don't get me started about the crayon factory, really.

i was reading jezebel the other day when i came across this post about how different seasame street was back in the day. now, i haven't watched seasame street in over ten years (i went through the obligatory retro-nostalgia phase in high school where my friends and i would amuse ourselves in the afternoon by watching seasame street on pbs - i also wore ring pops then, but that's another story altogether), but i am not surprised to hear that it's turned into a sanitized elmo-land of happy muppets and the distinct aroma of stifling safeness. now, the stuff that ruled about seasame street back then is the stuff that's considered somehow "too risky" for preschool minds to try to process. for instance,

The producers cite an array of reasons [for vintage seasame street episodes being deemed potentially unsuitable for today's toddlers] including but not nearly limited to Cookie Monster, who was not only a pathological binge eater but also the Muppet who played the character Alistair Cookie, who, explains the New York Times Magazine "used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, 'That modeled the wrong behavior' -- smoking, eating pipes -- 'so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.'"

remember alistair cookie? monsterpiece theater?? the minute i read about the pipe, i could clearly picture him eating it - and i laughed out loud. because that shit is funny. it was funny then to my pint-sized self, and it's funny now twenty years later - how often can you say that about something?

sigh. kids these days - they really don't know what they're missing.

for your own retro-nostalgia moment, here's a classic monsterpiece theater, including the offending pipe-eating finale:



and here's an amazing one that my sister found for me, monsterpiece theater: twin beaks: