Street Gang (38 page)

But he was looking. Unbeknownst to all but a handful of board members and executives at Children’s Television Workshop, Dann had been discussing the possibility of joining the nonprofit as a vice president and assistant to Joan Cooney, the woman he had once offered “any assistance you desire.” Over the weekend, word got out that CTW envisioned an ambassadorial role for Dann, establishing
Sesame Street
adaptations and coproductions internationally. This prompted Kitman to quip, “After he sells [
Sesame Street
] in Russia and Czechoslovakia, he might try Mississippi, where it is considered too controversial for educational TV.”

And so, the man who had a hand in developing
Ding Dong School
at NBC at the dawn of television, would, at age forty-eight—after twenty-one years in commercial network television—bring his native intelligence and promotional instincts to CTW. Within weeks, Dann was on the road exporting
Sesame Street.

The global conquest began in the summer of 1970, with the announcement that thirty-eight stations affiliated with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation would broadcast the series to English-dominant provinces. A representative of the CBC had actually made an inquiry about acquiring rights to
Sesame Street
.

Under an agreement with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network, the first one hundred thirty episodes of
Sesame Street
were made available to children of servicemen and -women in sixteen additional countries, including Iceland, Greece, Ethiopia, and South Korea.

Dann then lined up the Caribbean nations of Bermuda, Trinidad and Tobago, Antigua, Martinique, Curaçao, Jamaica, Barbados, and Aruba. “Representatives from the various countries met in Kingston, Jamaica,” Dann recalled, “school superintendants who couldn’t agree on a thing, even which country should take care of sending the tapes around. Finally, everyone agreed on Tobago. In the first years, the tapes often got lost or mutilated. Eventually, it worked out, but not without a lot of headaches.”

A Mexican foothold came about after Dann negotiated a coproduction deal with Emilio Azcarraga Milmo, the principal owner of the Spanish-language entertainment colossus Televisa. This was before Azcarraga, known as “El Tigre” (the tiger), became the Rupert Murdoch of Latin America and the popularizer of the cleavage-bearing, Kleenex-honking telenovela.

“I was aggressive and I knew people around the world,” Dann said. “I called someone I knew at the ABC network of Australia and made a quick sale. Then I called Benny Yoshida, a friend at NHK in Japan. At the time, they had four networks, one of them devoted to educational programming. I explained to him that
Sesame Street
was an experiment that might be copied in Japan. But I also suggested it might be used there as a way to teach English, and that I’d give it to him at a very good price. He gave me two hundred fifty thousand dollars to run the series on Japanese holidays, to fill in for regular programming. That was pretty good.”

Dann tangled with representatives of Imelda Marcos over a plan to air the show in the Philippines (“She demanded a cut,” he said) and insulted the French when he suggested they use a version of
Sesame Street
created in Ottawa. “What are you talking about, Mr. Dann?” a French television executive sniffed. “When we use a news clip in French from the Canadians, we use subtitles.”

Dann made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, as well. “The Israelis knew how to do
Sesame Street
better than we did,” he said with a half grin. “We got into the worst fracas ever there. The religious educators said, ‘Oh, you’re going to make the series in Jerusalem, right? And the children are going to be wearing yarmulkes, right? And you aren’t going to be shooting on the High Holidays, right?’ The people in Tel Aviv? They didn’t insist on yarmulkes, but they insisted we shoot the program there. Ultimately, Charles Revson put up the money to make it in Tel Aviv.”

Dann conquered Germany with a coproduction titled
Sesamestrasse
. The arrangement with the NDR network was not without its culture shock, said Norton Wright, the former
Captain Kangaroo
production team member who joined CTW to work on the international productions. “Over in Germany, I kid you not, they wanted to include sex education on
Sesamestrasse,
which raised our eyebrows,” Wright said. “So did their desire to include street vernacular. If there was a surprise moment in a script, the German character would say, ‘
Scheiss!
’ which means ‘shit.’ Of course, we would never say ‘shit’ on
Sesame Street
domestic, but we had to bite our tongues with the Germans. And we never would have included sex education, either. When we used the Burt Bacharach tune ‘What the World Needs Now’ in an American segment, we used momma bears and bear cubs. When they did it in Germany, it was men and women embracing. Some of the trial things they did in Germany were even more specific, with body parts.

