Would it be overly obvious to suggest everybody involved was on crack?
Was it called that then?
I’m one of those people from way back who NEVER cared for ‘Sesame Street’ and didn’t think it was the be-all end-all that everyone (it seemed to me) thought it was.
I did not see that as a child so I understand that I’m probably not a good reference, but it didn’t seem traumatizing to me at all.
My view is similar to Mark M. The Crack Monster disintegrated because he wanted to be mean. Good overcomes, again.
I may or may not have seen it. Reading the description sounded really familiar and I was mostly the right age. Maybe a little old but I watched Sesame Street well past me age level because I recognized good writing and I had younger sisters, cousins and younger children I tutored. So maybe I did see it.
Not in the *least* bit traumatic (not compared to the Crocodile King or the Slow Reader on the Electric Company).
Children like to make up stories of shapes and cracks in their walls. This is playful. And sometimes they get scared of the things they imagine. But they aren’t real and vanish when you shine a light on them. But the good ones can still entertain you in your imagination. I thought this was cute and I liked it.
People like to joke about being creeped out by benign things (esp. Clowns and dolls). Not sure why. Kind of bugs me….
Sentient things breaking up like the crack monster always freaked me out when I was a kid. Especially if what they leave behind is creepier, like the lath and plaster. Anything that you only see when the house is falling to pieces around you freaked me out.
I listened to the podcast at the link. The second half is new information (not in the article), and intriguing. The way the manila envelope was delivered would absolutely creep me out.
That’s a nifty story-within-a-story, even more mysterious than the short. Who provided and how was it delivered?
@ Andréa – Freebasing cocaine into “crack” started in the early 1980’s, so the Sesame Street cartoon of the “crack monster” probably predated it by at least five years.
P.S. Slate’s privacy policy is even more nefarious and unreadable than Google’s, and offers no practical way to “opt out” of their odious data tracking.
P.S. In the podcast, a CTW/Sesame employee theorizes that the advent of crack cocaine was probably one of the reasons that the short had been shelved.
Dr Who built a series on a crack that (IIRC) that we first saw on a kid’s bedroom wall… turned out it was a manifestation of some massive crack in the fabric of spacetime caused by the TARDIS exploding. http://www.thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/doctorwho/themes/pandorica/ “Some were tiny, some were as big as the sky. Through some we saw worlds and people, and through others we saw silence, and the end of all things”.
So the good Doctor delivered the manila package in some timey-wimey way.
I had something similar but less creepy happen with a “Frosty the Snowman” cartoon with a jazzy a capella soundtrack that I saw dozens of times every year on WGN out of Chicago. Grow up, move around, and often met people who had seen every other Xmas season cartoon, and had never heard of it. Did I hallucinate it? Nope, turns out it was a Chicago-only thing. It was produced by a public arts group and at some point it just got lost. Of course, now it’s on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU3SKtJbNu8
I recently saw a YouTube video on the topic of TV shows that are now lost, and apparently one involved a Sesame Street episode that featured the actress who played the WW on “Wizard of Oz”, Margaret Hamilton.
Kilby: Wikipedia, FWIW, states that crack came into its own in late 1984-early 1985.
When the very young daughter of a friend watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time, she saw the flying monkeys grab Toto and she screamed and cried. We made the mistake of turning it off, so she was left with just that image. If we’d finished watching it, it would have been resolved.
I think if the Crack Master had taken a little longer to destroy himself, or if his meanness causing his downfall was underscored, it might not have been so traumatizing.
I remember “The Wizard of Oz” appearing on broadcast television. In prime-time. Meaning that small children would not stay awake long enough for the WW to get her shower of defeat. So I imagine there’s a whole generation of children for whom the WW was a terror because they say the earlier, scary parts of the movie but never the defeat of the WW.
Chak, your friend’s story calls to mind what G.K. Chesterton wrote: “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
Thanks, CIDU Bill for posting this — very interesting. My kids were the right age to have seen it, but I don’t remember it. They learned a lot from Sesame Street. I didn’t know I was supposed to talk to my babies, so they learned the alphabet from Sesame Street before they talked. The first thing our son said was “O” when we drove past a Target with its sign missing the center of the target. At 1 year old he showed off in a hospital waiting room by calling out the letters on the plaques and signs around the room, and everyone was amazed. He’s an engineer working on the Space Station project now, so I guess it didn’t hurt him to learn the letters before he put them together into words! (Yes, I suppose it sounds sad that he didn’t say “mama” first, but it just didn’t occur to me at the time.)
Padraig, your Frosty will look somewhat familiar to fans of “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol”. Same studio, UPA.
My sister used to watch Sesame Street when she was young (and she is the tail end of the baby boom not a Gen X as everything seems to say that Sesame Street’s audience was) and we would watch with her and I don’t remember ever seeing the piece they mentioned, perhaps it was after the early years.
@ Chak – When my son saw the Mr. Bean episode “Mind the Baby”, he was so disturbed when the stroller was separated from the mother than he didn’t think anything in the episode was funny, and he was rather angry at me for turning it on in the first place.
@Kilby: Your son has the right idea, but has not yet been woke enough to go to the next level and realize that *nothing* in MR. BEAN is/was EVER funny. Still, baby steps (as it were. . .)
Creepy, IMHO.
Kilby: that’s a great observation and basically explains my dislike of the Three Stooges, and the Our Gang films. I have been repeatedly surprised in my adulthood being confronted with Three Stooges bits at how good and clever and original and well performed they are, because I just instinctively dismiss them based on my early childhood bias…
My childhood recollection of the Stooges is that they were hilarious. My mother didn’t like us watching them because “we’d get worked up”. Meaning the six boys in the family were imitating the mayhem.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Would it be overly obvious to suggest everybody involved was on crack?
