Sesame Street (TV Program)

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    Nom Nom Nom. What’s the Deal With Cookie Monster’s Cookies?

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    If you have ever wondered what the “Sesame Street” muppet is really eating, we have the answer.Years ago, a reader wrote probing for details on a mystery that had vexed him: What’s the deal with the cookies that Cookie Monster eats?The email said nothing else. I chuckled and filed the note in the cupboard of my brain where such things go. Until I realized something: Me want cookies. And me want answers.Cookie Monster, for those of you who skipped childhood, is a classic muppet on “Sesame Street.” He is a scraggly, blue fellow with bulging eyeballs, who has for decades been singularly obsessed with chaotically chowing down on cookies. The crumbs end up almost everywhere except his mouth, an effect that looks like a high-speed blender without a top.The character was created in the 1960s by Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, for a General Foods Canada commercial. Cookie eventually moved to “Sesame Street,” where he presumably found a good rent-stabilized apartment.It turns out the cookies are real — sort of.They are baked at the home of Lara MacLean, who has been a “puppet wrangler” for the Jim Henson Company for almost three decades. MacLean started as an intern for Sesame Workshop in 1992 and has been working for the team ever since.Lara MacLean, a puppet wrangler for the Jim Henson Company and the maker of the cookies that Cookie Monster eats, at the company’s offices in Queens.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesOne of the ingredients: instant coffee. Also: pancake mix, Puffed Rice and Grape-Nuts.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesMacClean dips her hand in water and flattens the cookies. They need to be thin enough to explode in a shower of crumbs.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesThe recipe, roughly: Pancake mix, puffed rice, Grape-Nuts and instant coffee, with water in the mixture. The chocolate chips are made using hot glue sticks — essentially colored gobs of glue.The cookies do not have oils, fats or sugars. Those would stain Cookie Monster. They’re edible, but barely.“Kind of like a dog treat,” MacLean said in an interview.Before MacLean reinvented the recipe in the 2000s, the creative team behind “Sesame Street” used versions of rice crackers and foams to make the cookies. The challenge was that the rice crackers would make more of a mess and get stuck in Cookie’s fur. And the foams didn’t look like cookies once they broke apart.For a given episode, depending on the script, MacLean will bake, on average, two dozen cookies. There’s no oven large enough at Sesame’s New York workplace, so MacLean does almost everything at home.This leads to the occasional awkward interaction, such as when MacLean once had to make huge batches of cookies for a series of Cookie Monster film spoofs.“My landlord came in my apartment at that time and I had all these cookies around and I was like, ‘I’m really sorry, I can’t offer you a cookie.’ And he probably just thought I was really mean,” she said.After baking.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesApplying hot brown glue for the cookie’s chocolate chips.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesOn set, when Cookie is shooting, MacLean said the “best-case scenario” was for the crumbs to end up all over the place.Sal Perez, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” said, “You’ve got to be careful for the shrapnel that comes out when he’s munching on the cookie.”Cookie has been portrayed since 2001 by David Rudman, who took over the role from Frank Oz. Rudman’s right hand moves the mouth, which is eating, and his left hand holds the cookies. Both work in concert to break the cookies, which means the cookies have to be soft enough to fall apart.Jason Weber, the workshop’s creative supervisor, recalled Rudman complaining about a tough batch: “My hands are so sore. Don’t make them like this ever again.”Rudman said soft cookies are best, adding, “The more crumbs, the funnier it is.”“If he eats the cookie, and it only breaks into two pieces if it’s too hard, it’s just not funny,” he said. “It looks almost painful. But if he eats a cookie and it explodes into a hundred crumbs, that’s where the comedy comes from.”MacLean has perfected a recipe that is “thin enough that it’ll explode into a hundred crumbs.” Rudman said. “But it’s not too thin that it’ll break in my hand when I’m holding it.”The finished cookies. Not everyone realizes they are meant only for muppet consumption.Carey Wagner for The New York TimesSometimes shoots don’t go as planned. Cookie appeared on “Saturday Night Live” in 2010 when Jeff Bridges was hosting. During the opening monologue, Bridges sang a duet with Cookie. The cookie that Bridges was supposed to offer Cookie broke in Bridges’s pocket, so when he took it out, he only had half the cookie. So Bridges pulled out the other piece and improvised.“Not only a half, but a whole cookie!” Bridges said.Rudman responded as a delighted Cookie: “Twice as good!”Cookie doesn’t just eat the cookies. He eats the plate they are on and has recently expanded the menu to include fruits and vegetables. Occasionally he devours inanimate objects like mailboxes. There is a small gullet in his mouth, so Cookie can actually eat something the size of a small fist. Bananas, apples and small hats go down easy, but most of the cookie crumbs end up outside his mouth.Not everyone realizes that the cookies aren’t meant to be eaten. Adam Sandler appeared on a 2009 episode of “Sesame Street” and decided to share in Cookie’s delight by spontaneously eating a cookie with him on set.“As soon as the cameras cut, he was like, ‘Bleeeech,’” MacLean said.Rudman said he told Sandler not to eat the cookies: “I think he got caught up in the moment,”It’s hard not to. The 54th season of “Sesame Street” just premiered on Max. Cookie is almost 60, but the core of his character endures.“He has sort of this base instinct that I think all of us have, even the youngest of us have,” Perez said. “One of our first instincts is like: ‘We see a cookie. We see a thing that we love and we just want it.’” More

