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A Prairie Dawn Companion - The Symbolic Annihilation of Granny Fanny Nesselrode and Friends · Muppet Fan Podcasts with ToughPigs.com

• 0:04
  You know, for a podcast called A Prairie Dawn Companion, we've
• 0:08
  spent a lot of time talking about characters who aren't
• 0:12
  Prairie Dawn. But, you know, this is a show
• 0:16
  about more than just Prairie Dawn.
• 0:18
  Obviously. It's about female Muppets, and
• 0:21
  it's about contextualizing those characters.
• 0:24
  And while Prairie might be the oldest female Sesame character
• 0:28
  who still appears somewhat regularly today, it's truly
• 0:33
  important to realize she's not the oldest out there.
• 0:36
  That's Betty Lou, obviously, you learned that two weeks ago.
• 0:40
  But if we're talking context, it's essential that we talk
• 0:44
  about the other female Muppets who appeared in Season 1 before
• 0:48
  Prairie ever graced our screens. So I'll tell you now that's what
• 0:53
  today's episode is going to be about.
• 0:56
  As I said last week, prepare to hear a lot about Granny Fanny
• 1:01
  Nestle Rd. But also, before I could wrap up
• 1:06
  Season 1, I felt it essential that we talk a little bit about
• 1:11
  the broader societal context of women on television during this
• 1:15
  era. And I was wondering, how could
• 1:19
  Becca learn more? Well, searching around the
• 1:25
  Internet directed me to the book Hearth and Home Images of Women
• 1:29
  in the Mass Media. Edited by Gay Tuchman, Arlene
• 1:33
  Kaplan Daniels and James Bennett, the book is a
• 1:36
  collection of thorough scientific observations of women
• 1:40
  on TV and print. Now let me be clear.
• 1:43
  It's a very dated book, and some of its premises are a little
• 1:49
  problematic given our modern understanding of gender.
• 1:53
  But being very dated doesn't exactly surprise me, because
• 1:58
  this book is from 1978, and that means there's really no better
• 2:04
  source to understand the view of women in the media from roughly
• 2:09
  the same era as early Sesame Street.
• 2:13
  So what was television like in the 70s?
• 2:16
  Well, the book cites the article Sex Role Stereotyping in
• 2:20
  Children's Television Programs, published in 1975, and notes
• 2:26
  that men outnumbered women on children's commercial
• 2:30
  programming over 2 to one. And while that's commercial
• 2:35
  television, not public television, it doesn't seem like
• 2:39
  PBS was doing much better. The book sites a pretty scathing
• 2:44
  indictment of the medium from scholar Muriel Cantor, whose
• 2:48
  research on public television alongside Caroline Esper was
• 2:52
  funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
• 2:56
  The text says. Cantor asks where are the women
• 3:01
  in public television? Her answer, based on a content
• 3:05
  analysis of programming, is in front of the television set.
• 3:10
  Although a higher proportion of adult women appear on children's
• 3:14
  programming in public television, then, is true of
• 3:17
  commercial television, Cantor finds both commercial and public
• 3:21
  television disseminate the same message about women, although
• 3:26
  the two types of television differ in their structure and
• 3:29
  purpose. Television captures societal
• 3:33
  ideas even when programming is partially divorced from the
• 3:37
  profit motive. Yeesh.
• 3:42
  So why does it matter that there were so few female characters in
• 3:46
  kids media and public television in the 70s?
• 3:50
  We said in the first episode that representation matters, but
• 3:54
  what exactly does that mean? And most importantly, what does
• 3:59
  any of this have to do with the answer Lady a Jim Henson
• 4:04
  character who? Doesn't understand that you need
• 4:07
  to take the. Cap off of a bottle of ketchup.
• 4:10
  Granny A. Few little taps here, come here.
• 4:17
  Granny, I think if you take the top off the bottle, you'll find
• 4:22
  that the ketchup will come out. It will.
• 4:28
  Most probably. That'll make sense in a second.
• 4:32
  Anyway, I'm Becca Petunia from Tough Pigs this week.
• 4:36
  Tropes, Symbolic Annihilation and Granny Fanny Nestle Rd.
• 4:42
  All here on a Prairie. Dawn Companion.
