Dr Chuck Pearson

Do you understand? Do you hear what I'm saying? See this psycho Fairuza Balk face?

This is not the first time Cookie Monster's been driven to promote balanced eating. Not by a long shot:

Me promise that when you eat varied menu,
You get more out of every meal.
You need balanced diet,
Come on and try it!

Yeah, I know. It's mindnumbingly pedestrian and obvious. It flies in the face of Cookie's basic id nature. Cookie's supposed to be the ultimate in monofocus, right? Writes to Santa and eats the pencil? Types at Santa and eats the ribbon, then the typewriter? Phones Santa, eats the phone, and pulls off a miracle in then-contemporary telecommunications? (Yeah, I know. I hate that it's out of TV circulation myself. Douglas fir give me heartburn, too. It's on DVD.)

Hey, we're getting off light. Sesame Street has a precedent for dropping characters perceived to be harmful in some fashion, okay? Roosevelt Franklin "was abandoned because he was thought by some to be a negative cultural stereotype and because the schoolroom in which he spent most of his time was considered to be a bad example." Don Music got "complaints about his alarming tendencies toward self-punishment. Apparently, kids were imitating his head-banging tendencies at home." (It'd take some hunting through 1998's Sesame Street Unpaved, the CTW-issued puff book cited above, to confirm it, but certain live-action segments went by the wayside for similar reasons over the years. Cake pratfalls down stairs? Dude.)

If you're gonna get upset about the American version of Sesame Street this week? Okay, there are plenty of reasons to get upset over Sesame Street. The way Mr. Hooper was an Event, but David just kinda vanished, say. Elmo's just bloody obvious. The scaling back of the show's target market's also bloody obvious; it sucks that they have to dumb down the one show which never assumed we were freakin' morons. In fact, Elmo's focus-stealing stems from that. And so do the other cardboard "characters" which began to populate the show. Baby Bear. The mindnumbingly heavy focus on Telly, who was at least suitably neurotic back in the day. Did you see how they mishandled Grover and his friends in that one direct-to-video special a little while back? Appalling. Effin' Rosita de la Great Big Hug thing. Plaza Sésamo's awesome, but this? Effin' Rosita? So not. (And, hell, I'll just go with you on any of the generic, bland monsters from about 1991 onwards. The real character development on monsters seems to be going on over with the international markets. The ones which don't just dub Big Bird and Elmo, anyways.) A little character depth? A little nuance and unforced charm? In the ten games we've played, she's only beaten me twice? Hello? Yeah. Yeah, see, no issue there. None at all.

And Noggin dropping those fantastic, grainy, perfectly bumpered late-night reruns from a few years back? Yeah, I'm with you every step of the way here (and if you taped 'em? My family wants a giant gushing word with you). That? That was for us. And it's not like Sesame Workshop don't know from the market here; we're getting Roosevelt Franklin figures from Palisades, after all.

(Look, my people got Sesame Park, okay? I have no bloody sympathy. Canadians can't deal with the grim urban reality of the Sesame Street ghetto, they told us. Yeah. Because, you know, couple generations of kids didn't do just fine with having the Spanish segments replaced with French ones, or just watching cable (MPBN, represent, yo) and being able to tell you what on earth a salida was. Inane Francophone beaver. Freaking beaver. Beaver, bear and biplane. Grim rural reality. I want me some North of 60 or Due South? I will watch me some of that. No sympathy at all. No.

None.

It got cancelled, by the way. But I digress.)

Look, he's still going to be Cookie Monster. It's like how, when Cartoon Network picks up a show to run on Toonami or Adult Swim, the original Japanese materials don't just somehow vanish from existence. They'd pretty much have to stomp this character, or purge him, to eliminate his basic appeal. And, in a few years, when the current wave of perceived urgency settles down a little, we'll probably see him go nuts again. And there's way, way, way too much stuff in circulation now to remind us of what was.

Frank Oz doesn't even perform him anymore, now, anyways. Likewise poor Grover.