They’ve Learned a Lesson

As a little girl in Harlem, Tipharnie Dingle would munch on dry cereal as she watched “Sesame Street” and pretend she actually lived there. It seemed like such a safe and happy place, recalled Dingle, who was raised in housing projects by her disabled single father, “and I longed to be in a place like that.”

Today, as a popular baby-sitter on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the empathetic Dingle often turns to the TV show and its familiar characters, songs and skits to help break the ice with her young charges. “ ‘Sesame Street’ has saved me many times,” said Dingle, 23.

Pieter Smit similarly bonds with his son over “Sesame Street” in suburban Stamford, Conn., watching not only current episodes with 22-month-old Samuel but also 1969 archival clips in which Smit himself appears as a very skinny kid with a very big afro, counting out ice cream cones and toys.

“It felt like things had come full circle,” Smit, a 34-year-old banker, said of the first time he played the clips for his son. “Not only was I watching, but I was watching with him, and I felt like, ‘Wow. This is really great.’ ”

As it begins its 30th year on the air, “Sesame Street” seems to be marking not only its unchallenged status as a landmark educational program but also its growing presence as an emotional reference point between generations. Fans and creators alike don’t just credit the show with teaching the ABCs to millions of children, but also the Golden Rule, and with generating some of their profoundest memories. Even Joan Ganz Cooney, the formidable co-founder of the show’s parent Children’s Television Workshop, sentimentally describes sharing vintage videotapes with her grandchildren.

And just as original viewers like Smit find themselves coming full circle with the show, so “Sesame Street” itself has reached into the past for a simpler, cleaner new season that begins today and includes the program’s most significant changes to date.

In a nod to its increasingly younger audience, the show’s producers have created a 15-minute segment called “Elmo’s World” devoted exclusively to the 3 1/2-year-old Muppet. Helping Elmo master basic, everyday things like balls, shoes and water is a human foil named Mr. Noodles (played by Bill Irwin), a Chaplinesque mime willing to make mistakes and learn a few lessons from kids.

The new segment, whose computer graphics are reminiscent of the classic children’s book “Harold and His Purple Crayon,” will appear every day at the end of the show; the same segment will be repeated five days in a row to enhance young viewers’ comprehension.

A Big Bird in Every Episode

In turn, the first 45 minutes of “Sesame Street” promises to be a tighter production with clearer themes and a renewed emphasis on the original neighborhood and its best-known denizens, including Big Bird and Oscar, Elmo and Zoe, Rosita, Telly and Baby Bear. Big Bird, who was featured less frequently in recent years despite market research showing him to be the show’s most popular character, is supposed to show up in every episode this season. Similarly, Mr. Hooper’s Store, the timeless soda fountain where humor and wisdom were always dispensed in equal measure, will be used as a frequent backdrop once more. The store has a new proprietor too, named Alan (Alan Muraoka).

Gone will be Around the Corner, the expanded set that was created for “Sesame Street’s” 25th anniversary, largely to prove the veteran program could still be fresh. Around the Corner, which represented fully half the show’s set, had introduced Celina’s Dance Studio, the Finder’s Keepers thrift store, the Furry Arms hotel, and an army of secondary puppets that were cute but ultimately deemed confusing.

In its return to the basics, the reformatted show will also emphasize about 10 classic “Sesame Street” songs--original numbers such as “Sing,” “Bein’ Green,” “People in Your Neighborhood” and “Rubber Duckie”--instead of constantly introducing new music. The program’s creators are hoping that kids will be more inclined to sing along if presented familiar tunes and that, despite all the changes to the program, they and their parents will feel very much at home. Even the opening has been re-shot in a throwback to the original scene of children blithely following Big Bird through Central Park on their way to Sesame Street.

“The feeling we really wanted to stress was intimacy,” said head writer Lou Berger. “We all wanted to go back to a place that you know. And we know Mr. Hooper’s Store. We know Oscar’s trash can. . . . We come back to Sesame Street more so we establish more of that intimacy.”

The changes come at a time of unprecedented competition, including shows clearly spawned by “Sesame Street” that are impertinently trying to knock the granddaddy of quality kids’ TV out of its easy chair. The Public Broadcasting Service no longer offers the sole alternative to the major networks’ cartoon kids’ fare but faces a growing cable market, including Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, the Cartoon Network and Fox Family Channel.

“Sesame Street,” for many years the uncontested leader of children’s programming, now ranks No. 5 in the Nielsen ratings behind “Arthur,” “Barney,” “Blue’s Clues” (Nickelodeon’s increasingly popular show about an inquisitive, blue-colored puppy) and “Little Bear,” the Nick program that airs just before “Blue’s Clues” in the morning hours.

“We’re in the midst of a programming explosion right now,” said Elizabeth Tessier, director of marketing and media research for Children’s Television Workshop. “ ‘Barney’ really opened it up. ‘Arthur’ took it to a new level. ‘Blue’s Clues’ really escalated the game.”

“Sesame Street” is still holding its own in the ratings and is viable by other standards too. The show captured 22.2% of its available target audience (children ages 2 to 5) during a three-month period last spring, according to Nielsen figures provided by the show from the second quarter of this year. (By comparison, “Arthur” won 27.3% and “Barney,” 26.2%.)

