Word: programming
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Until last year. Abruptly, the electronic babysitter moved onto a street called Sesame. It was a combination of the circus, a classroom and the Brothers Grimm. At first it was suspected of merely looking brilliant, compared with the boring horrors of standard children's programming. Vulgarity and violence dominate children's video: mice endlessly bombing cats, family "comedies" with dumb daddies, mischievous kids and dogs who wag their way into your heart, all accompanied by commercials as intense as the Chinese water torture ("Be the first on your block . . . Ask Mommy to get some . . . New! Big! Free...
Adds David Frost: "Americans tend to believe that everything foreign is better than anything American. But Sesame Street is the best children's program I've ever seen. It is true international TV. And it's a hit everywhere it goes." By next year, everywhere will include 50 countries, including Japan and South America and the Philippines. Foreign versions are being prepared; by 1971, it will have a side streeta program aimed at children seven to eleven, teaching reading and writing...
Sesame Street has the aura of ad lib, the spontaneity of a playground game with celebrities and characters. In fact, it is as meticulously planned as a semester at medical school. From Palmer's research department, program subjects flow to the production office, then get channeled to Head Writer Jeff Moss, a veteran of the Captain Kangaroo show. Three weeks before taping, Moss and his writers develop a script. Theoretically, their ideal viewer is poor and culturally deprived. Actually, the show catches the preschooler almost before his society does. Thus Sesame Street is as popular with the well...
...program obeys an iron law of show business: the greater the hit, the louder the detractions. Marshall McLuhan, in a sense the show's godfather, considers the whole thing naive. "Kids have graduated far beyond Sesame Street," he declares. "TV has already exposed them to the lethal adult world, they know about that now, and that's why they have no intention of growing up. They know that adult life brings the biggest game of all; whether it's Mannix or Mission: Impossible, it's all man hunting. TV is the cyclops, the eye of the man hunter...
...Samantha-fixes-the-plumbing repeats, there has been some tasteful and educational fare. Mr. I Magination took kids on gentle fictional trips, won awardsand lost sponsorship. The science-oriented Mr. Wizard lasted 14 years, was canceled in 1965. Ding Dong School, starring Dr. Frances Horwich, was a gentle, preschool program that provided a nannyish instructor for a babysitter. She, too, became an unreplaced dropout...