• 4:45
  Ladies and gentlemen, the Starlight Hotel takes great
• 4:49
  pride in presenting the world's favorite 6 year old entertainer,
• 4:54
  Miss Prairie. Dawn, come on and girls, girls,
• 4:58
  girls, let's go do girls stuff. Can you play a song with a
• 5:08
  beats? One of the main themes of Hearth
• 5:24
  and Home is the idea of symbolic annihilation and how that goes
• 5:28
  hand in hand with a concept called the reflection
• 5:32
  hypothesis. To quote the text once again,
• 5:36
  according to the reflection hypothesis, the mass media
• 5:40
  reflects dominant societal values.
• 5:43
  To attract audiences whose time and attention are sold to
• 5:47
  commercial sponsors, the television industry offers
• 5:51
  programs consonant with American values.
• 5:55
  Hey, remember how this is a Sesame Street podcast?
• 5:58
  I'm sorry, I, I, I know you'd prefer if the reflection
• 6:01
  hypothesis had to do with saying wubba, wubba, wubba to a monster
• 6:05
  in the mirror. But but listen, we'll, we'll get
• 6:07
  to picture books soon. Just just stay with me.
• 6:11
  The reflection hypothesis says that if ATV show wants to be
• 6:15
  popular, which is usually the goal of ATV show, even if Sesame
• 6:20
  has nobler goals than just commercial success, it needs to
• 6:25
  portray the world in accordance with mainstream values, so the
• 6:30
  world we see on TV can tell us what audiences at the time
• 6:35
  valued. In the case of Sesame, this is
• 6:39
  sometimes harder to track. After all, Sesame Street was no
• 6:43
  stranger to courting controversy during Season 1, which we'll be
• 6:48
  discussing today. Again, don't worry, Don't worry,
• 6:51
  it's coming. Mississippi banned the show for
• 6:55
  its positive portrayals of an interracial neighborhood.
• 6:59
  So yeah, the show wasn't reflecting the values of that
• 7:03
  particular segment of American Society, but as a whole.
• 7:09
  For our purposes, we can assume that what Sesame portrays women
• 7:13
  doing is what culture at large expects women to do.
• 7:18
  It's kind of that simple. Symbolic annihilation is the
• 7:22
  logical parallel. To quote the books paraphrase of
• 7:26
  George Gerbner's work, we may say that representation in the
• 7:31
  fictional world, such as the 1950s ideal family, symbolizes
• 7:36
  or signifies social existence. That is, representation in the
• 7:41
  mass media announces to audience members that this kind of family
• 7:47
  or this kind of social characteristic is valued and
• 7:50
  approved. Conversely, we may say that
• 7:54
  either condemnation, trivialization, or absence means
• 7:59
  symbolic annihilation. In other words, if we're not
• 8:04
  seeing it on TV, it might as well not exist in society at
• 8:09
  all. This is especially meaningful
• 8:12
  when we talk about female characters on television.
• 8:16
  First of all, the dearth of female characters.
• 8:19
  Remember, boys outnumber girls over 2 to 1 means women as a
• 8:24
  whole are trivialized. Secondly, what kinds of women do
• 8:29
  appear in the media? Those that appear are what
• 8:33
  society values. Those that don't are effectively
• 8:38
  annihilated. This is where we get into
• 8:41
  tropes. Here I mean common character
• 8:45
  types across media. Because after all, tropes are
• 8:49
  things that are frequently represented, and things that are
• 8:52
  frequently represented reflect values and thus are not
• 8:57
  annihilated. Tropes can change over time with
• 9:01
  new things added as culture shifts.
• 9:04
  But looking at the contemporaneous Hearth and Home,
• 9:08
  I can highlight a few. So when discussing women's
• 9:12
  magazines, researcher Helen Francois found 4 roles for women
• 9:18
  single and looking for a husband, housewife, mother,
• 9:22
  spinster and widowed or divorced soon to remarry.
• 9:28
  Furthermore, and related to that, the authors state that
• 9:32
  women are not important in American Society, except perhaps
• 9:37
  within the home. And that's what we're going to
• 9:41
  see when we discuss the remaining 2 recurring season one
• 9:45
  female Muppets granny Fanny Nestle Road and Roosevelt
• 9:49
  Franklin's mother. What were kids being taught by
• 9:54
  them? And of course, we'll take a look
• 9:56
  at what did and didn't work about them and why they didn't
• 10:01
  stick around. Today I'm going to be joined by
• 10:04
  tough Pigs pal Christie O, known for her amazing Muppet art, her
• 10:09
  Labyrinth prop replicas, and the hilarious podcast Bad Princess
• 10:15
  Movies. Let's go chat with her.