The program also has evolved from a 1960s experiment almost exclusively dependent on government funding to a self-supporting institution of its own. Although Children’s Television Workshop remains a nonprofit corporation, sales of “Sesame Street” toys, clothes, books, magazines and CD-ROMs are expected to cover 85% of this season’s $25-million production cost, according to CTW President and CEO David Britt. The show, which is broadcast in 78 countries, recently extended its contract with PBS through 2003.

Citing all those factors as signs of the program’s unflagging success, Britt and others maintain that competition really wasn’t the reason for all the change. “We’re not imitating ‘Barney,’ ” said research director Rosemarie Truglio. “Let me make that very, very clear.”

From its inception in 1968, when it was created to prepare underprivileged 4- and 5-year-olds for school, “Sesame Street” has been a collaboration between its research department and its writers, a balancing act between teaching and entertaining--and being entertaining for both kids and their parents. Every single segment of every episode is written on two levels and has a curriculum goal, whether it is sharing or counting to 10. Last year, for example, science and exploration were the overarching themes; Slimey the Worm’s historic trip to the moon, which unfolded over several weeks, was devised to convey the academic message.

In anticipation of the 30th-season milestone, Truglio’s research team conducted 20 studies to see what children thought of recent shows. (“Sesame Street” now targets kids as young as 2 because the working-mother phenomenon has lowered the age at which many youngsters are starting day care and nursery school.) The results showed that young children were simply overwhelmed by the smorgasbord of characters, locales and songs that had grown out of “Sesame Street’s” expansion to Around the Corner. As with food, kids liked familiar stuff better. It was clearly time for “Sesame Street” to engage in some voluntary simplicity.

Though the changes in “Sesame Street” are significant, they are by no means the first in the program’s history. Like the best of jazz musicians, the show’s writers and performing artists pride themselves on being able to improvise and gracefully react to events, whether in society at large or the gentle world of Sesame Street.

In one landmark, never-repeated episode, “Sesame Street” used the death of the real-life Mr. Hooper--actor Will Lee, who died of prostate cancer--to discuss the concept of death with children. “He’s gotta come back!” Big Bird cried during the 1982 show. “Who’s gonna make my birdseed milkshakes?”

“When we finished the scene, all the actors had tears streaming down our faces,” recalled Caroll Spinney, the voice and soul of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch since the show began.

Big Bird himself changed early on from a pinheaded bumpkin to a compassionate 6-year-old child. It was Spinney’s suggestion to recast the character, giving him more depth and relevance to viewers (and better reflecting the gentle Spinney), and the change compelled Muppets creator Jim Henson to give Big Bird a bigger head. Other changes on the show have included the introduction of rap music--”something I’ve never cared for,” said Spinney, who is 64.

His dislike of the genre was reinforced when a guest rapper literally rapped Big Bird on the beak, knocking the puppet’s 4 1/2-pound head out of Spinney’s controlling hand. Spinney said the outburst followed a frustrating shoot in which the teenage rapper kept dropping the letter Q from the alphabet, which he was supposed to recite with Big Bird. Finally the rapper nailed his ABCs but Spinney was so tired that he slurred his last line and the scene had to be re-shot yet again.

“You stupid bird!” the musician blurted out. “And this hush came over the place,” Spinney recalled.

More than one celebrity guest has required cue cards for reciting the alphabet, confided cameraman Frankie Biondo, the most senior technician on the “Sesame Street” set. Biondo still laments the production’s move five years ago from Broadway and West 81st Street to the roomier Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens. “Zabar’s was right across the street. Are you kidding me?” he said, in reference to the famed gourmet deli.

During a recent shoot, as Oscar held a garbage sale to make room for dance lessons inside his trash can, Biondo also noted the deaths of Henson, Lee (Mr. Hooper), composers and writers Joe Raposo, Jon Stone and, most recently, Jeff Moss, to whom the 30th season is dedicated. Those deaths and others over the course of three decades have served as reminders to the tight-knit troupe that while Big Bird and Cookie Monster are ageless, time and little else outside “Sesame Street” stay the same.

“I remember Jim [Henson], in one of our last conversations before he died, said to me, ‘The other day I was on a plane, and the stewardess said she just gave her ‘Sesame Street’ toys to her daughter,’ ” Cooney recalled. “And that was the first time we understood that the show had gone through more than one generation.”

Smit’s son Samuel now owns the Cookie Monster hand puppet that was once his aunt’s, while Dingle talks of the show as one of the few constants in her own turbulent childhood. Another “Sesame Street” kid-turned-grown-up, Maireda Seaman Place, should welcome the changes to the 30th season because it was the classic songs, slapstick routines and recognizable New York scenes surrounding “Sesame Street” she most treasured--and the recent glitz and assortment of characters she least understood.

“I remember sitting there one day and just having no idea what the segment was about,” said Place, 36, a teacher-therapist who has watched and talked about “Sesame Street” with her younger siblings, her own children and her students. “I think their creativity just got away from them.”

Yet Place also remembers once watching the show with the oldest of her three children, Nathan, now 11, and being moved to tears as Ernie sang “Oh, I’d Like to Visit the Moon,” in which he realizes--not unlike his creators--that familiar things are often the best.

Said Place: “I thought that was a very beautiful, poignant song about being home.”

* “Sesame Street” airs weekdays at 6 and 10 a.m. on KCET-TV.