Sesame Street is built around a single breakthrough idea: if you can attract children's attention, you can educate them. "-writer Malcolm Gladwell.

1969165438+1October 10 The once popular children's TV program Sesame Street taught millions of people, and their letters and numbers first appeared on public TV. In 2009, when this TV series celebrated its 40th anniversary, it won the Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement and became popular in more than 40 countries around the world.

Sesame Street is a think tank of Joan Ganzi Cooney. She was employed by Carnegie College on 1966 to explore the possibility of using television as an educational tool. This was a relatively revolutionary concept at that time, and it also inspired the great Presbyterian minister Fred Rogers (also known as Mr. Rogers) to start his project in 1960s. Not because he likes TV, but because he "hates it very much" ... I think there is some way to train people who can watch and listen with this magical instrument. "

In any case, in the course of her research, Cooney put forward the concept of "Sesame Street", which is a program that both entertains and educates preschool children, especially those low-income children who have fewer learning opportunities.

The background of this program is the city children they are trying to attract-a canned city street with apartment buildings, corner shops and trash cans, and an eight-foot-tall bird. Well, big birds may not be part of the city's childhood experience, but they don't try to beautify the reality of the city's inner life (of course, some people ask for different things). You can't please everyone. A humanoid actor on Sesame Street.

This was a great event in some areas in the late 1960s. Mississippi even banned this program because they couldn't handle the scenes where blacks and whites lived happily in the same neighborhood. (But they survived in the end. By the way, Mississippi didn't officially outlaw slavery until 1995. )

The real star of Sesame Street is of course jim henson's puppet. Interestingly, in the first set of tests, human actors and puppets never appeared in the same scene, because producers were worried that this might confuse their young audience.

But when the children were invited to watch the test set of Sesame Street, they were fascinated by the fragments of the puppet. When they sat on the show and saw only the boring old man, they soon lost interest. Before they were born yesterday, the producer decided to let the puppets interact with people, and some scenes were re-shot and mixed before broadcast.

In an interview with NPR, Joan Ganz Cooney talked about the influence of jim henson and puppets on Sesame Street:

Everyone in the enterprise knows that he is a genius. I remember one of the producers saying, "Let's try to find jim henson." I said, "Do you think we can find him?" ? "If we were not self-sufficient, it was jim henson's puppet who made us self-sufficient, and we wouldn't be here now."

Sesame Street is the key to success. The program won 20 awards in 1970, including three Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award and an American Public Relations Association Award. By the mid-1970s, "Sesame Street" had become a household name and a cultural touchstone for Generation X and everyone after them.

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There are 15 interesting facts about the great Mr. Rogers, among which the words "Crayola" and "crayon" come from "Green Eggs and Ham" written by Dr. Seuss. I bet he can't write a book with less than 50 words, "How the Newbery Prize was held", entitled Yoda's Voice, which unfolds the voice of Miss Pig and Cookie Monster as a reference to change sesame street, sesame street, sesame street, children's TV.