• 10:18
  Over in the guest corner all. Right.
• 10:21
  It's Showtime, people. Oh welcome, oh welcome to our
• 10:30
  little play, play. Like I said, my guest today is
• 10:51
  Christy O Christy, how are you doing today?
• 10:56
  Not doing too bad. It is a rainy day up in my part
• 10:59
  of Canada, but I have armored myself with a cup of hot
• 11:02
  chocolate. Yeah, so I'm I'm doing OK.
• 11:05
  I'm at least I'm cozy. Hot chocolate, that is not the
• 11:09
  weather that it is right here in rainy New York.
• 11:13
  It is not hot chocolate weather here.
• 11:15
  But I'm so glad you could be here, Christy.
• 11:17
  You know, you obviously should be a familiar, familiar voice,
• 11:24
  if not a familiar face because this is an audio medium and also
• 11:28
  you're usually wearing a helmet. But you should be a familiar, a
• 11:33
  familiar figure to Tough Pigs listeners.
• 11:37
  You've done a lot of work with Tough Pigs in the past, although
• 11:39
  I guess you're not officially part of the Tough Pigs family,
• 11:43
  but you're like, you're like a care Bear cousin to the to the
• 11:47
  to the to the tough Pigs family, I feel like.
• 11:51
  And why don't you tell us a little bit, though, about your
• 11:53
  history, you know, I guess your history with Henson stuff in
• 11:57
  general. And then we'll get into Sesame
• 11:59
  in specific. So how, how should people know
• 12:03
  you? What's your connection to this
• 12:05
  fandom? Why did I invite you besides the
• 12:08
  fact that you're lovely? Well, I mean, I think First off,
• 12:13
  what people probably know me best for are one of two things.
• 12:18
  Either the Muppet Princess Bride illustrations that I like to
• 12:22
  draw, or my my bread and butter, or at least where my heart is,
• 12:28
  are the labyrinth proper because that I like to do labyrinth in
• 12:33
  general. That is my area of expertise
• 12:36
  within the Henson universe, my fixation, my obsession.
• 12:43
  So I am slightly out of my depth here because my history with
• 12:47
  Sesame Street is pretty shallow. I, you know, I was a 90s kid, so
• 12:54
  I watched Sesame Street growing up.
• 12:57
  I remember some of my earliest memories being just watching
• 13:02
  Sesame Street or playing with some of the merchandise.
• 13:04
  So I have just the faintest nostalgic love of, you know,
• 13:11
  characters like Big Bird, obviously Grover, but you know,
• 13:17
  the the main characters. So it I'll say it's been
• 13:24
  interesting right off the bat. You getting me on the show
• 13:29
  because it was an opportunity to actually dig into some of the
• 13:34
  Sesame Street stuff that I I probably did not watch enough as
• 13:38
  a kid to really see these characters that we're going to
• 13:41
  be talking about today. And I even if I did, I certainly
• 13:44
  do not remember any of them. Well, that's the interesting
• 13:47
  thing about, you know, some of the characters we're going to
• 13:49
  talk about is like, unless you actively sought this stuff out
• 13:54
  in like the YouTube era or the tape trading era, you wouldn't
• 13:58
  have seen these characters because they weren't re airing
• 14:02
  these sketches pretty much past the the early 1980s.
• 14:09
  This stuff did not stick around these these characters.
• 14:13
  And again, we're going to get into them in a second, but these
• 14:16
  characters really didn't make it past like season season 1 and
• 14:22
  season 2. We are not seeing any new
• 14:25
  material with these characters after Sesame's second season.
• 14:29
  And, and that's kind of a ridiculous thing because, you
• 14:31
  know, one of the things that we've been talking so much about
• 14:35
  is just how few female characters there were on Sesame
• 14:39
  Street. And, you know, here we have
• 14:43
  these female characters and they just don't stick around.
• 14:49
  They, they, they existed and then they they didn't.
• 14:52
  But at the same time the question is.
• 14:54
  Like, well, are we? Did we need these particular
• 14:59
  characters? Are we better off without a
• 15:02
  granny? Fanny Nestle Rd.
• 15:05
  But I guess let's, let's start talking actually about the, the
• 15:09
  character of the three we're going to be chatting about.
• 15:13
  Actually, I should say we're going to be talking about 3
• 15:15
  characters today, Roosevelt, Franklin's mother, Granny, Fanny
• 15:20
  Nestle Road and Franny. And I'll get into those
• 15:25
  characters because my guess is you listening at home heard
• 15:28
  Franny and you go, what is that character?
• 15:32
  We'll get into it, but we're going to start with the
• 15:35
  character of those three who appeared first, which is
• 15:38
  Roosevelt Franklin's mother. So Roosevelt Franklin's mother
• 15:41
  first appeared in February 1970, which was the first season of
• 15:48
  Sesame Street. That is 3 months after Sesame
• 15:52
  Street began. And of course, Sesame Street
• 15:55
  being Sesame Street, that was already 68 episodes into the
• 15:59
  show's run. Because I don't frankly
• 16:02
  understand it either. Christy, how much do you know
• 16:06
  about Roosevelt Franklin is, I guess, the question here,
• 16:09
  because I feel like to understand Roosevelt Franklin's
• 16:12
  mother, we need to understand Roosevelt Franklin.
• 16:15
  And it's kind of tough to talk about the history of Sesame
• 16:18
  Street without talking about Roosevelt.
• 16:22
  Peter Piper picked a Peck of pickled pig feet.
• 16:26
  But my name is not Peter Piper, It's Roosevelt Franklin, and I
• 16:32
  live on Sesame Street. I I do know a little bit because
• 16:37
  I did watch the street gang documentary that came out a few
• 16:41
  years ago and and he was mentioned in there.
• 16:44
  So I'm not, I'm not a documentarian on Frank
• 16:49
  Roosevelt, Franklin, but I am, yeah, aware of who, who his
• 16:53
  character was. Now, as a Canadian, how much do
• 16:55
  you know about Franklin Roosevelt?
• 16:57
  Not very much. I knew I messed up by inviting
• 17:01
  you onto this podcast, but no now.
• 17:04
  So what's important to realize about Roosevelt Franklin is
• 17:08
  while Roosevelt Franklin was not in the 1st.
• 17:11
  Episode of Sesame. Street.
• 17:13
  In fact, I believe his first appearance was February 1970.
• 17:18
  In this same sketch. Roosevelt Franklin quickly
• 17:21
  became sort of the show's first breakout star.
• 17:26
  I guess other than Bert and Ernie, who absolutely would, you
• 17:30
  know, Ernie would have the first Billboard charting single from
• 17:34
  Sesame Street and all of these things.
• 17:36
  But Roosevelt Franklin was an incredibly popular character.
• 17:40
  And the thing about Roosevelt Franklin is he is basically a
• 17:44
  little kid. He's a, a tiny anything Muppet,
• 17:48
  kind of the same sort of shape as Prairie Dawn or Betty Lou,
• 17:53
  who we talked about two weeks ago, except he's purple.
• 17:57
  He's got a stripy shirt and he is just incredibly cool.
• 18:02
  Is I guess what you can say about Roosevelt.
• 18:04
  Franklin. Roosevelt Franklin was
• 18:07
  absolutely supposed to be black. Even though Roosevelt Franklin
• 18:12
  is not black in color, he's purple, but he was overdubbed
• 18:19
  with audio from the then Gordon Matt Robinson and Roosevelt
• 18:26
  Franklin was an incredibly popular character.
• 18:29
  He had the first character specific Sesame Street album,
• 18:33
  which is the year of Roosevelt Franklin.
• 18:36
  And you might be wondering, well, if he's the first
• 18:39
  breakout, then why didn't he last?
• 18:42
  And frankly, there was a lot of controversy around Roosevelt
• 18:47
  Franklin and particularly Roosevelt's friends in Roosevelt
• 18:52
  Franklin Elementary, which we were going to talk about in this
• 18:56
  episode. And then I was like, we are not
• 18:57
  going to have time because I've got, you know, I don't know, 40
• 19:01
  to 50 minutes planned just on Granny Fanny Nestle Rd.
• 19:05
  But. The the important.
