There are understandably a lot of surprising stories for a show like Sesame Street that have tended to build up over the years. Mental Floss has compiled a few things that you might find interesting, especially seeing as how a lot of these facts are simply not known because parents either don’t take the time, sometimes it can’t be helped, or they just aren’t that easy to find. It could also be due to the fact that since kids like the show parents aren’t going to question a whole lot about the origins unless they’re genuinely interested. It’s not so much of a snub towards the show as it is a desire of the parents to simply support something their kid happens to like.
Those parents that are interested only need to hit Google or some other search engine in order to find what they’re looking for.
Food commercials were responsible for how a couple of the puppets looked.
Big Bird and Cookie Monster were both brought to life in order to star in food commercials, but neither commercial ever got made so it was possible that they might have been scrapped before ever making it to Sesame Street. Thankfully though both characters were cast and became rather iconic throughout the time spent on the show. Big Bird was initially a much more raggedy character and had to be redone a time or two in order to get his plumage right. If you’re wondering, every feather on his body is a turkey feather dyed yellow.
Oscar the Grouch originally orange.
Oscar went through a couple of different color variations. He was also nearly left as magenta, which might have been a little different if you look at his character. But the best explanation of his color change to green came from Oscar himself. At one point he claimed that he was still orange, but that years of living in the trash had turned him green. So basically if you took him out of his can and hosed him down for about a day you might find out that he was still orange. That’s interesting and disgusting all at once.
Mr. Snuffleupagus was a core puppet and not an imaginary best friend.
It seemed that for the longest time no one believed Big Bird when he told them about Snuffleupagus. People would always think that he was making the character up, which unfortunately had an effect on kids that made them not want to open up about imaginary or even real happenings for fear that the adults in their lives wouldn’t believe them. But finally in 1985 Big Bird got the chance to introduce Snuffleupagus to the rest of the cast and the big, elephantine character was finally made a real part of the show.
There are a lot of stories concerning the origin of Sesame Street and its cast, and a lot of them might make you realize just why it’s been one of the only shows that generations upon generations of kids have managed to enjoy.
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