Was it called that then?
I’m one of those people from way back who NEVER cared for ‘Sesame Street’ and didn’t think it was the be-all end-all that everyone (it seemed to me) thought it was.
I did not see that as a child so I understand that I’m probably not a good reference, but it didn’t seem traumatizing to me at all.
My view is similar to Mark M. The Crack Monster disintegrated because he wanted to be mean. Good overcomes, again.
I may or may not have seen it. Reading the description sounded really familiar and I was mostly the right age. Maybe a little old but I watched Sesame Street well past me age level because I recognized good writing and I had younger sisters, cousins and younger children I tutored. So maybe I did see it.
Not in the *least* bit traumatic (not compared to the Crocodile King or the Slow Reader on the Electric Company).
Children like to make up stories of shapes and cracks in their walls. This is playful. And sometimes they get scared of the things they imagine. But they aren’t real and vanish when you shine a light on them. But the good ones can still entertain you in your imagination. I thought this was cute and I liked it.
People like to joke about being creeped out by benign things (esp. Clowns and dolls). Not sure why. Kind of bugs me….
Sentient things breaking up like the crack monster always freaked me out when I was a kid. Especially if what they leave behind is creepier, like the lath and plaster. Anything that you only see when the house is falling to pieces around you freaked me out.
I listened to the podcast at the link. The second half is new information (not in the article), and intriguing. The way the manila envelope was delivered would absolutely creep me out.
That’s a nifty story-within-a-story, even more mysterious than the short. Who provided and how was it delivered?
@ Andréa – Freebasing cocaine into “crack” started in the early 1980’s, so the Sesame Street cartoon of the “crack monster” probably predated it by at least five years.
P.S. Slate’s privacy policy is even more nefarious and unreadable than Google’s, and offers no practical way to “opt out” of their odious data tracking.
P.S. In the podcast, a CTW/Sesame employee theorizes that the advent of crack cocaine was probably one of the reasons that the short had been shelved.
Dr Who built a series on a crack that (IIRC) that we first saw on a kid’s bedroom wall… turned out it was a manifestation of some massive crack in the fabric of spacetime caused by the TARDIS exploding. http://www.thedoctorwhosite.co.uk/doctorwho/themes/pandorica/ “Some were tiny, some were as big as the sky. Through some we saw worlds and people, and through others we saw silence, and the end of all things”.
So the good Doctor delivered the manila package in some timey-wimey way.
I had something similar but less creepy happen with a “Frosty the Snowman” cartoon with a jazzy a capella soundtrack that I saw dozens of times every year on WGN out of Chicago. Grow up, move around, and often met people who had seen every other Xmas season cartoon, and had never heard of it. Did I hallucinate it? Nope, turns out it was a Chicago-only thing. It was produced by a public arts group and at some point it just got lost. Of course, now it’s on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU3SKtJbNu8
I recently saw a YouTube video on the topic of TV shows that are now lost, and apparently one involved a Sesame Street episode that featured the actress who played the WW on “Wizard of Oz”, Margaret Hamilton.
Kilby: Wikipedia, FWIW, states that crack came into its own in late 1984-early 1985.
When the very young daughter of a friend watched The Wizard of Oz for the first time, she saw the flying monkeys grab Toto and she screamed and cried. We made the mistake of turning it off, so she was left with just that image. If we’d finished watching it, it would have been resolved.
I think if the Crack Master had taken a little longer to destroy himself, or if his meanness causing his downfall was underscored, it might not have been so traumatizing.
I remember “The Wizard of Oz” appearing on broadcast television. In prime-time. Meaning that small children would not stay awake long enough for the WW to get her shower of defeat. So I imagine there’s a whole generation of children for whom the WW was a terror because they say the earlier, scary parts of the movie but never the defeat of the WW.
Chak, your friend’s story calls to mind what G.K. Chesterton wrote: “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
Thanks, CIDU Bill for posting this — very interesting. My kids were the right age to have seen it, but I don’t remember it. They learned a lot from Sesame Street. I didn’t know I was supposed to talk to my babies, so they learned the alphabet from Sesame Street before they talked. The first thing our son said was “O” when we drove past a Target with its sign missing the center of the target. At 1 year old he showed off in a hospital waiting room by calling out the letters on the plaques and signs around the room, and everyone was amazed. He’s an engineer working on the Space Station project now, so I guess it didn’t hurt him to learn the letters before he put them together into words! (Yes, I suppose it sounds sad that he didn’t say “mama” first, but it just didn’t occur to me at the time.)
Padraig, your Frosty will look somewhat familiar to fans of “Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol”. Same studio, UPA.
And now, here is my favorite Frosty: https://youtu.be/1T_RZOoVlzc
My sister used to watch Sesame Street when she was young (and she is the tail end of the baby boom not a Gen X as everything seems to say that Sesame Street’s audience was) and we would watch with her and I don’t remember ever seeing the piece they mentioned, perhaps it was after the early years.
@ Chak – When my son saw the Mr. Bean episode “Mind the Baby”, he was so disturbed when the stroller was separated from the mother than he didn’t think anything in the episode was funny, and he was rather angry at me for turning it on in the first place.
@Kilby: Your son has the right idea, but has not yet been woke enough to go to the next level and realize that *nothing* in MR. BEAN is/was EVER funny. Still, baby steps (as it were. . .)
Creepy, IMHO.
Kilby: that’s a great observation and basically explains my dislike of the Three Stooges, and the Our Gang films. I have been repeatedly surprised in my adulthood being confronted with Three Stooges bits at how good and clever and original and well performed they are, because I just instinctively dismiss them based on my early childhood bias…
My childhood recollection of the Stooges is that they were hilarious. My mother didn’t like us watching them because “we’d get worked up”. Meaning the six boys in the family were imitating the mayhem.