#154: Sesame? Sesayou Street
Before having a kid,--(that's right, I have a kid. And she's awesome. What are you gonna do about it? Buy her a present or something? Actually, she keeps asking for a hula hoop, but have you seen how hard those things are to use, even for grown adults, and I know she's going to ask me to demonstrate how to use it, and I won't be able to, and she'll realize that I am, in fact, fallible, and her childhood will be over. You trying to rob her of that innocence or SOMETHING?!).
...Ahem, before having a kid, I was resolved that she would get no TV time until she was, like, 25. But then I realized I had things to do (these Toonstacks don't write themselves) and remembered that I myself had watched a ton of TV growing up (and look how great I turned out!). So we relented. And I introduced her to the classics, perennial staples of childhood programming, like Kurosawa's early work and the films of the Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist, Jonas Mekas. Recently, after she staged another "sit in" in which she screamed "Bluey!" for 4 hours straight (so cute!), we watched Sesame Street , which, while possessing none of the experimental qualities of Mekas' sweeping epic "As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty," does have cute puppets that teach you numbers.
This week, I've asked my fellow Toonstackers to share cartoons about Sesame Street and puppets. That perennial staple of childhood programming...no, not cartoons of Bluey.
I have to go. She's staging another sit in.
- Navied
I've always thought working for Sesame Street would be a dream job. Luckily, cartooning is a dream job for those who couldn't get a job at Sesame Street and speculate what it must be like to work at Sesame Street.
This is a cartoon the New Yorker published back in 2018, during what we thought at the time was the 'height of craziness' in online rhetoric. Everyone was weighing in on whether or not Sesame Street characters were allowed to be gay. Little did we know this would now be considered 'normal discourse' in our modern information diet.
I'm currently working in and around Yellowstone National Park and get to see first hand how people LOSE THEIR MINDS when they see certain animals. You can tell people not to stop their car in the MIDDLE OF THE ROAD and definitely NOT to walk over to the 2,000 lb bison with horns, and they say "Yes, yes, yes, only a stupid person would do that. I will certainly not do that because I am not a stupid person" and then if you put a bison by their car that is exactly what they will do. I've come to believe we can't criticize people for this trait, I think it really is a brain short circuiting issue. We can however exploit it and eat them, if we happen to be sharks.
But wait, there’s more!
Amy Kurzweil’s graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story, was named a best book of 2023 by The New Yorker, NPR, and Kirkus!
Jason Chatfield has a new Substack about making art called Process Junkie! And Subscribe to Jason’s regular weekly Substack at NewYorkCartoons.com
Amy Kurzweil also teaches cartoon classes on Patreon! Sign up now to get the recording of every past class!
Sofia Warren 's got an advice column! Read it here.
Read more of Ellis' comics on Junk Drawer!