• 19:07
  Thing is, because of this this sort of pushback, Sesame started
• 19:12
  pulling back on Roosevelt Franklin stuff and first there
• 19:15
  was no new Roosevelt Franklin stuff and then they eventually
• 19:20
  stopped rerunning Roosevelt Franklin stuff.
• 19:23
  In fact, the last sketch with Roosevelt Franklin's mother to
• 19:27
  be re aired was in 1987. These clips were not reshown
• 19:33
  after 1987. So you were talking about being
• 19:37
  a 90s kid and not knowing this and that's why?
• 19:40
  Yeah. Yeah, makes sense.
• 19:43
  So Roosevelt Franklin, you know, in a lot of his early sketches,
• 19:50
  really the 1st 4 Roosevelt Franklin sketches, he's paired
• 19:54
  with his mother. So we checked out those 4
• 19:58
  sketches and you know, Christy, seeing as you're kind of new to
• 20:01
  this scene. Let's talk about these songs,
• 20:04
  sketches, whatever you want to call them.
• 20:06
  In general. What did you think of the
• 20:07
  Roosevelt Franklin sketches? You.
• 20:10
  Know I, I mean, they're cute, they're catchy, I can see why he
• 20:14
  was such a popular character 'cause he is just a fun little
• 20:18
  kid to watch. And especially the way he's
• 20:20
  puppeteered him just bouncing around the screen, so much
• 20:25
  energy, like it's hard not to love him.
• 20:31
  I wonder where he is. Where is he now?
• 20:37
  Where is that Roosevelt? Franklin?
• 20:42
  This somebody call me by my first and last name.
• 20:45
  Yes, I called you and it's about time you got here too.
• 20:48
  Now will you please come on and recite your number?
• 20:51
  All right, I'll do that. When I do, you know I'm going to
• 20:54
  count them just for. You.
• 20:56
  Well, let's see if you know them for sure.
• 20:58
  I'm not so sure you even know you know I know.
• 21:01
  I know, I know, I. Know reminds me a lot of my
• 21:06
  little nephew, especially when he gets particularly
• 21:09
  rambunctious and there's when he's in that mode, there's
• 21:13
  nothing you can do but just stand back and just watch him
• 21:17
  run around. Yeah, no, that's absolutely how
• 21:19
  he feels. And and I love the energy that
• 21:24
  that he sort of he sort of brings whenever he's there, you
• 21:29
  know, I will say. So he is Matt Robinson both on
• 21:34
  the album and on the on the show.
• 21:38
  But on the album, his voice is a little higher.
• 21:42
  I was a little surprised watching these, just how deep
• 21:45
  Roosevelt Franklin's voice is. But, you know, Roosevelt
• 21:52
  Franklin is the star of these sketches.
• 21:55
  His his mother is secondary. And you know, I don't even know
• 22:02
  Roosevelt Franklin's mother's name.
• 22:04
  No one knows Roosevelt Franklin's mother's name.
• 22:07
  That's that's The thing is so as part of the the wonderful, the
• 22:11
  materials that you assembled for this podcast is you also
• 22:15
  provided a lot of images from books and other materials that
• 22:20
  she appeared in. And there's a set of finger
• 22:23
  puppets. And that really hit home because
• 22:25
  you have all these other characters with their names
• 22:28
  underneath the finger puppets. And then you just have Roosevelt
• 22:31
  Franklin's mom. And that's just how she's
• 22:34
  referred to. She has no name, it's just her
• 22:37
  title. I vaguely remember us talking
• 22:39
  about on the Tough Pigs discord at one point.
• 22:42
  Like can we change her Muppet wiki page to Misses Franklin?
• 22:47
  But we can't even say for certain that she has the same
• 22:50
  last name as Roosevelt Franklin. We don't know.
• 22:54
  So. I should say Roosevelt
• 22:56
  Franklin's mother, just like Roosevelt was performed by Matt
• 23:00
  Robinson. Roosevelt Franklin's mother was
• 23:04
  performed on the show by Loretta Long who was Susan.
• 23:09
  Weirdly, on the album she's re performed by Rosalyn Cash, who
• 23:16
  was an basically just a general stage screen actress who didn't
• 23:21
  really do anything else with The Muppets.
