- Five, four, three, two, rehearsal.
- Business Insider.
Oh, this sounds exciting.
- In 1969 our founders, Joan Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett
had the revolutionary idea of asking,
what if kids can learn from TV?
They had noticed that kids could repeat beer jingles.
♪ Where there's life there's Bud ♪
- What'll you have?
♪ Pabst Blue Ribbon ♪
- So they posed themselves that question
and basically created Sesame Street
which is a show that's now been on the air almost 50 years.
We film at Kaufman Astoria Studios
which is in Astoria, Queens
and is a very old studio
that was built in the '20s
by what was United Artists at the time
and has gone through many iterations over the years.
On a regular production day, like today,
when you're visiting,
there's about 60 people involved
when you count the production staff
that's downstairs in the office
as well as all of the technical and stage crew
and camera people and costume designers, et cetera.
It really does take a village to bring this show together.
Every year when we start a new season
what we do is our curriculum team
convenes an all-day seminar.
And they basically consult with experts
in child development, child psychology, preschool teachers.
As the writers work the curriculum team
works in tandem with the production team
and they review all the scripts and give feedback
from the educational standpoint.
We also do a lot of research.
So we'll take some of the scripts into schools,
we'll read them to the kids
and solicit feedback from them.
Our production cycle is essentially a 12-month cycle.
You know, from the moment of that curriculum seminar,
which I described,
to the moment we deliver shows to HBO.
Jim Henson, you know, obviously his impact
on Sesame Street is massive
and he was the one who brought The Muppets to Sesame Street.
And so his legacy, I mean, is very solid
and lives on on the show
because all of our puppeteers are trained, basically,
in a methodology that he invented.
I mean, he took the puppet theater
and decided, I'm gonna get rid of that
and just use the TV frame as my puppet theater
while looking at a monitor
so that I can position my puppet
and see exactly what I need to see.
And so, basically he invented, you know,
puppetry for television.
And our puppeteers are trained in those methods
that he came up with.
It truly is, like, kind of a magic act.
So we have a core group of puppeteers
that is 14 people, 14 performers.
We have a mentee program that we run
to identify new puppeteers.
And so there's a few of those
and we'll bring them in a day here, a day there.
There's essentially three categories of puppets.
There's the walk around puppet.
So that's Big Bird or Snuffy, for example,
where the person is inside the puppet
and they're operating it from inside.
It's a full suit.
- You and me together, ol' pal.
- Then there's what we call a bag puppet.
So that's, like, Cookie Monster or The Count.
- Om, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom.
- One, two, three, four.
- And so there the puppet covers the puppeteer.
The puppeteer's operating the mouth with one hand
and is operating one of the hands with another
and then there's a second puppeteer,
which we usually call the assistant puppeteer,
and that person comes behind and operates the other hand
and helps hand props from below frame.
Then third kind of puppet is what we call a rod puppet.
So that's like an Elmo or an Abby.
And so they have,
those are typically operated by a single puppeteer.
They hold two rods which operate the hands
and then they're operating the mouth this way.
The primary puppeteer is always the person
that does the voice.
- Oh, Cookie Monster,
how could you mistake the mushroom for cookies?
- So, the most recent and probably most talked about
for the US is Julia,
who's a young girl who's on the Autism spectrum.
- Can Big Bird see your painting?
- See your painting, yes.
- And she was developed originally
by our Social Impact team.
Another example on the international side,
because we do a lot of international work,
is Zari who was developed for Afghansitan.
- Welcome to the street.
- Thank you Elmo.
Today I'm so excited to be here.
- [Both] Yay!
(both laugh)
- She's six years old.
She's curious and also has a younger brother
who looks up to her which is a great, kind of,
gender equity role modeling.
Caroll Spinney has been here since season one, you know,
and is the originator of both Oscar and Big Bird.
He's obviously a legend
and an amazing performer and just an amazing guy.
We have a couple of crew members,
believe it or not,
who've been here for nearly 50 years.
Frankie, who's our Camera One operator,
has been here since the beginning.
Our sound effects editor, Dick Maitland,
has also been here since the beginning.
They work on Sesame Street because they love Sesame Street.
They believe in our mission.
So people tend to stay.
In a given season of 35 episodes
we'll have, you know, 10 to 12 celebrity appearances.
We love to do musical guests
because kids love music.
And, you know, the celebrities are for the parents
you know, more so than the kids
who may not know who John Legend is
but when we can combine both,
doing musical and a celebrity appearance,
then it's great for everyone.
Celebrities will reach out to us
especially if they've recently had kids
and they think to themselves,
wow, I would love for Junior to see me on TV.
Sesame Street has changed a lot
and our production models evolve
with new technology all the time.
So we did a big kind of redesign of the set in season 46.
So that was about four years ago.
And it was, you know,
obviously we kept 123, the brownstone and Hooper's.
Those are the touchstones of the set.
But we wanted to modernize it some
to give it a more colorful and vibrant atmosphere
and also to position the puppets in specific places.
So Abby, who is a fairy, we put her in her garden.
And so now every kid who watches Sesame Street knows, like,
that's Abby's garden, that's where she lives,
that's where she hangs out and plays with her friends.
There's hundreds of studies
that have shown the effectiveness of Sesame Street
and how kids who watch Sesame Street
are ready for school in a fashion
that's greater than those who don't.
- Why me love cookies?
Oh, they just the perfect food.
They round, they crunchy,
they soft in the middle,
they chocolate, mmm, chocolatey.
Sorry, me got to go get a cookie right now.
Excuse me.