Sunny day
Sweepin' the clouds away
On my way to where the air is sweet
Can you tell me how to get
To Sesame Street …
Of course you can. After nearly 40 years, partly because of its many international co-production units, most everyone on the planet knows the premier address in children's lives, 123 Sesame Street, that near-mythic meeting place where “everything's A-Okay,” thanks largely to an infectiously unforgettable theme song and an equally memorable – animate and inanimate – cast of characters and creators.
Now, just in time for its celebration of four extraordinarily successful decades in educational television (come Nov. 10), reporter, editor and educator Michael Davis (who aced a variety of positions at various publications, from writer to top news executive, at The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Sun-Times and TV Guide), applies his talents to providing generations with a compulsively readable compendium of all things Sesame Street -wise with Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street .
And, what a history it is! Davis delves deeply and comes up with a behind-the-screens illustrated winner destined to become the definitive statement on the remarkable television program that entertains, instructs, delights and utterly charms any and all who come into contact with its irresistible oddballs and upstarts, the likes of which we may never see again. And, that's just the endless A-List of international guest stars.
As an aside, it's particularly illuminating to note the Jim Henson shop displayed a great deal of sensitivity when it came to regional and national cultural differences, especially in terms of its dealings with the CBC. During the 1980s, characters such as Basil the Polar Bear, Louis the Francophone Otter and Bush-Pilot Dodi joined a revolving cast of “Anything Muppets” who became, as situations demanded, anyone from Barbara Plum to Beau Beaver.
Naturally, the long list of Canadians who found themselves in Muppetland over four decades included everyone from Eric Peterson to Sandra Oh to Red Green to John Candy to Feist, providing an alternative reading of “1234” to … You get the picture.
Street Gang , informative, heartbreaking, hilarious and often eye-opening (even for the most seasoned followers of the shenanigans of the Count, Cookie Monster, Big Bird, Ernie, Oscar, Miss Piggy, Elmo, Kermit, et al.), relates the involving and often comical story of the history and creation of what many consider to be television's numero uno masterpiece theatre for children of all ages.
Granted the full co-operation of one of the show's cofounders, Joan Ganz Cooney, the trailblazer tracks the sometimes quirkuitous but always amusing birth of the program (with its roots and inspiration in the mid-20th-century civil-rights' movement as much as the pronouncements of media-guru Marshall McLuhan concerning the dominant medium and the way in which its messages come across most clearly). He also traces its evolution from Richard Nixon's resistance of it and repugnance toward it to the awesome phenomenon of Elmo, as well as the way in which one of the show's true geniuses, Jim Henson, forever altered the small-screen, inner-city scenescape for the better before a garden-variety strep-throat infection got the best of the him in 1990.
In fact, the book's prologue, both Henson eulogy and encomium, may well break millions of hearts around the globe all over again:
