Mecha Builders: Sesame Street’s Failed Action Spinoff

Well, this was a long time coming.

Recently, I stumbled upon a video about a rather bizarre piece of unfinished media: an action cartoon featuring characters from Barney & Friends. This potential show, pitched during Barney's heyday in the late 1990s, would've been aimed at a slightly older demographic of elementary schoolers and was in the same vein as shows popular with them at the time, such as Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (if you think this sounds so insane that you just have to hear the rest of the story, I'll leave a link to the video at the end).

Back on topic, watching the video reminded me of an action spinoff to one of my favorite childhood shows that did make it to fruition: Mecha Builders.

I've actually discussed Mecha Builders in the past on other websites, but after the aforementioned video came out, I regularly began rambling to myself about the show's origins, its failure, and how to tie it back to something else I've been dying to talk about. And much like my last blog post, I've transcribed those ramblings to the best of my ability for you to enjoy.

Part 1: What is Mecha Builders? 

Mecha Builders is an animated spinoff of Sesame Street that features three of the show's most popular Muppet characters (Elmo, Abby, and Cookie Monster) as superpowered robots who help the citizens of Pretty Big City using their engineering and problem-solving skills.

While this all sounds innocuous enough, I'm going to get pretty harsh on this show in a minute. But first, in the spirit of fairness, I'm going to list some of the things I actually like about Mecha Builders.

1. The Mecha Trio - Elmo, Abby, and Cookie Monster’s designs translate into giant robots surprisingly well, and the Mechas’ personalities are also relatively unchanged from their Muppet counterparts: Mecha Elmo is still a happy-go-lucky kid, Mecha Abby’s flight powers reflect her fairy origins, and Mecha Cookie Monster is just as voracious as ever.
2. The Voice Acting - Another big plus regarding the protagonists is that Ryan Dillon, Leslie Carrara-Rudolph, and David Rudman voice the Mecha versions of their respective Sesame Street characters. Leslie even reprised her role as Elmo's dog Tango when a Mecha version of her was added midway through the show's run.
3. The Character Designs - Main trio aside, I also really like the designs for the civilians in Pretty Big City. They’re designed to look like Anything Muppets-utility puppets that are often used as background characters on Sesame Street-which I think is a nice touch. The animation for the show was done by Guru Studio (more on them later), and I think they did a good job.

But despite these compliments, there's something about the mere existence of Mecha Builders that depresses me, and that's where this post gets interesting…

Part 2: Why is Mecha Builders?
To understand why Mecha Builders was greenlit, one must accept a rather disappointing truth: Sesame Street isn't all that popular with its target demographic anymore. According to a Washington Post article from December 2024, Sesame Street was only the 14th most popular show amongst preschoolers; a response to that article posted on Muppet fan site ToughPigs.com even argued that the idea of Sesame Street continuing was more popular than the show itself.

But you know what show is popular with 21st-century preschoolers? Paw Patrol.

Yes, perhaps unsurprisingly, 4-year-olds are drawn like a magnet to a show full of exciting storylines, bright colors, loud noises, and cute puppies. Even less surprisingly, the show is produced by a toy company that capitalizes on young children's love of these things to sell them merchandise, thus keeping the franchise afloat indefinitely.

And of course, whenever something (especially a merchandising powerhouse) gets incredibly popular, there will be copycats…

Part 3: What Follows is a Brief Tangent 

Now, before I go any further, I feel like there's something I need to address. Sesame Street taking inspiration from their competition is nothing new; they've been doing it pretty much since they first started having less-than-friendly competition. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the Around the Corner era, where many new characters and locales were added to the street in an effort to win their audience back from the aforementioned Barney the Dinosaur.