“One day at a meeting in Germany we were joined by five attractive female child development specialists, all with their doctorates . . . and all braless. This came as something of a surprise to Gerry Lesser and Ed Palmer. One said, ‘Vell, Dr. Lesser, there’s much to talk about with your curriculum and ours. But could you first give us your opinion about
focking
?’

“Gerry didn’t miss a beat. ‘I’m all for it,’ he said.”

 

On September 8, 1971, the London bureau of the Associated Press reported that Monica Sims, children’s program chief for the British Broadcasting Corp., had turned thumbs-down on airing
Sesame Street
in Great Britain.
²⁴
Describing the series as “indoctrination,” Sims condemned
Sesame Street
as “a dangerous extension of the use of television.” Criticizing what she characterized as the show’s “authoritarian aims,” Sims said, “Right answers are demanded and praised, and a research report refers to the program makers’ aim to change children’s behavior.” At the same meeting with the British press, Sims said the BBC was purchasing two American shows:
The Further Adventures of Dr. Doolittle
and
The Harlem Globetrotters
.

ITV, Britain’s other TV service, announced it would air
Sesame Street
on a London station as a thirteen-week experiment. An ITV station in Wales had screened ten episodes of
Sesame Street
in the spring of 1971 to test its suitability for children. Adult reaction was mixed. Some found it wholesome and humorous, others found it vulgar.

 

Eighteen months after
Hey, Cinderella
was filmed in Canada, Jim Henson’s musical adaptation of the fairy tale—starring Kermit the frog and a cast of unknown actors—finally aired on a U.S. network. The success of
Sesame Street
had likely led ABC to pick up and broadcast the special.

New York Times
critic Jack Gould slammed the production the morning after it ran, diminishing it as a “grotesque” modernization of a classic. He also accused Kermit of breaking faith with his PBS audience—and CTW of “cashing in” on
Sesame Street
’s success. Gould incorrectly assumed that the nonprofit had had a hand in the production. Though the creative team for
Hey, Cinderella
included Jon Stone (cowriter with Tom Whedon), Joe Raposo (original score), Charles Rosen (set design), and puppeteers Frank Oz and Jerry Nelson, the production had wrapped in 1968, well before the team was reunited to work on
Sesame Street
.

The wise-guy Kermit of
Hey, Cinderella
—a persona significantly more sardonic than his familiar one on
Sesame Street
—provided the lead-in to commercials for the special. This set off Gould, who accused the frog’s handlers of compromising the character’s integrity. He was speaking for the home viewer when he raised objections about one of the most visible stars of public television suddenly surfacing as an amphibious pitchman for cigarettes on the home screen. As Kermit, himself, might have said, what the hey?

Two days after the review appeared, Henson defended CTW—and his puppet—in a letter to Gould.

 

As these controversies swirled, Joan Cooney gave her creative team extraordinary latitude and support, only once summarily reversing a decision. After learning during the test-show period that Gordon and Susan were to be unmarried romantic partners, she called in Dave Connell, Jon Stone, and Sam Gibbon and demanded change. “I said, ‘Good Lord, marry them!’ ” Cooney recalled. “They’re clearly mommy and daddy on the show. Why not model a sound marriage for our target viewers?”

Stone scribbled furiously on a pad. Gibbon nodded. Connell remained outwardly placid but his gut churned. Cooney had violated her promise to always approach him first with a complaint, and never to undermine his authority. He didn’t speak to her for a week afterward.

“I certainly was involved in the decision that Susan was going to be a housewife,” Cooney said. “We wanted to model two evolved adults who behaved like parents, and were involved in the community even though they did not have a child at the time. Gordon was a teacher and involved in the community. Susan was a homemaker.” Little was made of the fact that they were co-owners of the brownstone, landlords to Bert and Ernie.

A small but vocal chorus of white feminists was rankled by the portrayal of Susan, whom they saw as a subservient, powerless dispenser of milk and cookies. At first, their displeasure was privately shared, in barbed letters to Cooney and her producers. But then members of the National Organization for Women took their dispute public after season one, threatening a boycott of General Foods, which had pledged corporate support to outreach programs for
Sesame Street
.

The antagonism came to a head in April 1972, when Cooney wrote to NOW president Wilma Scott Heide.
²⁵
Though dipped in the honey of business-etiquette prose, it was a bee’s nest of a rebuttal. Here are some highlights: