Vogue part 2: Sesame Street

I am so proud and impressed that a show like Sesame Street has lasted as long as it has. With the changing trends and needs in child-rearing this one show has managed to stay relevant and necessary. Granted there have been major changes in its 40 year career, but it's still around biddies. Oh yes. I haven't sat down and watched an episode recently, but I have seen some of the important sketches that make these current seasons as important as the old ones.

Like Cookie Monster, for instance. All I was hearing was that he was becoming Veggie Monster, giving up cookies and wearing birkenstocks. or something. I, like the many folks who grew up with this show, were crushed to hear this news. But then I actually watched the sketches where they address Cookie's new diet, and it's done with the same humor and frankness as any other issue they address. There's one sketch where Cookie encounters a bowl of fruit and gets all excited to eat it. Matt Lauer appears from nowhere grilling Cookie on the fact that he's about to eat FRUIT?!? Cookie handles it like a pro and says, "You members of media blow story WAAY out of proportion. Me still like cookies. Me Cookie Monster." And there you have it.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about, I want to continue our discussion of frame. One of the things that makes Sesame Street so great is the way they parody other tv shows, movies, theater, what have you, and part of that means parodying their camera work, so there are way too many different ways in which they use frame to generalize and say that there's one way that SS uses frame.

Instead I would like to focus on one sketch in particular, one called Fat Cat Sat Hat.

First of all, I love how this is done like a beat poem with the individual words coming slowly then a big explosion of sound and rhyme. And you immediately establish character and relationship with unique voices and text that has nothing to do with any of them (by which I mean text that directly addresses who they are or what they want). But the smooth shapes of the Anything Muppets (the green, blue and purple fellas) next to the wild and unkempt energy and look of Bip Bippadotta (the Mahna Mahna Muppet whose name was later changed) suggest a conflict between order and disorder just by looking at them. And all this for teaching word families.

So frame. It's my feeling that a lot of shows with puppets keep a very two-dimensional look to everything given that the puppets are restricted by their real life puppeteer. They can move left and right, down but not too far up without some serious rearranging and the occasional near and far (just ask Grover). But here we have them all over the place creating this liminal empty space that's not a room or a street corner, it's just a place. I'm continuing with the vision of this sketch as a beat performance on a standard proscenium stage. So the Anythings try to keep things going left and right, as if they are walking on and off stage, and then from the back here comes Bip Bippadotta. But when they all leave to start a new round of words, they go in all directions, defying the bounds of a conventional stage. They even use status techniques of having the Anythings tower above Bip when they want him gone adding levels that further define relationships and take up more of the frame that we haven't seen used yet.

Perhaps my favorite part though, other than when Bip yells "Hey y'all!" would be when the three Anythings are right in front of the camera looking at Bip and we only see the tops of their heads. They're standing in our position creating a visible audience for Bip and totally redefining their roles as performers, if we keep up with my vision of them on a stage. They're no longer looking left and right, they are in our space where we have not seen them before. And to finish things off, they throw Bip right offstage out into the audience with us, straight into the camera.

I think the great thing about this sketch is how much they managed to pack in there and the sheer simplicity of it all. It's like a visual and artistic vitamin, getting everything you need in one dose. I don't know that I'm trying to make a grand point, other than that Sesame Street has a good eye for putting sketchs together and we could all learn a little something from them.

And now, in the vein of Sesame Street parodying things, here's the opening to Follow That Bird, one of my faves.