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A Prairie Dawn Companion - Sesame Street's Origins and Androcentrism · Muppet Fan Podcasts with ToughPigs.com

0:03
So I could start my journey here in so many different places, but
0:06
for me, there's only one obvious place to begin with a line of
0:11
socks released by the Bombas Company in 2021.
0:15
In 2021, Bombas introduced a wave of Sesame Street socks for
0:20
adults. The line contains 8 pairs of
0:23
socks featuring 8 Muppet characters packaged in a box
0:27
that says the gang's all here. Who's in the gang?
0:32
Well, Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Elmo, Grover, Oscar, The Count,
0:39
Bert, and Ernie. And really, those are the big
0:43
Sesame characters. If you ask most adults for their
0:46
favorite Sesame character from childhood, they'll draw from
0:50
those eight watch My favorite Muppet is The Count.
0:55
My favorite is Bert, my favorite Sesame Street character.
0:59
Is Big Bert. My favorite Muppet character is
1:02
the cookie. Monster.
1:05
My favorite Sesame. Street character is the count.
1:09
I love Bird, but I also love Bart's brother.
1:14
In 1985, while producing the first Sesame Street movie titled
1:19
Follow That Bird, the Sesame team was tasked with a similar
1:23
mission of condensing the thousands of Muppet characters
1:27
down to a core bunch. A movie can only handle so many
1:31
characters, and the team distilled that down to a select
1:34
few Muppets who would get to go on an adventure to find Big
1:37
Bird. The list looks pretty similar to
1:41
the list of socks Bombas produced 37 years later.
1:45
Just switch out Elmo for telly and you've got your roster.
1:50
But there's one problem with this list.
1:52
You've got characters with all different colors, species,
1:56
personalities, ages, likelihoods of eating the sandbox.
2:01
But something's missing. You noticed it too, didn't you?
2:05
That's right, there are no girls in either group.
2:09
Representation matters has become a stock phrase in media
2:13
criticism, but it's a valid one, especially when dealing with
2:17
media for young children. According to the Mayo Clinic,
2:21
kids begin developing their sense of what gender is at age
2:25
3, and it's a logical extrapolation that what kids see
2:29
in media can affect that. The academic journal article
2:33
Gender and Media Representations, a review of the
2:37
literature on gender stereotypes, objectification,
2:40
and sexualization by Fabrizio Santa Niccolo and others, talks
2:45
more about this. These authors note that gender
2:48
stereotypes can change based on what people are exposed to, but
2:53
television programming often doesn't feature enough female
2:57
representation to affect this in a positive way.
3:02
I can say that today, the Sesame Gang has a lot more female
3:05
characters. The main members of the cast
3:09
absolutely include Abby, Cadabby, Gabrielle, Rosita, Ji
3:14
Young, and Tango, and if you cast to that net slightly wider,
3:19
you get Julia and Zoe as well. But getting to this point took
3:23
time. The oldest of those characters
3:26
is Rosita, who debuted in 199122 years after Sesame's debut and
3:33
after what most fans consider the show's golden age.
3:37
Jim Henson was already gone, and legendary puppet performers
3:42
Frank Oz and Richard Hunt were appearing less and less.
3:45
It makes sense that even today, when Sesame markets things for
3:50
adult fans, there are no girls allowed.
3:55
Let me clarify. It makes sense given the
3:58
history, but what doesn't make sense is why it took so long for
4:03
Sesame to introduce a girl character with real classic
4:07
staying power. There were girl characters back
4:10
in the day, of course. In particular, early episodes
4:14
introduced 2 near identical pink blonde girls, the affable Betty
4:21
Lou and the unflappable Prairie Dawn.
4:25
Both of these girls were occasionally grouped with the
4:27
main cast, especially Prairie, like on these albums.
4:33
We shan't have any of my soft sweet soda crackers when his
4:36
soft sweet soda crackers are gone.
4:38
Can you do that? OK, let me think.
4:42
Now let's draw a picture. A picture of a face.
