It's been more than 30 years since Jim Henson departed for that great Muppet workshop in the sky, yet barely a moment seems to pass without a reminder of his legacy: in the enduring appeal of his showbiz menagerie; in the creative spell cast by his peerless puppetry; or in the memes of his signature character – and alter ego – Kermit the Frog that furnish internet punchlines every other day. It's hard to think of another bearded American dreamer whose creations have had a more enduring impact on generations of Western kids, save perhaps his sometime-collaborator George Lucas.
Henson's genius was integral to the success of the game-changing children's series Sesame Street, but as the new documentary Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street shows, he was one part of a community of performers, writers and television creators who helped bring together the immortal kids program – which continues to go out across some 140 countries around the world – at the tail end of the 60s.
Sesame Street was an almost quintessential 60s vision. Spearheaded by Children's Television Workshop founder Joan Ganz Cooney, the show was galvanised by a progressive, racially integrated notion of society informed by the decade's civil rights activism, and set its mandate to reach inner-city kids and minorities under-represented by traditional children's programming.
Cooney and Jon Stone, the idealistic television director who would become the show's driving force, worked closely with children's psychologists and educators to reach a generation of toddlers spending unprecedented hours parked in front of the boob tube; kids babysat by television, who could recite advertising jingles like they were nursery rhymes.
If they held this audience's attention, Cooney and Stone figured, they could also help them to learn.
It was Henson who provided the magic spark. A beatnik by comparison to the TV executives, Henson was enjoying some late night television and advertising success with his antic Muppets, whose anarchic humour and countercultural sass – abetted by the talents of his frequent partner in felt, Frank Oz – imbued Sesame Street with the off-the-wall sensibility that kids couldn't resist.
Henson hadn't set out to make children's television – among other things, he'd dabbled in experimental short films, like 1965's Time Piece – but his knack for combining avant-garde sensibilities with imaginative humour and offbeat monster mayhem proved perfectly in sync with kids' boundless sense of play.
Debuting on American network PBS in November 1969, the resulting show was something television had never seen: a program that was somehow deeply, intuitively educational yet never patronising; one whose experimental tendencies, surreal animated interludes, and barely contained lunacy spoke to kids like a playground peer.
"It was chaos," says Sesame Street's long-running musical composer Joe Raposo at one point in the film, "but it was chaos dedicated to a real ideal."
"Sesame Street is the greatest thing to happen to television," declared filmmaker Orson Welles, a man who knew what's up, while yakking with talk show host Dick Cavett.
Rewatching some of the show's early clips excerpted in the film, you're struck anew by the gonzo spirit of so much of what's on screen – the bouncing ball number countdown that seems to spring from some waking hallucination, the manic slapstick of Henson's Muppets, James Earl Jones solemnly intoning the alphabet like a Black monk. It feels less like a children's program than a sibling to its anglophile contemporary, Monty Python's Flying Circus. (Little wonder American college kids were fans of both.)
Sesame Street's existence is even more miraculous when you consider the sludge that television continues to shovel at children's audiences. In an early pitch reel for the program that parodies this kind of thinking, one of the characters jokingly suggests that – since the show is pitched to kids and kids are dumb – it should be called "Hey, Stupid!", a title that could double as the raison d'être for so many lesser children's programs.
Director Marilyn Agrelo's documentary is based on the 2008 book of the same name by television critic Michael Davis, and while it's hardly an adventurous piece of filmmaking, it does a good job of bringing together those who were there at the beginning – alongside some judicious archival footage – to keep the story focused on the show's core creative engine.
As in Davis's book – and unlike the recent, star-studded love-in Sesame Street: 50 Years of Sunny Days – Street Gang concentrates on the sociological genesis of the show and the formative era of the 70s and early 80s, locating Sesame Street's development as an outgrowth of 60s activism and examining what a radical experiment it was to fuse education and entertainment at the time.
Sesame Street was unique, and not just in the US, where its vision of racially integrated living caused pearl-clutching in some Southern states; around the world, kids in far-flung suburbias suddenly had a window on inner-city New York neighbourhoods, not to mention an unbeatable roster of musical guest stars (the list is endless, but the documentary alone offers glimpses of Stevie Wonder, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn and Paul Simon jamming with the Muppets on the block).
Yet as Street Gang notes, the show's vision of post-racial harmony wasn't without its hiccups. When Black radical performer Matt Robinson, the actor who played Sesame Street's patriarch Gordon, introduced the street-talking puppet Roosevelt Franklin as a way of giving Black kids a sense of their distinctive identity, concerned parents wrote in decrying the character as reinforcing racial stereotypes. A frustrated Robinson would eventually leave the show.
At the same time, Joe Raposo's account of writing Kermit's classic lament It's Not Easy Bein' Green – a heartfelt ballad for the dispossessed that was widely seen as an analogy for race – is considerably moving, as is Carroll Spinney's recollection of his performing duality as both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, and writer Norman Stiles's story of the Mr Hooper farewell episode, which dared to grappled with the subject of death.
While Henson is generously represented via archival footage (Big Bird's performance of It's Not Easy Bein' Green at his 1990 funeral still brings the house down), it's a shame the doc doesn't have access to Frank Oz, the Bert to Henson's Ernie and as essential a figure to the show as any. (Oz was interviewed for Davis's book, though perhaps – having wisely sat out the ill-conceived movie reboots of The Muppets – he simply decided he needed a well-deserved rest.)
In one of Street Gang's best moments, a handful of non-actor kids are shown playfully interacting with Oz's Grover and Henson's Kermit as though they were – as indeed they are – real. Watching these kids riff and ramble away with their felt companions as though they're best friends thawed even this ice-cold heart – a reminder of Sesame Street's power, and Henson's (and Oz's) inimitable gifts.
As Street Gang points out, the show was a place where all ages, races and monsters could peacefully coexist; where a guest-starring Reverend Jesse Jackson might lead a bunch of kids in a power chant of "I may be young, but I am somebody." If that sounds fanciful, even naive, 50 years on, then it's a vision worth preserving.
Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street is streaming now.