• 23:25
  And kind of the. Interesting thing to me about
• 23:27
  Roosevelt Franklin's Mother is that, well, like you said, there
• 23:30
  isn't that much really to say. And even going into those story
• 23:35
  books that we looked at and we looked at a couple of different
• 23:37
  story books, Roosevelt Franklin's Mother appears in
• 23:41
  123456. Roosevelt, Franklin's Mother
• 23:45
  appears in eight books from 1971 to 1980.
• 23:52
  I showed you scans from from all of them and I don't believe she
• 23:57
  has a line of dialogue in any of them.
• 24:00
  No, I I don't remember any. She's there.
• 24:03
  She's carrying bricks in Grover and the Everything in the Whole
• 24:06
  World Museum from 1974. She has a livery stable in Tales
• 24:14
  of Sesame Gulch. She needs her plants watered in
• 24:18
  the Sesame Street Dictionary, but I really can't say much
• 24:22
  about her. No, and it's unfortunate because
• 24:27
  I mean there there's no reason why she couldn't have been a
• 24:30
  fully fledged character. I guess that goes I'm sure that
• 24:33
  probably could be said for everybody that you're going to
• 24:35
  profile on this podcast. But like the little glimpses
• 24:40
  that you get of her in the sketches with Roosevelt
• 24:43
  Franklin, like I, I want to see more She, she seems like again,
• 24:48
  and maybe I'm just drawing comparisons to my own family,
• 24:51
  but, you know, thinking of my sister and watching her interact
• 24:54
  with my nephew, you know, that's, that's Roosevelt
• 24:57
  Franklin's mom is, is she's kind of gently trying to guide him
• 25:02
  into, you know, remembering his alphabet, remembering the days
• 25:07
  of the week, how to spell his own name.
• 25:09
  It's all stuff that you you see mom's doing as part of that
• 25:14
  wonderful process of trying to prepare your child for the
• 25:18
  world, and yet she's doing it in such a fun way that it's all
• 25:22
  just a game to him. And that's such a lovely thing
• 25:25
  to see. Moms, do you know?
• 25:27
  Doesn't an E come right after D? Yes, and then come to happen the
• 25:33
  G. Roosevelt, Franklin, what you
• 25:37
  say? After the GE, come to HIJ.
• 25:44
  Halfway home. Halfway home?
• 25:45
  Go ahead. Well, and that's that's what's.
• 25:47
  So great about her is it really does feel like and obviously I
• 25:51
  would have loved to have seen more than 4 songs with her.
• 25:55
  She's in also a a a an instrumental bit called hand
• 26:00
  clapping number that I did not ask you to watch, I don't think
• 26:03
  because there's nothing to say about it.
• 26:05
  She shows up in one one street scene on Sesame Street where she
• 26:10
  has no lines. So it's really just this, but
• 26:14
  one of the. Things that that I really
• 26:15
  enjoyed is, again, you know, I'm not a mom, but I'm a teacher.
• 26:19
  And it really does seem like she's trying to meet Roosevelt
• 26:24
  Franklin on his level. Like, you get the sense that
• 26:27
  like, she's got an energetic kid who likes to sing, and that
• 26:31
  means she's going to be energetic and she's going to
• 26:34
  sing too, you know? And.
• 26:37
  She's, she's encouraging her son and, and, you know, not trying
• 26:43
  to stifle that energy, just trying to, you know, direct it a
• 26:46
  little bit so that it's, you know, slightly less destructive
• 26:52
  maybe. And then I say that 'cause that
• 26:54
  energy from a a small child can be very destructive.
• 26:58
  And, and you know, let me let me be clear here too.
• 27:00
  You know, Christy, you and I are also both white and Roosevelt,
• 27:05
  Franklin's mother is clearly supposed to be coded as a black
• 27:08
  character. So is Roosevelt.
• 27:11
  When we get to talking about Roosevelts classmates, I'll do
• 27:15
  the same introduction again because they also seem to be
• 27:18
  coded as black characters. I'm aware that my knowledge on a
• 27:24
  lot of the, the sort of cultural stereotypes and cultural aspects
• 27:31
  that are being portrayed by Roosevelt, Franklin and his
• 27:34
  mother are going to be limited. And, and frankly, I would love
• 27:38
  to loop back to talking about Roosevelt Franklins mother and
• 27:42
  his classmates, you know, with a, with a different guest in the
• 27:45
  future, because I recognize that our sort of knowledge basis is a
• 27:49
  little small. But it's interesting that you're
• 27:52
  pointing out that sort of energy and, and you're you're jokingly
• 27:56
  referring to it as destructiveness, because that
• 27:59
  was something that a lot of the complaints about Roosevelt
• 28:02
  Franklin were tied into were that he and his friends were a
• 28:06
  little too raucous, a little too like a little too loud and and
• 28:13
  sometimes disrespectful. And I kind.