4:51
Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
4:53
That's ridiculous, Grover. Why should she marry the Prince
4:56
when she never even met him? What if she didn't like him?
5:00
Why couldn't you just go back to her castle and ride her horse,
5:04
or open a lemonade stand or learn to read instead of getting
5:08
married? That's very dawn.
5:10
Fairy tales always end like that, with everybody getting
5:13
married and living happily ever. After Oh no, Grover, there are
5:18
lots of fairy tales that don't end like that.
5:21
Really. Of course.
5:23
Would you like to hear one? Certainly I am most curious.
5:26
All right. But as I've said, not always.
5:31
After all, as an example, Prairie Dawn is in about two
5:35
seconds of Follow That Bird. And in an interview Tough Pigs
5:40
did with Ken Kwapis, the film's director, he joked that she was
5:44
one of a few characters with unusual names who he wasn't even
5:49
aware of before filming began. No disrespect to Kwapis, of
5:54
course. It's a sign of a bigger, more
5:57
complicated problem. It's all weird, you know?
6:00
Sesame was a show that prided itself on diversity from day
6:04
one. Sesame was a show that was
6:07
created by a woman, Joan Ganz Cooney.
6:11
Sesame featured talented women behind the scenes, under the
6:15
puppets, and on screen, as grown up human characters like Susan
6:20
and Maria and Linda. And as a whole, Sesame brought
6:25
us some of the most memorable characters in television
6:28
history. Yet for a long time, our puppet
6:32
pals were basically only boys. But why did this happen in the
6:37
1st place? What did Sesame do to try to fix
6:41
this? Why did it take until Abby
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Cadabby's debut in 2006, 37 years after the show's debut,
6:51
for a female character to truly be as important as the boys?
6:56
I'm here to investigate these questions, starting at the very
7:00
beginning of Sesame Street's history.
7:03
And if anyone can investigate this, it's me.
7:07
You see, lots of women can podcast about female
7:10
representation in media, and lots of people can podcast about
7:15
the history of The Muppets, but I'm uniquely qualified to talk
7:19
about this particular subject. As a trans woman, I find gender
7:24
fascinating. I like exploring the ways we see
7:27
gender stereotypes in everything we're exposed to, and how the
7:31
media we engage with can shape our perceptions of ourselves.
7:36
As a professional educator, I like knowing about what kids are
7:41
and aren't exposed to. And of course, as a Muppet
7:44
expert who has been writing for the premier Muppet fan site
7:48
Tough Pigs for over a decade, I know an awful lot about, say,
7:55
Rodeo Rosie. You know, when I was coming out,
8:00
realizing that maybe I wasn't the man I was told I was, one of
8:05
the things I clung to was my love of Prairie Dawn.
8:09
She was my favorite Muppet and exposed me to a type of
8:13
femininity that was artistic and studious and funny.
8:18
Prairie helped me learn who I wanted to be, but a lot of folks
8:23
my age don't remember Prairie. Like I said, she was sort of a
8:28
main character but sort of not, and probably only stuck with me
8:33
because I was a Muppet obsessive.
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And it really makes me wonder, why didn't Sesame work harder to
8:40
make characters that more girls could see themselves in?
8:45
Let's find out. I'm Becca Petunia from
8:48
toughpigs.com. Welcome to a podcast about this
8:52
mystery and this journey. Welcome to a Prairie Dawn
8:58
companion. Ladies and gentlemen, the
9:01
Starlight Hotel takes great pride in presenting the world's
9:05
favorite 6 year old entertainer, Miss Prairie Dawn, come on
9:12
girls, girls, girls. Let's go do girl stuff.
9:15
Yes, Oscar. Can you play a song with a
9:22
beats? So like all stories, this one
9:31
starts with a conversation about socks and then goes to the
9:35
beginning. The year 1966, and after some
9:40
encouragement from Lloyd Morissette, Joan Ganz Cooney
9:44
began researching the possibility for television to
9:47
educate children, including inner city children.