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      Lloyd Morrisett, a Founder of ‘Sesame Street,’ Dies at 93

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      His observations about his 3-year-old daughter’s viewing habits led him to join Joan Ganz Cooney in creating a program that revolutionized children’s television.Lloyd Morrisett, a psychologist whose young daughter’s viewing habits inspired the creation of the revolutionary children’s educational television program “Sesame Street,” and whose fund-raising helped get it off the ground, died on Jan. 15 at his home in San Diego. He was 93.His daughter Julie Morrisett confirmed the death.Mr. Morrisett was a vice president of the nonprofit Carnegie Corporation in 1966 when he attended a dinner party in Manhattan hosted by his friends Joan Ganz Cooney and her husband, Tim. During the evening, Mr. Morrisett told the guests that his daughter Sarah was so mesmerized by TV that she would watch the test pattern on weekend mornings until cartoons began.Sarah had also memorized advertising jingles, which suggested to Mr. Morrisett that youngsters might more easily learn reading, writing and arithmetic if they were delivered in an entertaining way.“I said at one point in the conversation, ‘Joan, do you think television can be used to teach young children?’” he said in an interview on “BackStory,” a podcast about history, in 2019, “and her answer was, “I don’t know, but I’d like to talk about it.’”The idea was intriguing enough for Mr. Morrisett, along with Ms. Ganz Cooney, then a producer of public affairs television programming, and others to begin brainstorming about creating a program for preschoolers, particularly poor children who were likely to fall behind in the early grades, that would educate and amuse them.“‘What if?’ became their operative phrase,” Michael Davis wrote in “Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street” (2008). “What if you could create content for television that was both entertaining and instructive? What if it went down more like ice cream than spinach?”At Mr. Morrisett’s request, and with money from the Carnegie Corporation, Ms. Ganz Cooney traveled the country interviewing educators, animators, puppeteers, psychologists, filmmakers and television producers to produce a study, “The Potential Uses of Television for Pre-School Education.” That study became the blueprint for “Sesame Street.”Mr. Morrisett focused on raising $8 million to start “Sesame Street,” with about half coming from the United States Office of Education and the rest in the form of grants from Carnegie, the Ford Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.Mr. Morrisett had “magnificent political skills” that helped him raise money, Mr. Davis said in a phone interview. “He lived in that rarefied world and had connections. He was so believable and so clear and made so much damn sense.”In a statement, Ms. Ganz Cooney said, “Without Lloyd Morrisett, there is no ‘Sesame Street.’”The series made its debut on public television on Nov. 10, 1969, introducing children to a fantasy world where they could learn numbers and letters with help from a multiracial cast and a corps of Jim Henson’s Muppets that would include Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Kermit the Frog, Cookie Monster and Elmo.Mr. Morrisett recalled that “Sesame Street” had a curriculum based on continuing research, designed to help children who watched the show succeed in school.“We were spending maybe a third of our budget on that research,” he told WBUR Radio in 2019, “and that was something that commercial television just couldn’t do.”Mr. Morrisett in 2009 with Joan Ganz Cooney at a benefit in New York for Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit company that produces “Sesame Street.”Bryan Bedder/Getty ImagesMr. Morrisett was born on Nov. 2, 1929, in Oklahoma City, and grew up in Yonkers, N.Y., and Los Angeles. His father, also named Lloyd, was an assistant schools superintendent in Yonkers, N.Y., and later a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles. His mother, Jessie (Watson) Morrisett, was a homemaker.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1951, Mr. Morrisett studied for two years at U.C.L.A, then earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale in 1956. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, but left after two years to work at the Social Science Research Council. He then joined the Carnegie Corporation as the executive assistant to its president, John Gardner. He later became a vice president.Mr. Morrisett never took an operational role at the Children’s Television Workshop, now Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization that produces “Sesame Street” and other programs, but he was an active chairman of its board until 2000. During that time he was instrumental in the creation and funding of “The Electric Company,” a series that taught language skills to children ages 6 to 10, which was broadcast in the 1970s and rebooted from 2009 to 2011.“He had this wonderful combination of being a child psychologist who was also a champion of media and technology and was research-based, which is the DNA of the company,” Sherrie Westin, the president of Sesame Workshop, said in a phone interview. She added, “He was a pioneer who believed that television could be an educational force.”When “Sesame Street” received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2019, a gaggle of Muppets onstage shouted “We love you” to Mr. Morrisett and Ms. Ganz Cooney, who were seated in the balcony.In addition to his daughters, Julie Morrisett and Sarah Morrisett Otley, Mr. Morrisett is survived by his wife, Mary (Pierre) Morrisett, and two grandchildren.Julie Morrisett said that, unlike her sister, she didn’t like television. “There’d be no ‘Sesame Street,’” she joked, “if I were the older daughter.”While chairman of Sesame Workshop, Mr. Morrisett was also president from 1969 to 1998 of the Markle Foundation and shifted its focus from medical research and education to supporting the study of mass communication and information technology.In an essay published in Markle’s annual report in 1981, Mr. Morrisett looked at the state of children’s television and advocated for a cable TV network devoted to younger viewers. (He did not mention Nickelodeon, which had started in 1979.)He argued that such a channel had to compete effectively for viewers’ attention, but that “the key for a new children’s television service will be to provide cultural and educational values widely believed necessary for leading a productive and satisfying life in our society.” More

