At karaoke recently I finally noticed the writer’s credit on the Three’s Company theme song was one Joe Raposo, whose name I revered even as a little kid. He wrote all the classic, dark and jazzy tunes from Sesame Street’s best years like C is for Cookie and Sing. My personal favorite is Everybody Sleeps, which immediately conjures up fuzzy images of friendly hobos and snuggly kittens. It made me think about the olden days of The Street, before the green screen reign of the soulless Elmo. I tried to watch some clips of Elmo and that peppy orange one, but the sound of their voices cuts through me like a knife.*
Recently I also caught Cookie Monster on The Colbert Report, who threw out some hip jokes to win over the young crowd of Manhattanites, who initially made hostile murmurs at the mention of “Veggie Monster”. We’re hostile because we all grew up watching those millions of cookies come spilling back out of his black felt mouth, and we turned out OK. They did make sure we knew not to bring cookies into the library though. I feel like Sesame Street didn’t always have such an obvious, annoying agenda. A kid could just chill with a juice box and watch a rolling rubber ball do its thing. And find me someone who doesn’t love that crayon factory. The Street was at its best when it was ponderous and abstract.
Also, can they cool it with the hipster guest stars? Don’t preschoolers know how to count to four already by hearing that Feist song on incessant ipod commercials? Back in the day we had classy guests like Madeline Kahn and Cab Calloway. Not one hit wonders with bangs. Now if they had Smokey Robinson running from that giant floating U parent groups would freak out cause it probably fosters stalkerist tendencies.
And anyway I think it’s clear that I still haven’t gotten over Mr. Hooper.
*Secret trivia: One of the fiery things in Labyrinth has Elmo’s voice (Kevin Clash), which bumps them up into a cosmically annoying level.