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One thing I feel like a lot of folks don't get, Sesame Street
9:55
was invented by a woman. And not just any woman, a
9:59
working woman in the 1960s, a woman who had worked in
10:03
journalism and then TV production, who was deeply
10:07
concerned with fighting discrimination, who travelled
10:10
around the country researching in order to be better able to
10:14
meet kids needs. And let me be clear, not many
10:18
women were working in TV production at the time, years
10:21
before the women's movement picked up steam in the 1970s.
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In her role first doing research and then as a leader of the
10:29
newly founded Children's Television Workshop, Ganz Cooney
10:34
spoke to educators, psychologists, scholars, and
10:37
television personnel and prepared a massive document
10:41
called The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool
10:45
Education. It laid out her research
10:48
findings and also created a framework for what an
10:51
educational TV show might look like.
10:54
You can still read this paper. Sesame has made it available on
10:57
their website. It's a lengthy piece but written
11:01
accessibly rather than in the formal style of a professor.
11:05
It is the following abstract which gives you an idea of the
11:08
comprehensiveness of her work. The following is a report of
11:12
recommendations as to possible uses of open circuit television
11:17
to stimulate the intellectual and cultural growth in children
11:21
of preschool age. The report is based on a four
11:24
month survey of opinions of leading cognitive psychologists
11:28
and educators in the field of preschool education, as well as
11:32
of television producers, film makers and other specialists in
11:36
the field of children's entertainment.
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It draws also from extensive research into old and new visual
11:43
material that could be used or adapted for use on television.
11:48
What's important is how directly Joan Ganz Cooney's
11:51
recommendations shaped what Sesame would become.
11:54
She suggests that a kids show should be an hour long show
11:58
focused on letters, numbers and other types of school readiness,
12:02
with gentle human adults guiding students through concepts and
12:06
encouraging participation at home.
12:09
She also imagined different media types mixed together,
12:13
including humans on set, cartoons, and nature footage.
12:17
Sesame was born right there in this report.
12:22
That's not to say that Jim Henson wasn't important in the
12:25
early days of Sesame Street. It's just, look, I've been on
12:29
the Internet for long enough and through enough.
12:32
Jim Henson's ashes would be rolling around in his urn if he
12:36
knew what Sesame was Today. Discourse cycles to know that a
12:41
lot of you kids at home didn't really pay enough attention to
12:45
Joan Ganz Cooney's influence. Joan Ganz Cooney had already
12:49
drafted the idea of Sesame Street long before she ever got
12:54
in contact with Jim Henson. So at the end of, follow that
12:58
bird when the count says. Joan.
13:01
Ganz Cooney. Hi, Mom.
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He's not joking around. There is no Sesame Street
13:07
without a smart, dedicated, compassionate woman.
13:11
And This is why I think viewing Sesame through a feminist lens
13:14
is so, so interesting. Still, while Jim Henson might
13:19
not be the singular mind behind Sesame, he was absolutely very
13:24
important. After all, Jim brought the
13:26
puppets. Puppets were only a small
13:29
component of Joan Ganz Cooney's plan at first.
13:33
Her report discusses the possibility that the
13:35
aforementioned gentle adults could maybe have a clownish
13:39
puppet sidekick who could get easy questions wrong so kids
13:43
could feel smart. A proto big bird, if you will.
13:48
Although obviously the exact appearance of this foolish Comic
13:52
Relief puppet wasn't specified. Still, through their mutual
13:57
colleague, the writer Johnstone, Joan eventually brought Jim on
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board. Henson's work always managed to
14:05
capture kids attention, and Joan's team figured he'd be a
14:08
good guy to help shape the show. They were right, of course.
14:13
Considering Muppets weren't always a part of the Sesame
14:16
plan, it's remarkable how quickly they became synonymous
14:20
with the Sesame brand. Sesame will always be the cute
14:25
little children's show with puppets and not, you know, the
14:28
cute little children's show with videos about milking cows, a
14:32
Baker falling down the stairs, and Washington and Lincoln
14:35
appearing in elevators while the woman from Jefferson Airplane
14:38
sings. So this is an important premise
14:43
for us to establish here on the Prairie Dawn Companion.
