‘Goodness And Humor' Celebrated As ‘Sesame Street' Turns 50

Fifty years ago, beloved entertainer Carol Burnett appeared on the very first broadcast of a quirky TV program that featured a bunch of furry puppets.

Blink and you might miss it, but Burnett followed a cartoon about a witch called Wanda, which was loaded with words beginning with the letter w.

“Wow, Wanda the Witch is weird,” Burnett commented. And then — poof — she was gone.

That show was “Sesame Street” and Burnett, like a lot of kids, was instantly hooked. She would return to the show multiple times, including visits to demonstrate to pre-school viewers where her nose was and to smooch a rubber duckie.

“I was a big fan. I would have done anything they wanted me to do,” she said. “I loved being exposed to all that goodness and humor.”

This first episode of “Sesame Street” — sponsored by the letters W, S and E and the numbers 2 and 3 — aired in the fall of 1969. It was a turbulent time in America, rocked by the Vietnam War and raw from the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King the year before. The media, like today, was going through disruption.

Newt Minow, who was the Federal Communications Commission chairman at the time, famously said TV was becoming “a vast wasteland.” Like today, there was lots of content, but it wasn’t necessarily quality.

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Enter “Sesame Street” creators Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett, who worked with Harvard University developmental psychologist Gerald Lesser to build the show’s unique approach to teaching that now reaches 120 million children. Legendary puppeteer Jim Henson supplied the critters.

“It wasn’t about if kids were learning from TV, it was about what they were learning from TV,” said Steve Youngwood, the chief operating officer of Sesame Workshop. “If they could harness that power to teach them the alphabet and their numbers as opposed to the words to beer commercials, you may be able to make a really big difference.”