Sesame Street's Library is Coming to YouTube (and my Subsequent Thoughts)

So, yesterday, Sesame Street posted an exciting announcement to their Instagram account. I’m sure you probably already know what it is if you’re reading this (or just looked at the title of this post), but just in case you don’t, here’s the picture they shared.

Pretty exciting, right? But of course, there’s still a lot to unpack here, especially with the announcement being rather ambiguous about which episodes will be uploaded. While many are hoping for classic episodes, Shane Keating wrote in a ToughPigs article about this development that “classic” Sesame Street could refer to a more recent time frame than one might assume…

Long story short, this got me thinking about what counts as “classic” Sesame Street these days, and that turned into a conversation about the evolution of online discussion about the show, which eventually caused me to go off the rails on a crazy train. And since I like to have discussions with myself as if I’m talking to an audience, I figured I might as well write down my ramblings for you to read. So, sit back and enjoy my thoughts on “Classic” Sesame Street, the online Muppet community, and more!

Part 1: What is “Classic” Sesame Street?

“Classic” Sesame Street can refer to many different things depending on which fans you’re asking, including:

• Specific decades (1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, etc.)
• Everything made before Jim Henson’s death (1969-1990)
• Everything made before the Around the Corner era (1969-1993)
• Everything made before Elmo’s World (1969-1998)
• Everything made before Y2K (1969-1999)
• Everything made before the block format was introduced (1969-2001)

And probably some other definitions I’m not aware of.

However, it looks like Sesame Street themselves actually revealed their definition of “classic” quite some time ago. In 2008, the show relaunched their official website with games, Muppet bios, and of course, plenty of video clips from the show. All clips originating from seasons 1-24 were labeled as “Classic” (complete with a stamp, no less), which aligns perfectly with the “everything before Around the Corner” definition.

So that’s it, right? Sesame’s official definition of “classic” is everything made before the Around the Corner era? Well, not exactly…

At the time, the oldest clips labeled as “Classic” debuted in 1993, only 15 years prior to the relaunch. Going by this logic, everything up to and including season 40 would now be considered “Classic” (and by the time these episodes start getting uploaded in January, season 41 will be “Classic” as well). To make things more interesting, even the aforementioned Shane Keating echoed this logic on the ToughPigs Discord server, so I’m clearly not the only one who thinks like this.

However, while the notion that something made in the late 2000’s could be called “Classic” by today’s standards may seem ridiculous, the Sesame crew might not be the only ones who’d consider them as classic, or at least nostalgic…

Part 2: The Evolution of Sesame Street’s Online Discussion

In the seventeen years since Sesame Street’s website relaunched, online discussion of the show from fans who grew up has changed quite a bit. For much of the 2000’s, the conversation was dominated by former 70s and 80s kids who watched the show in their respective decades and didn’t like what it had become since then. However, sometime in the 2010’s, the dynamic started to shift a little.

The most noticeable change was the rehabilitation of Elmo’s online perception. Many of the fans who grew up before Elmo was introduced (or at least, before his popularity skyrocketed) despised the little red guy for having too much of a presence on the show, taking screen time away from other (older) characters. However, newer participants in the conversation have a more positive opinion of him, even getting to the point where the internet decided Elmo getting pissed off by a rock was the funniest thing in the world during the first week of 2022.

So what caused this to happen? The answer’s simple: people who grew up with 90’s and 2000’s-era Sesame Street got old enough to share their thoughts about the show online, and many of them looked back on Elmo more fondly. While the people who hate him for ruining the show haven’t gone anywhere, the younger crowd has shown more than enough love for him to balance it out (although obviously, there are still exceptions on either side (i.e., 90’s and 2000’s kids who hate Elmo and 70’s and 80’s kids who love him)).

To bring us back to the original point, there are people on the internet who could feasibly look back on late 2000’s-early 2010’s Sesame Street with nostalgia (myself included, as I was born in October 2004) so they might be considered “Classic” after all. That’s not to say that the much older seasons aren’t still classic, just that more seasons fit the definition as time goes on thanks to the ever-fleeting demographic.

Part 3: The Fleeting and Not-so-Fleeting Demographics

Sesame Street (and most other shows like it) is aimed primarily at an age demographic of young children. While different sources give different numbers, I personally consider the target audience to be 2-6 years old (2 for the minimum age recommended for screen time, and 6 for the oldest before one can watch TV-Y7 shows). Taking reruns of slightly older episodes PBS aired into account, for me, this definition would include seasons 36-42 (plus 30-33, which I saw in syndication on Sprout) as the ones I saw when I was in the target demographic; for everything I watched after that, I was in the periphery demographic.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “periphery demographic” refers to the fans a work has outside its target audience, and in the case of children’s shows, it’s typically those older than it. This can be split into two major categories:

Category 1 - Adults in the Life of Someone in the Target Demographic

While this usually means the child’s parents or legal guardians, it could also include older siblings, other relatives, or even non-related caregivers such as babysitters or daycare workers. As one would expect, these people watch the show because of the child in their lives. While they may enjoy it, they’re unlikely to watch it on their own, unlike…

Category 2 - Fans Who Grew Up

This is exactly what it sounds like, people who watched the show when they were in the target audience and never stopped watching even after they grew up. This is common for shows that have been around for decades, and can be further split into those who continue to watch new episodes and those who just rewatch the ones from the era(s) they’re nostalgic for.

Keep in mind that it’s completely possible to be in both of these categories at the same time (for example, someone who grew up with the show introducing it to their kids). Also, while these are the two biggest reasons an adult might watch a show made for young children, there are still some others. For example, if the show’s part of a larger franchise with an established fandom, some members of said fandom might watch it out of curiosity. There’s also people who watch the show to analyze its lore on YouTube (i.e., Athena P.) and people who are just drawn to a show for some unknown and perhaps unnatural reason despite being too old for it…

Part 4: What Follows is a Brief Tangent

In October 2022, I celebrated my 18th birthday, upon which I became an adult. A couple months later, I heard about a new show that really caught my attention, as it seemed like the kind of thing I’d just eat right up. Unfortunately, said show airs on a channel/channel block aimed at preschoolers, and since it was brand new, it didn’t have the same generational appeal or nostalgia factor as something like Sesame Street to make me feel okay with watching it as an adult. To this day, I’ve never seen an episode of the show due to these emotions swirling inside me, not to mention the embarrassment I’d feel if someone caught me watching it (I don’t live on my own), and it’s starting to eat at me.

Well, now that I got that out of the way, I might as well wrap things up before I start crying.

Part 5: Conclusion

I have absolutely no idea what the bottom line of this blog post is. Does Sesame Street need a better way of defining the word “Classic” in regard to their show? Is 15 years a good threshold for “Classic” and Sesame aficionados just need a new word for the really old stuff (“Vintage”, maybe)? These questions still don’t have answers, and don’t even get me started on the unresolved issues about my desire to watch a preschool show made long after I grew out of the target demographic.

I guess the moral of the story is…

Maaaaan!