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To most audiences, even early on, the puppets were much more
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important than every other component of the show.
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That's not to say that audiences didn't enjoy the cartoons, clips
14:58
of real world kids and the like. Sesame wouldn't have continued
15:03
airing them for decades if they didn't connect.
15:06
But it's clear that the Muppet characters were a different
15:09
level of importance, which is why the premise of my podcast
15:13
will focus more heavily on the gender dynamics of these
15:17
characters. So after all that, let's finally
15:20
talk about The Muppets and the team behind them.
15:24
The first episode of Sesame has five named Muppet characters,
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Big Bird, Ernie, Bert, Oscar the Grouch, and Kermit the Frog.
15:35
There's also brief appearances by the then unnamed Cookie
15:39
Monster, 3 Crocodiles, and some generic anything Muppets.
15:45
I'm not sure about those Crocs, as details from the early days
15:48
are somewhat scarce, but all of those other characters were
15:52
designed by Jim Henson, who of course also performed Ernie and
15:57
Kermit. That was a delicious glass of
15:59
milk. My compliments to the cow.
16:02
Now, part of the masterstroke of contacting Jim is that Ganz
16:07
Cooney also got access to Jim's inimitable team of creatives.
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Of course, this meant Frank Oz and Carol Spinney, who rounded
16:17
out the key Muppet performing roles.
16:20
Frank was Bert and Cookie and Carol who?
16:24
If you're new to the world of The Muppets, first of all,
16:27
welcome. And second of all, I should
16:29
specify that Carol Spinney was a man, Carol was Big Bird and
16:34
Oscar. And all of these performers also
16:37
took turns playing anything Muppets along with some other
16:41
puppeteers. By all accounts, in the earliest
16:44
days of Sesame, the only other dedicated puppeteer was Daniel
16:49
Segren, who would mostly assist the main puppeteers.
16:54
He often performed Ernie's right hand, and Ernie once expressed
16:59
his dismay that Segren was left out of an on screen puppeteer
17:03
credit. And I say, oh, look, they left
17:05
out Danny's credit there that Danny was there.
17:08
Danny would eventually become the first actor to play Spider
17:11
Man in a live action role. But you know what?
17:15
We're really getting off topic. Anyway.
17:18
It takes a village beyond even the performers, and Jim brought
17:22
these folks, too. For instance, Jim brought Jerry
17:26
Jewell, a former puppeteer who helped write so many of the most
17:30
memorable things The Muppets did, both before and after
17:34
Sesame's premiere in 1969. He also brought Don Selene, who
17:39
makes a hell of a puppet, as the kids say, and Don's fellow
17:43
puppet builders Kermit Love. No relation to the frog, by the
17:47
way, and Carol Lee Wilcox. Of all those people listed,
17:53
Wilcox is the only woman. Her work building puppets was
17:57
incredibly important, and certainly 10 years down the
18:01
line, she'd design A smiley red monster who would one day become
18:06
the Elmo we all know and love. It seems Don Celine and Kermit
18:11
Love LED more of the puppet builds early on, but Caroli's
18:16
role was important and she'd stick with the team for years.
18:20
As far as we know, in Season 1 of Sesame, Carolee Wilcox was
18:25
also the only female puppeteer. Data is scarce on who played
18:30
which utility character in which sketch.
18:33
It doesn't seem like Carolee was involved in the first episode at
18:37
all, but we do know she would occasionally perform Ernie's
18:41
right hand instead of seagrin, and she performed The Beautiful
18:46
Day Monster in a sketch explaining first and last that
18:51
would first air four months into the show's run.
18:54
Yeah, OK. Everybody ready?
18:56
Hold it, Hold it, hold it. What's the matter, Becker?
18:59
You might not have noticed, but I'm last in line.
19:02
Yeah. You last.