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      Bob McGrath, Longtime ‘Sesame Street’ Star, Dies at 90

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      He was an original cast member who, for nearly half a century, played a sweater-clad and easygoing music teacher who dispensed advice.Bob McGrath, who played the sweater-clad neighborhood music teacher and general advice-giver on “Sesame Street” for almost half a century, died at his home in New Jersey on Sunday morning. He was 90.Mr. McGrath’s daughter Cathlin McGrath confirmed his death by email on Sunday. She said Mr. McGrath died from complications after a stroke. She said that the night before Mr. McGrath passed, his family had decorated his room for Christmas, and sung and danced around him. “We just knew that he wanted to go the way he lived.”Mr. McGrath wasn’t particularly interested when an old Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brother stopped him one night to tell him about his new project, a children’s show on public television. But then he had never heard of Jim Henson, the puppeteer, and he had never seen a Muppet. After his first meeting and a look at some of the animation, he knew this show would be different.“Sesame Street” had its premiere in November 1969, with Mr. McGrath and other cast members gathered around an urban brownstone stoop, in front of the building’s dark green doors, beside its omnipresent collection of metal garbage cans. His character, conveniently and coincidentally named Bob, was reliably smiling, easygoing and polite, whether he was singing about “People in Your Neighborhood” (the butcher, the baker, the lifeguard), discussing everyday concerns with young humans and Muppets, or taking a day trip to Grouchytown with Oscar the Grouch.Viewers were outraged when Mr. McGrath and two other longtime cast members — Emilio Delgado, who played Luis, and Roscoe Orman, who played Gordon — were fired in 2016. When HBO took over the broadcasting rights to “Sesame Street,” their contracts were not renewed.But Mr. McGrath took the news graciously, expressing gratitude for 47 years of “working with phenomenal people” and for a whole career beyond “Sesame Street” of doing family concerts with major symphony orchestras.“I’m really very happy to stay home with my wife and children a little bit more,” he said at Florida Supercon, an annual comic book and pop culture convention, later in 2016. “I’d be so greedy if I wanted five minutes more.”Robert Emmett McGrath was born on June 13, 1932, in Ottawa, Ill., about 80 miles southwest of Chicago. He was the youngest of five children of Edmund Thomas McGrath, a farmer, and Flora Agnes (Halligan) McGrath.Robert’s mother, who sang and played the piano, recognized his talent by the time he was 5. He was soon entering and winning competitions in Chicago and appearing on radio. He did musical plays and studied privately but, as a practical matter, intended to study engineering.But he was invited to attend a music camp outside Chicago the summer after his high school graduation. Teachers there encouraged him to change his plans, and he “did an about-face,” he remembered in a 2004 video interview for the Television Academy Foundation.He majored in voice at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1954. He spent the next two years in the Army, mostly in Stuttgart, Germany, where he worked with the Seventh Army Symphony. Then he went to New York, where he received a master’s degree from the Manhattan School of Music.He took a job with St. David’s, a private boys’ school in Manhattan. Freelance singing assignments, obtained through a vocal contractor, paid the bills until 1961, when “Sing Along With Mitch” came along. He was one of 25 male singers who appeared every week on that show, on NBC, performing traditional favorites like “Home on the Range,” “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.”As St. Patrick’s Day approached, the program’s host and producer, Mitch Miller, asked Mr. McGrath if he knew the song “Mother Machree.” He was so impressed with Mr. McGrath’s rendition and his light lyric tenor — he had been singing the sentimental Irish American number since he was a little boy — that he doubled his salary and made him the show’s featured male soloist.After “Sing Along With Mitch” ended in 1964, the cast played Las Vegas and did a 30-stop tour in Japan. That led to an unusual chapter in Mr. McGrath’s career: teenage idol.Schoolgirls chanted his name at concerts and organized fan clubs. Their demand brought him back to Japan nine times over the next three years, and he recorded nine albums there, singing in both English and Japanese. His repertoire included Japanese folk ballads on which he was accompanied by a shakuhachi, or bamboo flute. Back home, he amused American television viewers by singing “Danny Boy” in Japanese.When “Sesame Street” began, it led to a very different collection of albums for Mr. McGrath, with names like “Sing Along With Bob” and “Songs and Games for Toddlers.”He also learned American Sign Language, which he used regularly on camera with Linda Bove, a cast member who was born deaf.Asked about important memories of his years on the series, Mr. McGrath often named the 1983 episode devoted to children’s, adults’ and Muppets’ reactions to the death of Will Lee, who had played Mr. Hooper on the show for 13 years. Another favorite was the holiday special “Christmas Eve on Sesame Street” (1978), particularly the Bert and Ernie segment inspired by the O. Henry story “The Gift of the Magi.”In 1958, Mr. McGrath married Ann Logan Sperry, a preschool teacher whom he met on his first day in New York City. They had five children. He is survived by Ms. McGrath, who is 89, and their five children, Liam McGrath, Robert McGrath, Alison McGrath Osder, Lily McGrath and Cathlin McGrath, as well as eight grandchildren. He is also survived by an elder sister, Eileen Strobel.“It’s a very different kind of fame,” Mr. McGrath reflected in the Television Academy interview about his association with “Sesame Street.”He recalled a little boy in a store who came up to him and took his hand. At first he thought he had been mistaken for the child’s father. When he realized that the boy seemed to think they knew each other, Mr. McGrath asked, “Do you know my name?” “Bob.” “Do you know where I live?” “Sesame Street.” “Do you know any of my other friends on Sesame Street?”“Yep,” the boy answered and promptly gave an example: “Oh, the number 7.”Livia Albeck-Ripka More