What I feel differentiates Mecha Builders from the introduction of Around the Corner is that when the latter happened, the show still felt like Sesame Street and not merely a Barney clone with a Sesame-themed coat of paint (for example, one of the first ATC episodes was about racism, a topic I doubt Barney would ever cover). The same can’t really be said when comparing Mecha Builders to Paw Patrol, though, especially since even the people working on the show were aware that they had to outright copy the latter in order to make the former…

Part 4: Why is Mecha Builders? (continued)
As I mentioned earlier, the animation for Mecha Builders was done by Guru Studio. What I did not mention, however, is that Guru Studio also provides the animation for Paw Patrol, and they seemed well aware of the similarities between the two shows. While I don’t have any inside information myself, a friend of mine on Discord once mentioned that a friend of their stepmother’s used to work for Guru when Mecha Builders was in production, and they were effectively told to “make Sesame Street like Paw Patrol”, so make what you will of that information…

Of course, the animators weren’t the only ones to compare the two shows. When Mecha Builders first entered production, Ryan Roe of ToughPigs.com was quick to point out that it was likely being made to get contemporary preschoolers to care about the Sesame Street gang as much as they care about the Paw Patrol. And to this day on the ToughPigs Discord server, whenever users discuss the current state of Sesame Street, they express disappointment that the show had to copy Paw Patrol in order to maintain relevancy among its target audience.

But whatever, if taking inspiration from Barney was enough to keep Sesame Street alive in the 1990s, then maybe a Paw Patrol-esque spinoff could keep it afloat in the 2020s. Plus, given they're ripping off a toy-based cartoon, it'd certainly give them an opportunity to make more money by selling merchandise of the characters, right? Right?

Part 5: Moichendising! Moichendising!
Despite being heavily inspired by, as I said earlier, a merchandising juggernaut (and Sesame Workshop desperately needing as much money as possible in this day and age), very little Mecha Builders merchandise was ever produced. The few pieces that do exist include:

• Two Step into Reading books based on episodes of the show
• Four shirt designs by Popfunk
• A Roblox game

As far as toys (i.e., the kind of thing the target audience would actually want to buy), only two were ever produced: these plushes of Mecha Elmo and Mecha Cookie Monster.

(Side note: These plushes were made by longtime Sesame plush partner Gund. I bring this up because as of 2018, Gund is a subsidiary of Spin Master, the company that produces Paw Patrol.)

Now, I'm not going to say I know why there isn't a lot of Mecha Builders merchandise; there could be any number of reasons. Maybe they wanted to wait for actual demand. Maybe they were afraid people would get the Mechas mixed up with their Muppet counterparts while looking for toys. For all I know, maybe they didn't even want to make too much merchandise. But whatever the reason, the writing was on the wall that Mecha Builders was not as successful as they hoped it'd be…

Part 6: Conclusion
The final episode of Mecha Builders' first season premiered in November 2023. While no official announcement was made regarding the show's fate, five months later, a DVD compilation of all 26 episodes was released under the title "Mecha Builders: The Complete Series", effectively confirming it was unceremoniously cancelled. The idea was not completely abandoned, however, as the Mechas would later star in a short-form series of segments (under the same name as their series) on Sesame Street's 55th season.

As far as Mecha Builders' impact on Sesame Street as a whole goes, it's minimal to say the least. As stated, the target audience didn't seem to care, and adult Muppet fans just took it as a sad sign that Sesame had to copy Paw Patrol to survive in a world where its relevance is declining. I will say that as far as Paw Patrol clones go, Mecha Builders is one of the better ones in my opinion; I'd rank it C tier on a hypothetical tier list of these types of shows, but A and B tiers would be empty, so it's still something.

That said, there is one Paw Patrol copycat show that I actually really like a lot, far more than Mecha Builders, HBO/Netflix-era Sesame Street, and especially Paw Patrol itself. And I think it's finally time I told the world how I feel about it…

Now that this blog post is over, I'd like to give a huge shoutout to the people at the ToughPigs Discord for encouraging me to write this. Thanks for all your support, I wouldn't have done this without you.

And, as promised, here's the video about the scrapped Barney spinoff I mentioned at the beginning.