19:03
Yeah. Well, someone to be last in
19:05
line. Well, somebody's got to be last
19:07
in line. Still, Carol Lee doesn't really
19:11
have a single line of audible dialogue in the sketch.
19:14
There's something that gets kind of swallowed by other other
19:18
Muppets talking at the same time.
19:21
We know she performed only because of behind the scenes
19:24
documents. After all, Carol Lee wasn't
19:28
really a full time puppeteer. Her main job was in the
19:31
workshop. At this point, the only full
19:34
time female puppeteer who had ever worked with The Muppets was
19:39
Jane Henson. I could talk for hours about the
19:43
importance of Jane Henson, nay, Jane Nebel, to the early days of
19:48
The Muppets. I won't, because her role on
19:51
Sesame was pretty minimal, and this isn't the Bernice from
19:55
Salmon Friends Companion, but Jane was truly the unsung
20:00
champion of the Sam and Friends era on this, Jim Henson's first
20:05
TV show. She rarely voiced characters,
20:09
but often built and manipulated the puppets and was by all
20:13
accounts a true collaborator. Jane kept herself in the
20:17
background, preferring to undersell her contributions.
20:21
But recent scholarship from Brian J Jones and Craig Shemon
20:25
has revealed just how key she was to The Muppets early
20:28
success. We do know Jane would do some
20:32
background puppeteering and assisting in later seasons of
20:35
Sesame Street, but prior to the first season, she had taken a
20:39
step back from puppetry work to care for her family after
20:43
Cheryl, her second child, was born in 1961.
20:48
As I mentioned, in those early days, behind the scenes records
20:52
are kind of sparse. We didn't have Matt Vogel doing
20:56
Below the Frame podcasts or Stephanie Debruzzo making
21:00
Instagram posts from the set of the show, so I can't say exactly
21:05
who was performing, say, those 3 crocodiles in that first
21:09
episode. Plus, voice chasing is almost
21:13
impossible, as we'll discuss in a second, because some of the
21:17
characters voices were dubbed after the fact.
21:21
But considering we know Danny Segren often helped right hand
21:25
Ernie, and we know Jim, Frank, and Carol did most of the
21:29
principal puppetry, it's safe to say that here in 1969 we started
21:35
episode 1 of Sesame Street in a weird place with zero female
21:40
puppeteers and basically zero female Muppets.
21:45
I say basically because while Big Bird, Ernie, Bert, Oscar,
21:50
Kermit, and Cookie Monster are all absolutely male characters,
21:55
there is one scene where Gordon introduces the viewers to the
21:59
Anything People and that family includes a mother and a little
22:04
girl. The Anything Family, more
22:07
commonly and accurately called the Anything Muppets, were
22:11
utility puppets on the show. Or should I say they are utility
22:16
puppets because even today Sesame Street uses Anything
22:20
Muppets for supporting roles. Although those puppets have
22:23
changed a bit in appearance since 1969.
22:27
It's a genius concept that Jim Henson pioneered.
22:31
Simple, featureless puppets that could be given all sorts of
22:35
different features so they can fit in different roles.
22:39
Like this for instance. We're going to just play with
22:42
these different features and and rearrange them and see if we can
22:45
come up with several different characters in the course of the
22:47
next few minutes. And so first of all, as I say,
22:51
he's a Southern Colonel. That's right.
22:53
And I'm wearing 1/5 helmet because I just come back from
22:56
Africa. You know what?
22:58
What I was? I was big game hunting in
23:00
Africa, fella. Big game hunting?
23:02
Yes, indeed. What game?
23:04
Monopoly. That's a big game in Africa,
23:07
didn't you know that? Now why don't you make him
23:10
younger by just taking off this mustache?
23:12
That's right, already I'm younger.
23:14
You see, I could be a rock'n'roll singer being young
23:16
like this. On Sesame Street, these puppets
23:20
would eventually be used to make characters in their own right.