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      HBO Max Pulls Nearly 200 ‘Sesame Street’ Episodes

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      HBO Max took down classic episodes of “Sesame Street” as it prepares to combine with Discovery+. The move came as a surprise to fans, who worried about what it signals.Nearly 200 episodes of “Sesame Street” have been pulled from HBO Max, the streaming platform that has been purging films and television shows in recent weeks as it prepares to combine with another streaming service, Discovery+.Fans of “Sesame Street” were surprised on Friday to see that hundreds of episodes, most from the first 40 years of the show, had been removed from HBO Max.It is the latest shift at HBO Max following the merger of its former parent company, WarnerMedia, with Discovery Inc. in April. Together, the companies formed Warner Bros. Discovery, which is aiming to find $3 billion in savings in an effort to reduce its $55 billion in debt.This week, about 70 HBO Max staff members were laid off as a part of the reorganization, and HBO Max announced that 36 titles were being pulled from the platform. The pulled programming included the animated series “Infinity Train” and “The Not-Too-Late Show With Elmo,” a “Sesame Street” spinoff.David Zaslav, the company’s chief executive, also told investors this month that the company plans to offer a single paid subscription streaming service, bringing together content from HBO Max and Discovery+.It was not clear what that means for the future of “Sesame Street” on HBO Max.As of Friday, HBO Max had cut the number of “Sesame Street” episodes it provides to 456 from 650, Variety reported. Some spinoff series survived the cull, including seven seasons of “My Sesame Street Friends,” and “The Magical Wand Chase” special, featuring Elmo and Abby Cadabby, a pink fairy-in-training who joined “Sesame Street” in 2006.Every episode of “Sesame Street” from Seasons 39, which aired in 2008, through 52, the latest season, is still available on HBO Max. The newest season, 53, will air on HBO Max in the fall.The only episodes available from before season 39 are from seasons one, five and seven, including a fan favorite in which all of the characters gather for a singalong in Bert and Ernie’s bathroom.Some of the most notable episodes HBO Max once streamed are no longer available, including an episode that aired in 1983 and featured Big Bird confronting death, following the death of the actor who played Mr. Hooper, Will Lee.HBO said in a statement that the streaming platform was “committed to continuing to bring ‘Sesame Street’ into families’ homes.”“‘Sesame Street’ is and has always been an important part of television culture and a crown jewel of our preschool offering,” the statement said.Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit group behind “Sesame Street,” struck a five-year deal with HBO in April 2015 to give the premium cable network the first run of new episodes. The episodes would then air free nine months later on PBS, where the show had aired for 45 years.In 2019, Sesame Workshop made a similar deal with HBO Max, which started in May 2020. Both deals also gave HBO Max access to the enormous back library of “Sesame Street,” though it has never made all of the episodes available at the same time.Some episodes of the show are available on PBS and the Sesame Street YouTube account.Sesame Workshop did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.Joe Hennes, editor in chief of ToughPigs, a website for fans of “Sesame Street,” the Muppets and other Jim Henson creations, said the “Sesame Street” episodes still available on HBO Max were a “random assortment.”“The culturally important episodes, or the episodes that maybe a more casual fan would say, ‘I’d like to see that again,’ that stuff is what’s missing,” Mr. Hennes said.Mr. Hennes, who worked in the creative department of Sesame Workshop from 2012 to 2021, said that he was concerned that the episode removal could signal a fading relationship between HBO Max and Sesame Workshop.Sesame Workshop expanded its offerings and increased its production values with the influx of funding from the premium cable network. If HBO Max reduced its financial support or ended the relationship, Mr. Hennes said it could limit the nonprofit’s production and outreach work.“In a perfect world, HBO Max would want to invest more in ‘Sesame Street’ and really make it the flagship that it could be for the streaming network,” Mr. Hennes said. “So it’s a little baffling that they would decide to go backward on that and say we’re going to do less of this and not really capitalize on their own investment in the franchise.”After HBO Max’s decision to remove episodes became public, the official Twitter account for “Sesame Street” seemed to address the change.“Your friends on Sesame Street will always be here when you need them,” it said. “Visit the neighborhood any day of the week with full episodes on our YouTube channel.” More

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      Emilio Delgado, Luis on ‘Sesame Street’ for Four Decades, Dies at 81

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      The actor was a fixture on the groundbreaking educational program. His character’s wedding to Maria on the show in 1988 captivated children and their parents.Emilio Delgado, the actor who for more than four decades played Luis the handyman on the beloved children’s television show “Sesame Street,” died on Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.The cause was multiple myeloma, which Mr. Delgado had been battling since December 2020, his wife, Carole Delgado, said.Over a span of 44 years on “Sesame Street,” Mr. Delgado’s character was the owner of The Fix-It Shop, where he repaired any objects that needed fixing, like picture frames or giant toasters. Luis was joined in the shop by Maria, played by Sonia Manzano. After an on-screen courtship, the characters married in a widely viewed episode of the program in 1988.The marriage of Maria and Luis was cause for celebration among the children who were learning numbers and letters — and about worldly concepts like death and diversity — from “Sesame Street.” Parents dressed their children in their fancy clothes for viewing parties. Mothers cried as the ceremony unfolded.The union, which followed five months of hugging, serenading and pizza-sharing, was also a way to teach young children about love. The two characters were friends and partners at the shop for 10 years, but their feelings started to change when they cared for a sick kitten.“Since kids see love in terms of physical things like kissing, hugging, giving flowers, we showed Maria and Luis doing a lot of that,” Ms. Manzano, who also wrote for the show, told The New York Times in 1988.“We wanted to show a couple who are nice to each other and have fun together,” she said.Mr. Delgado had a long road to the show that would define his career. After “beating doors in Hollywood” for nine years, he got a call one day to audition for the show because it wanted a more diverse cast, Mr. Delgado said in a 2011 interview for the public television show “Up Close with Patsy Smullin.” He joined the cast in 1971, two years after the program premiered.“I was so excited, but as an actor I knew it was a job,” he said. “Maybe it would last a year, maybe two years. Maybe not even that long. But it was great. I had a job on television, on a major television show.”The program allowed Mr. Delgado to show off his singing in addition to acting. In the 2011 interview, Mr. Delgado said that music was his life. He would later perform with the band Pink Martini at venues like the Hollywood Bowl and Carnegie Hall.His love for music developed as a child in Mexico. “I just remember going to sleep to the sound of mariachis,” he said.Emilio Delgado was born on May 8, 1940, in Calexico, a California border town, to Emilio Delgado and Carmen Rodriguez Delgado. He had family he would live with across the border in Mexicali, Carole Delgado said.“He really lived biculturally,” she said, noting that he lived with grandparents and extended family in Mexico. “Because he was an American citizen, he would walk to Calexico every day for school. It wasn’t the border politics of today.”As a teenager, he moved to Glendale, Calif., where he explored his passion for music and theater. Mr. Delgado served six years in the California National Guard in the 1960s before attending California Institute of the Arts, where he was a student in the institution’s first theater class in 1970.When Mr. Delgado wasn’t performing on “Sesame Street,” two “Sesame Street” feature films and many live appearances, he acted in numerous popular shows, including “Hawaii Five-O,” “Falcon Crest,” “House of Cards,” “The Michael J. Fox Show” and “Lou Grant.”In 2018, Mr. Delgado began starring in “Quixote Nuevo,” Octavio Solis’s reimagining of “Don Quixote,” performing at the California Shakespeare Theater, Boston’s Hartford Stage and Alley Theatre in Houston, his family said.In addition to his wife, Mr. Delgado is survived by a daughter, Lauren Delgado; a son, Aram Delgado; and four siblings: Cesar Delgado, Edward Delgado, Martha Ledesma and Norma Vizcaino.Former Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City declared Oct. 15, 2019, “Emilio Delgado Day” at a celebration to honor Hispanic heritage.“At a time when, if you saw diversity on television, it often was with stereotypes, and not the good kind of stereotypes,” Mr. de Blasio said, “Emilio was one of the people who broke the mold, created a positive role model, for everyone, but particularly for children who didn’t get to see or hear people who looked like them and spoke like them.”Christine Chung More

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      Stephen Lawrence, Whose Music Enriched ‘Sesame Street,’ Dies at 82

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      He composed the title song of the landmark album “Free to Be … You and Me.” He then moved on to Big Bird and friends.Stephen Lawrence, who provided a soundtrack of sorts for countless childhoods as the music director for the landmark “Free to Be … You and Me” album and television special and as a longtime composer for “Sesame Street,” died on Dec. 30 at a medical center in Belleville, N.J. He was 82.His wife, Cathy (Merritt) Lawrence, said the cause was multiple organ failure.Mr. Lawrence had a gift for catchy tunes and song constructions that would appeal to young minds.“One of the most effective devices, and for children one of the most important, is repetition,” he wrote in “How to Compose Music for Children,” an essay on his blog. “Did you write a first line you like? Why not repeat it?”The essay went on to show how composers from Beethoven to John Lennon had done just that, and Mr. Lawrence employed the device often on “Sesame Street” classics like “Fuzzy and Blue (and Orange),” a jaunty 1981 number with lyrics by David Axelrod.One of Mr. Lawrence’s most captivating tunes was also one of his first for the children’s market: the title track of “Free to Be … You and Me,” the star-studded 1972 album and book conceived by Marlo Thomas. The record, full of songs and stories celebrating tolerance and busting gender stereotypes, became an enduring hit and was recently selected for inclusion in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry of culturally significant works.Mr. Lawrence, working with the lyricist Bruce Hart, was given the task of coming up with the opening number. A memorable folk melody recorded by the New Seekers, it begins with a banjo, an instrument not often heard in the pop and rock music of that time.“Banjo was perfect for the introduction of this song,” Mr. Lawrence said on the radio program “Soundcheck” in an interview marking the 40th anniversary of the album. “It is sort of timeless. It says joy. It says non-sophistication — although some of the album is quite sophisticated. It says: ‘Listen up. This is an unusual instrument you don’t hear every day. It’s going to set up a song you’re going to like.’”Ms. Thomas had recruited a formidable roster of stars to perform on the record. In addition to writing the music for several of the songs, Mr. Lawrence, as the project’s music director, had the task of overseeing recording sessions. That meant working with a quirky array of performers, some of them professional singers and some of them, like Mel Brooks and the football player Rosey Grier, not.Mr. Lawrence was a relative unknown at the time. Recording Diana Ross singing “When We Grow Up” (another “Free to Be” song for which he wrote the music) at Motown’s studios in Los Angeles provided him with a pinch-myself moment.“I arrived at Motown Studios and thought about the many famous recording artists who had recorded there, none more famous than Diana Ross,” he wrote on his blog. “I realized that the entire ‘Free to Be’ project was lifting my career to new heights.”The album was a runaway best seller, and Mr. Lawrence went on to compose more than 300 songs for “Sesame Street.” Beginning in 1989, he was nominated repeatedly, along with the show’s other composers and lyricists, for Daytime Emmy Awards for music direction and composition. He won three times.Mr. Lawrence didn’t work only on children’s material. He composed the music for the 1973 baseball drama “Bang the Drum Slowly,” the 1976 horror movie “Alice, Sweet Alice” and other films, and collaborated on several stage musicals.Ms. Thomas, though, said he was the perfect choice to reach young audiences.“‘Free to Be … You and Me’ was first and always a children’s project,” she said by email, “so it required a composer and musical director who could create songs that sparked the imaginations and touched the hearts of girls and boys everywhere. Stephen was that person. I loved him and I loved working with him.”Stephen James Lawrence was born on Sept. 5, 1939, in Manhattan. His father, Allan, was head of a manufacturing company, and his mother, Helen (Kupfer) Lawrence, was a homemaker.He grew up in Great Neck, on Long Island. He started taking piano lessons at 5, and at 17 he won a New York radio station’s jazz piano contest; the prize was lessons with the pianist Mary Lou Williams.While majoring in music at Hofstra College (now Hofstra University), where he graduated in 1961, he composed music for student shows and other entertainments. One was a musical, “The Delicate Touch”; the book and lyrics were by a fellow student, Francis Ford Coppola.Mr. Lawrence came to the “Free to Be” project through Mr. Hart, with whom he had written some songs and whose wife, Carole Hart, was producing the project with Ms. Thomas. The two women asked Mr. Hart and Mr. Lawrence to come up with a song that would introduce the album and convey what it was about. It was Mr. Hart who came up with the phrase “Free to be you and me” and built that idea into a full song lyric, which he presented to Mr. Lawrence.Marlo Thomas and friends in a scene from the 1974 television special “Free to Be … You and Me,” based on the record album of the same name. Mr. Lawrence was the music director for both.“As sometimes happens,” Mr. Lawrence recalled in his blog, “I got an idea right away and completed the song in one day.”The label, Bell Records, told the group to expect to sell about 15,000 copies. Instead sales soared past the million mark. A 1974 television version, with Mr. Lawrence as music director, added to the phenomenon.The Harts (he died in 2006, she in 2018) and Mr. Lawrence worked together on other projects, including the 1979 television movie “Sooner or Later,” which yielded the Rex Smith hit “You Take My Breath Away,” written by Mr. Hart and Mr. Lawrence.Mr. Lawrence began writing for “Sesame Street” in the early 1980s and continued to do so for years. The job gave him a chance to indulge in a wide assortment of musical styles. One of his earliest compositions for the show was “Kermit’s Minstrel Song” (1981, lyrics by Mr. Axelrod), which called to mind Renaissance-era tunes. Ms. Lawrence said one of her favorites was “Gina’s Dream” (lyrics by Jon Stone), in which Mr. Lawrence did a pretty good job of imitating Puccini.Mr. Lawrence lived in Bloomfield, N.J. His marriage to Christine Jones ended in divorce in 2000. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Hannah Jones Anderson; Ms. Lawrence’s sons, Sam and Nicholas Kline; and a grandson. More

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      Elmo’s Unhinged Rant About a Pet Rock Resonates With the Exasperated

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      A 2004 clip from “Sesame Street” surfaced on social media this week, drawing thousands of responses from viewers expressing that they could relate to Elmo’s sense of frustration.Elmo wants the oatmeal raisin cookie, which is on a counter. Next to the cookie is a rock.But as Elmo reaches for it, his furry red hand is stopped by an orange one that belongs to Zoe, another “Sesame Street” character, who is concerned for the rock, a pet named Rocco.“No, no, no — wait, Elmo,” Zoe says. “Rocco says that he wants the oatmeal raisin cookie.”And it is at this point that Elmo — a children’s character usually associated with innocence, lighthearted fun and playfulness — reaches his breaking point.“Rocco?” Elmo says, sounding astonished. “Rocco’s a rock, Zoe! Rocco won’t know the difference!”And when Zoe insists that Rocco will, indeed, know the difference, Elmo goes from incredulous to angry.“How?” Elmo retorts. “How is Rocco going to eat that cookie, Zoe? Tell Elmo. Rocco doesn’t even have a mouth. Rocco’s just a rock! Rocco’s not alive!”The video clip from a 2004 episode of “Sesame Street” circulated widely across social media this week, garnering more than eight million views and thousands of responses from people who resoundingly expressed that they could relate with an unhinged Elmo’s sense of exasperation.As the video got more and more attention, other clips of Elmo losing his patience with the rock began to appear, adding fuel to a raging internet fire as others posted about the fictional relationship — aghast, they said, at how Elmo had been gaslit all these years.There is the clip in which Zoe says she was late because Rocco had “to go to the potty,” and Elmo, pausing for a beat, responds with a flat, “What?”Another clip shows Elmo saying hello to a real hamster, only to be interrupted by Zoe, who directs him to also say hi to Rocco.Of course, Elmo was already a star on the internet before this week.The Elmo fire meme is often dispatched during chaotic moments. Other scenes of him in an adversarial mood have also circulated, such as one in which he throws a fit and starts to walk off the set of “The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon” or one in which he bites and throws a talking block of cheese on a cooking show.Drake Amendola, 29, of Queens said that what he loved about the cookie clip was that he could tell Elmo was trying to be inclusive of Zoe and “her eccentricities.”“But you can just tell that like, every little inch he gives, she takes a mile,” Mr. Amendola said on Saturday.There is also a pandemic interpretation, Mr. Amendola said.The rock is a metaphor for pandemic denialism, and Elmo represents the vaccinated — those who, now in year three of pandemic life, are fed up with the false beliefs surrounding Covid-19.“Just the amount of times people try to convince you something you know isn’t true, no matter how many times you point out the obvious,” he said.For his part, Elmo said on Twitter that he and Zoe were still “best buds” but that he didn’t “want to talk about Rocco.”Dr. Leela Magavi, a psychiatrist in Newport Beach, Calif., said the clip helped divert the attention of children and adults from “their own pain and helplessness during this difficult time.”Many people “perceive Elmo as an amicable, loved character, so when they view his frustration and anger, it helps normalize their own feelings of anger and makes them realize that this is a normal human sentiment,” she added.To others, the clip is an example of selfishness.“We’ve all had an Elmo experience, either in college, in a class, or at work somewhere, from people who want to make everything about them,” said Alexiss Tyler, 27, of Kansas City, Mo.Jennifer Cretu of Snohomish, Wash., said her three boys — ages 8, 11 and 14 — believed that Elmo had been wronged, though her oldest, Liam, was able to sympathize with Zoe because he, too, once had an imaginary friend: Barack Obama.Her middle child, Silas, believed that the unhinged Elmo phenomenon could have been headed off by having the human character in the scene eat the cookies. “I mean, one is a rock,” he said. “And the other two are just puppets.”Liv Pearsall, who has 2.8 million followers on TikTok and makes videos highlighting Elmo’s bratty side, said that the “Sesame Street” characters have personalities and that Elmo sometimes displays his in “snarky, savage moments.”“It’s kind of like a combination of the nostalgia that we all have from ‘Sesame Street’ coupled with just kind of being shocked that he was so sassy,” said Ms. Pearsall, 22, of Los Angeles. “I think we all relate to that at times.” More

