is, more successful at educating and entertaining children than anyone initially imagined.
What’s more, the lessons learned by generations of preschoolers went far beyond simple school-readiness skills to include values like acceptance, cooperation, and inclusiveness because the urban Sesame Street was a place populated by people and monsters young viewers could identify with, where anything could happen, and where every ethnicity, generation, and species co-existed and interacted harmoniously.