23:24
Characters like Count Von Count, Guy Smiley, Roosevelt, Franklin
23:30
Grover's customer, Mr. Johnson, Sherlock, Hemlock, and more all
23:35
started with anything Muppet templates given more permanent
23:39
personalities, but in the early days they were often used like
23:43
they were. In that clip, you just heard
23:44
from The Muppets on puppets as literal blank slates that a
23:49
human could decorate with features live on camera.
23:52
That's how it often was in the first season of Sesame Street,
23:55
too. Oh, Cardi, Hi.
23:59
Hi. Hey.
24:00
Oh, you know, this is one of our anything people.
24:03
They can be anything they want. It's a whole family of them.
24:05
Yeah. What do you want to be today?
24:07
I don't want to be a. Little girl you want to be a
24:09
little girl can. You give me some pretty eyes.
24:12
Little girl eyes, yes, yeah, I got some little girl eyes, hair
24:19
of them. That's that's.
24:22
Nice, do you have some hair for me?
24:24
Little girl hair. You want blonde hair?
24:26
You want pretty blonde hair? Yes, OK, How would you like now
24:31
you're a little girl. That's nice, thank you.
24:35
This is a cute segment, but it's pretty clear that this is the
24:38
exact antithesis of well developed characters, which is
24:43
fine in isolation. The goal of this sketch wasn't
24:47
to create a little girl character that kids would
24:49
remember forever. It's just a cute sketch about
24:52
family relationships and a chance for everyone to sing a
24:56
song from Oliver if it's a chance.
24:58
To be we should see some harder days, empty harder days.
25:03
White grouse always a chance. We'll meet.
25:06
Somebody to foot the bill, then the drinks are on my.
25:10
House soft drinks unset. Yourself lower mate, we.
25:14
Don't want to have load us. So in a way, the first two
25:21
female Muppets on Sesame Street are the Anything Little Girl and
25:25
the Anything Mother, and as established, they're barely
25:29
characters at all. Here's what we know.
25:32
The Maroon little girl was performed and voiced by Frank
25:35
Oz, starting his long legacy of female characters with falsettos
25:40
that would obviously peek with The Muppet Shows Miss Piggy.
25:45
The Purple Mother is puppeteered by either Jim or Carol, but
25:49
overdubbed with vocals from Loretta Long, who played the
25:52
human character Susan on the show.
25:55
And that's it. In episode 1.
25:58
That's basically all there is to say about female Muppets.
26:02
Only 4700 episodes to go. I kid.
26:07
Of course, I'm not going to go this deep on every episode, but
26:10
what I realized viewing this monumental episode through this
26:14
lens is that there truly is a stark contrast between women's
26:19
roles in the Muppet segments and women's roles on the other
26:24
segments on the show. Obviously, as established
26:27
earlier, the puppet segments are the main focus of this podcast
26:32
because they were the segments that clearly caught the
26:34
attention of audiences. But it's worth noting that when
26:38
the puppet scenes are contrasted to other scenes, it's like 2
26:42
separate worlds. Honestly, let's start with the
26:46
shorter segments and go bigger. The first celebrity to appear on
26:50
the televised Sesame Street is Carol Burnett, who has one line
26:55
about how Wanda the Witch, a cartoon character from the
26:59
previous segment, is wacky. Wanda herself is a female
27:05
character who appears in a cartoon that shows twice in this
27:08
same episode. She's a fun, classic Halloween
27:12
witch with WS for hair and a worm for a belt.
27:16
While there's ostensibly not much to say about Wanda, she
27:20
occasionally appeared in merchandise through the early
27:23
70s, and her sketch would reappear well into the 80s.
27:29
Wanda is joined in this episode by her fellow female cartoon
27:33
star Alice bright white goody shoes a know it all who claims
27:37
to be the. Smartest person in town?
27:39
Despite making a foolish mistake in getting paint all over her
27:43
while demonstrating through. While Alice is a little
27:48
intentionally annoying, it's nice to see a female character
27:52
be comedic Alice. Bright white sketches would
27:55
appear for years. Well, this episode only has one.
