![]() My favourite segment was the 1979 one when the Muppet band the Beetles, suitably mop-topped, if a little fuzzier of face than the originals, sang their poignant ballad Letter B (sample lyric: "When I find I can't remember/What comes after A and before C/ My mother always whispers, 'Letter B'," and yes, I am quoting from memory). The clearly depressed Oscar the Grouch is another problem: "We might not be able to create a character like Oscar today," said Parente, which is possibly one of the most depressing sentences I have read in my life.įor those of us reared on Sesame Street, the degree to which the show is embedded in our psyche is hard to overstate. His alter ego, Alistair Cookie, used to smoke a pipe before eating it, which, Sesame Street producer Carol-Lynn Parente explained to the New York Times, "modelled the wrong behaviour", and so Alistair was, tragically, dropped, and he now probably munches down on pipes in bitterness in illegal pipe dens. Children dancing in the street! Grown men reading storybooks to kids - for no apparent reason!Ĭookie Monster is the number one problem, not because he is a monster, but because he eats cookies (encourages obesity), and when his addiction takes a special stranglehold, the plate (might hurt). ![]() This post has been updated to include a statement from HBO Max.It's not the psychedelic nature of the programme in its 70s incarnation that worries, but the behaviour it might encourage. HBO Max may still be Elmo’s world, but it’s a bit smaller now. We have its premiere episode, sure, but we don’t have the first rendition of the beloved Oscar song “ I Love Trash” or other milestones from the show’s early years. ![]() But many classic, mainline Sesame Street episodes that were once on the service are nowhere to be found. The newer seasons 39 through 52 are still there, as well as several spinoffs and related ephemera. It still has its hub on the service similar to HBO’s, Studio Ghibli’s, TCM’s, and HBO Max’s other programming buckets. Now, there’s still quite a lot of Sesame Street content on HBO Max. “We are committed to continuing to bring Sesame Street into families’ homes, including the newest season premiering this fall and the nearly 400 episodes of the most current and historic seasons that remain on Cartoonito on HBO Max,” the streamer wrote. In a statement acknowledging the cuts, HBO Max called Sesame Street a “crown jewel” of its kids programming. “As of this morning, only 29 episodes from those years remain.” Variety estimated that Sesame Street’s episode count on HBO Max had been reduced from about pre-purge 650 to 456. “By my count, there were over 250 legacy episodes on the streaming service from the first 38 seasons of the show,” Hennes writes. More than 200 episodes have been removed, first spotted by Joe Hennes, editor of ToughPigs, a fan site dedicated to Sesame Street and other Muppets media.Īs ToughPigs lays out, there’s now a huge gap between season 1, which now has just 5 episodes, and season 39, with some odd entries thrown in in between: 14 episodes from season 5 and 10 episodes from season 7. HBO Max announced earlier this week, buried in a longer list of titles, that “select Sesame Street specials” would be removed, but that was downplaying it. Discovery has apparently spiked a massive chunk of the Sesame library from its service, amid a larger content reduction. Nearly three years later, HBO Max is under new management, and Warner Bros. They announced a deal with Sesame Workshop to shift decades of Sesame Street’s back-catalogue, plus the upcoming five years of new episodes, to the forthcoming streamer HBO Max. It seemed simpler in 2019, when HBO Max was still an apple in the eyes of AT&T executives trying to figure out what to do with WarnerMedia. Photo: Children’s Television Workshop/Getty Images
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