The original Sesame Street episodes are being released to DVD (Vol. 1, Vol. 2)…just don’t show ‘em to your kids.

According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

What?

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

I’ll freely admit to leaning to the left politically and socially, but this level of über-sensitive, overwrought ‘Political Correctness’ is absolutely ridiculous.

Were I ever to have kids (or spend some time babysitting any nieces or nephews — consider yourselves warned, Kev and Emily, Noah’s in trouble with me!), I’d be more than happy to give ‘em a full dose of Sesame Street and the Muppets both (that is, during one of the few times we plopped ‘em down in front of the TV instead of with a book or a game or outside play or other such things).

This world just gets weirder and weirder some days.

(via /.)

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