27:59
There were 8 total Baby Alice sketches that would be mixed and
28:03
matched into plots for several seasons.
28:07
We also of course see girls in the various clips of real
28:11
children interspersed throughout the program.
28:13
Most important are the so-called St. scenes, a term that refers
28:18
to clips on the actual Sesame Street city block set with human
28:23
actors. You know the ones There female
28:27
characters were incredibly more prominent, though Matt
28:31
Robinson's Gordon is the de facto host of the episode.
28:35
We also meet Longs Susan, who is the second most prominent human
28:41
here. Susan, a kindly and musically
28:44
talented black woman, appears several times throughout the
28:48
episode. To talk about the number 2 and
28:50
play one of these things is not like the other.
28:54
We've also got Jenny, another adult character, albeit one who
28:59
didn't last on the show past the first season.
29:02
Jenny was a young white woman played by Jada Rowland, and
29:06
appeared throughout this episode in Season 1 doing various arts
29:10
and crafts. And of course, the thing I
29:13
really want to talk about is the fact that this entire episode
29:17
centers around a little girl named Sally.
29:20
Sally, you've never seen a street like Sesame Street.
29:23
Everything happens here. You'll love it.
29:26
In the first episode of Sesame Street, Gordon shows Sally
29:29
around, introducing her to the humans and Muppets alike.
29:34
In other words, Sally is the audience surrogate.
29:38
In writing, we use this term to refer to a character whose
29:41
perspective mirrors that of the audience, experiencing things in
29:46
the way we'd imagine the audience would if they were in
29:49
the same position. Just like the kids at home,
29:52
Sally needs to meet the cast. She responds to Gordon's prompts
29:57
and learns about Sesame at the exact same rate that the home
30:01
audience does. This is actually really
30:04
interesting because it flies in the face of what we call
30:08
androcentrism. According to the Encyclopedia of
30:12
Critical Psychology, edited by Thomas Teo in 2014, the theory
30:18
of androcentrism refers to the idea that some societies
30:22
maintain quote a male centered worldview which does not
30:27
necessarily present explicitly negative views of women and
30:31
girls, but positions men and boys as representative of the
30:35
human condition or experience, and women and girls as diverging
30:40
from the human condition. And as research from Jennifer
30:43
Lindsay in the journal Gender Studies suggests, if people
30:48
don't know the gender of a character in media, they assume
30:52
that character is a man. So basically the theory says
30:56
that the standard character is a man.
30:59
Men have the default human experience.
31:02
Women have the other human experience.
31:06
This is why we often see books and movies about male
31:09
characters. After all, if a writer sits down
31:13
to tell a story about, say, a firefighter, the theory says
31:17
that their mind is instantly going to go to a male
31:21
firefighter, as that's the default way for a firefighter to
31:25
be. So this is very interesting to
31:28
me because Sally is positioned as the generic child, the
31:32
generic Sesame viewer. And yet, as a girl, she isn't
31:38
what most people would conceive a generic character to be.
31:42
It feels silly to call this revolutionary, but in its own
31:46
way, it kind of is. It's important to this podcast
31:51
that I make a logical extrapolation here, using
31:54
androcentrism to think about why so many of The Muppets are male.
32:00
Especially in the early days of The Muppets, the characters were
32:03
painted with very broad strokes designed to focus on key comedy
32:08
tropes. Bert and Ernie were the classic
32:11
comedy duo. Big Bird was the classic
32:14
buffoon, Oscar the classic curmudgeon.
32:18
The theory of androcentrism says that by default we assume these
32:23
archetypes, when not explored deeply, will refer to men.
32:28
So it feels like when designing this menagerie, it made sense
32:33
for the core cast to be male. At the very least.
32:37
That feels like the quick decision one would make.
32:40
Or rather, not even a decision, but an inherent aspect of how
32:44
the average person's brain works.
32:47
In 1966, when Jim Henson made his original design sketch of
32:51
the monster that would one day become Cookie, he drew a jagged
32:56
bunch of fur and fangs around a gaping maw.