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      First Asian American Muppet to Debut on ‘Sesame Street’

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      Whether it’s reporting on conflicts abroad and political divisions at home, or covering the latest style trends and scientific developments, Times Video journalists provide a revealing and unforgettable view of the world.Whether it’s reporting on conflicts abroad and political divisions at home, or covering the latest style trends and scientific developments, Times Video journalists provide a revealing and unforgettable view of the world. More

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      First Asian American Muppet Arrives on ‘Sesame Street’

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      Ji-Young, a guitar-playing Korean American character, will bring rock music and conversations about racism to the long-running children’s show starting on Thanksgiving Day.“Sesame Street” is welcoming its first Asian American muppet to the neighborhood. Ji-Young, a Korean American 7-year-old who loves playing her electric guitar and skateboarding, will make her debut next week.Ji-Young won’t just be sharing her love for rock music and tteokbokki, or Korean rice cakes, on the show. She will also play a role in countering anti-Asian bias and harassment at a time of heightened awareness around the issue.Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that produces “Sesame Street,” said it created Ji-Young to support families of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage as part of its racial justice initiative, Coming Together. Sesame Workshop introduced the initiative in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and as racism and violence targeting Asians and Asian Americans surged during the pandemic.“Sesame Street” has been on air for more than 50 years, but Ji-Young is its first Asian American muppet.The show has had human characters and guests of Asian descent, including Alan Muraoka, who is Japanese American and owns the fictional Hooper’s Store. In June, “Sesame Street” released a video called “Proud of Your Eyes,” in which Mr. Muraoka helped Analyn, a Filipino American girl, after she was teased about the shape of her eyes. Muraoka and Wes, a muppet, told Analyn that her eyes were beautiful and part of what made her who she was.Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociology professor at Biola University in La Mirada, Calif., and an expert on race and racism in Hollywood, said that when she first immigrated to the United States from Taiwan at age 5, she learned more English from “Sesame Street” than from the E.S.L. classes at her school.The show was more diverse than most children’s programming of the time, but Ms. Yuen said it was missing characters who looked like her when she was growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s.“I think having this muppet who is more culturally specific and is able to speak another language, especially in the current time of rising anti-Asian hate, is so essential to representation,” she said.Kathleen Kim, Ji-Young’s puppeteer, with the finished muppet.Zach Hyman/Sesame WorkshopJi-Young made her television debut on the “Today” show on NBC on Monday. “You know what’s really cool about ‘Sesame Street’ is that no matter what you look like, or how you play or where you come from, you belong, and that’s really cool,” Ji-Young said.She will be introduced on “Sesame Street” during a special episode on Thanksgiving Day on HBO Max and on local PBS stations. The show, “See Us Coming Together: A Sesame Street Special,” will also feature Simu Liu and Naomi Osaka.Mr. Liu, who plays the title character in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings,” welcomed Ji-Young to “Sesame Street” on Twitter on Monday, after The Associated Press reported on the new muppet’s debut.“I’ve had the privilege of experiencing so many incredible things over the past couple of years, but this definitely sticks out,” Mr. Liu said. “Welcome to Sesame Street, Ji-Young! I’m so glad I got to hang out with you.”In the special episode, the residents of Sesame Street celebrate Neighbor Day, a community event with food, music and games. Someone offscreen tells Ji-Young to “go back home,” and then the other residents, guest stars and friends, like Elmo, offer her support.Ji-Young’s puppeteer is Kathleen Kim, who is Korean American. “My one hope, obviously, is to actually help teach what racism is, help teach kids to be able to recognize it and then speak out against it,” Ms. Kim, 41, told The A.P. “But then my other hope for Ji-Young is that she just normalizes seeing different kinds of looking kids on TV.” More