| Sesame Street | |
|---|---|
 Sesame Street logo. | |
| Format | television series |
| Creator(s) | Joan Ganz Cooney, Lloyd Morrisett |
| Company | PBS |
| Date released | 1969 to present |
| Genres | children's show |
| Country of origin | USA |
Sesame Street is an American educational children's television series produced by the non-profit Sesame Workshop, formerly known as the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), which was founded by Joan Ganz Cooney and Ralph Rogers. The show premiered on 10 November 1969, and is the longest running children's program on television.
Sesame Street uses a combination of animation, puppets, and live actors to stimulate young children's minds, improve their letter and word recognition, basic arithmetic, geometric forms, classification, simple problem solving, and socialization by showing people in their everyday lives. Since the show's inception, other instructional goals have included basic life skills (such as how to cross the street safely), proper hygiene, healthy eating habits, and social skills.
The producers and writers decided to build the new show around an inner-city street, the eponymous Sesame Street. They wanted to attract inner-city viewers, so they reproduced these viewers' neighborhoods as the show's setting—a realistic city street, complete with peeling paint, alleyways, front porches, and garbage cans. The cast needed to reflect the diversity of this kind of neighborhood, at first with a mix of White and African-American actors, and later with the addition of Hispanic and Asian actors.
Sesame Street freely mingles its puppet and human characters. The former are "Muppets", a type of marionette created by Jim Henson. They are presented as being independent of the puppeteer, who is usually not visible, instead being hidden behind a set or outside the camera frame. Creative use of a mix of technologies has even allowed scenes in which Muppets appear to be dancing, riding a bicycle, or rowing a boat. A common design for a Jim Henson Muppet is a character with a very wide mouth and large protruding eyes. The puppets are moulded or carved out of various types of foam, and then covered with such material as fleece or fur.
- Adapted from the Wikipedia articles on Sesame Street and The Muppets.