33:01
And yeah, the fangs didn't last. No gender is written on the
33:06
sketch. But in a way, did it have to be?
33:09
Was there ever any assumption that this hulking, ravenous
33:13
beast could be a girl? I mean, of course, with the
33:18
hindsight of 2025 we know Cookie Monster is a boy, but it's
33:23
interesting to imagine yourself in the shoes of the Sesame
33:26
founders and realize you too may have been a victim of the
33:30
androcentric worldview. The specter was of course
33:35
exacerbated by the fact that, as mentioned, Jim Henson's team
33:39
contained no full time female puppeteers.
33:43
Of course, a generic character played by Jim Henson would
33:47
likely be a man. It would have Jim's trademark
33:50
deep voice. And yeah, women can have deep
33:54
voices. I, for one, resemble that
33:56
remark, but you know what I mean?
33:59
And certainly Jim's life experiences were shaped by his
34:03
being a man. All this leads to that strong
34:07
discrepancy between the more Muppet centered parts of Sesame
34:11
and those that focused on other media.
34:14
Sesame clearly presented a world where women were smart, capable,
34:19
important, and most importantly, relatable.
34:23
But the wildly popular and memorable part of Sesame Street,
34:27
The Muppets? Well, they didn't.
34:31
Things would change over the next few months.
34:34
The summer before the second season began, Jim was joined by
34:38
another female puppeteer, the legendary Fran Brill.
34:43
During the second season, Johnstone would add Emily Pearl
34:48
Kingsley to the writing staff, impressed by her easy grasp of
34:52
the sensibilities of Henson's Muppets.
34:56
As for female characters, things would start changing as season 1
35:00
progressed. Sort of.
35:03
Remember that anything people sketch, Gordon gave Frank Oz's
35:08
little girl character a yellow pigtailed yarn like wig.
35:13
But that blonde wig would soon be given to a tiny pink Muppet
35:17
with a blue gingham dress, and this little pink character would
35:22
sort of become the first main female Muppet on Sesame Street.
35:28
And here's. Our lovely Betty.
35:30
Lou to thank you. There.
35:32
Come on in, Betty Lou. And yet, something was still
35:36
missing. Actually, a lot was still
35:39
missing. So next week on A Prairie Dawn
35:42
companion, the rise of Betty Lou, the main character who was
35:47
also never really a character at all.
35:52
And in the meantime, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this
35:55
episode. You can always find me on Blue
35:57
Sky at Tall Girl Petunia, or hanging out on the Tough Pigs
36:01
Discord page. This podcast has been a long
36:04
time coming, and I'm so excited for you all to join me on this
36:08
journey. We have a lot to learn about the
36:11
history of female characters and female performers on Sesame
36:15
Street, and I can't wait for you guys to hear what's coming next
36:19
for a Prairie Dawn companion. This has been Becca Petunia so
36:24
long, folks. I really.
36:26
Am quite. Remarkable A Prairie Dawn
36:32
Companion is a production of toughpigs.com.
36:35
It is written, produced, edited and hosted by Becca Petunia, an
36:40
executive produced by the Tough Pigs Muppet Fan podcast
36:43
executive producer Johannes. Thanks to Scott Hanson, Shane
36:48
Keating, Tony Whitaker and the Whole Muppet Wiki team for
36:53
helping me with research. The book St.
36:55
Gang by Michael Davis was also indispensable.
36:59
Thanks to Katie Lynn Miller, Michael Richardson, and Eli Lee
37:03
for help with script revisions. Follow Tough Pigs on social
37:07
media. You can support us on Patreon or
37:10
by buying a T-shirt on our tea public.
37:13
Join the conversation on the Tough Pigs discord.
37:17
You can support a Prairie Dawn companion and lots of other
37:21
podcasts too by giving Muppet fan podcasts with toughpigs.com
37:26
five stars on your podcast reviewing app of choice.
37:41
My favorite Sesame character is Abby.