• 28:16
  Of. I kind of really like, again, I
• 28:19
  can only speak for myself that Roosevelt, Franklin's mother, is
• 28:23
  again, like meeting him there rather than, you know, objecting
• 28:27
  to it. So that's something that, you
• 28:30
  know, I would love to discuss more with someone who maybe
• 28:34
  knows a little more. And I recognize that, you know,
• 28:38
  I can read all that I want from all of my different, you know,
• 28:43
  academic theory books and I can watch every Roosevelt Franklin
• 28:47
  clip. I'm never going to never going
• 28:49
  to understand it, you know, the same way that that that a black
• 28:53
  person would. But that idea of Roosevelt
• 28:55
  Franklin's mother is just a strong mother.
• 28:57
  I loved this quote, which is from the Sesame Street unpaved
• 29:02
  TV special. Loretta Long, who again did the
• 29:07
  voice for Roosevelt, Franklin's mother, said this what I loved
• 29:12
  about Jim Henson. You know what I loved about him
• 29:16
  when we were doing Roosevelt Franklin and he watched me do
• 29:19
  the voice over for the mother and I said Roosevelt Franklin
• 29:24
  sure does know his ABC's and he totally rewired the mother
• 29:28
  puppet so she could put her hand on her hip.
• 29:30
  I thought that was. So.
• 29:33
  Cool that he respected that, that that's what a mother would
• 29:36
  do. And you know, you can see it.
• 29:38
  She always has her hand on her hip.
• 29:41
  And that is a really neat character touch that you don't
• 29:45
  really see from any of the other Muppets, you know, especially
• 29:50
  like Roosevelt's arms kind of just flail around.
• 29:52
  I don't even know if he has arm rods.
• 29:56
  But it's, it's a, it's a little fun, a little fun note.
• 30:00
  And I think if she has any personality, it's conveyed both
• 30:05
  through, you know, Loretta Long's wonderful performance and
• 30:08
  that one silly little, you know, choice to, to pin her arm up
• 30:12
  like that. What I do want to mention, and
• 30:15
  I'm sorry, I feel like I'm talking so much, Christy, but
• 30:19
  we'll, we'll, we'll get back to you in a second.
• 30:22
  But what I do want to mention is, you know, bringing it back
• 30:25
  to the conversation that I started the episode with.
• 30:27
  And you weren't there for this, Christy, So you're going to have
• 30:29
  to listen later. OK.
• 30:31
  Well, we were talking about the 1978 feminist media criticism
• 30:37
  book Hearth and Home that I was reading to to sort of get an
• 30:41
  understanding of contemporary understanding of media
• 30:45
  criticism. And there was one we were, we
• 30:48
  were talking using it a little bit about tropes and the idea
• 30:52
  that like their standard things that we see female characters
• 30:57
  being time and time again. And one of the things mentioned
• 31:02
  was that there's 4 roles for adult women.
• 31:06
  It's single and looking for a husband, housewife slash mother,
• 31:11
  spinster and widowed or divorced soon to remarry.
• 31:17
  And, you know, Loretta Long was even saying like, this is what a
• 31:21
  mother should be. It's interesting that, you know,
• 31:25
  again, here we are. We have our first adult female
• 31:28
  character that we've talked about.
• 31:30
  And she fits so cleanly into one of those four boxes.
• 31:35
  Another thing worth noting is they went a little deeper later
• 31:40
  in the book to talk about black characters on TV, and they note
• 31:46
  that at least situation comedies, they didn't do a
• 31:50
  specific breakdown on black characters in children's media.
• 31:54
  I was looking for it, but it wasn't in this book.
• 31:57
  But on situation comedies, they noticed that Black women are
• 32:01
  usually restricted to the family sphere.
• 32:05
  When black women appear in plots, they're usually involved
• 32:09
  in the family. And again, that's exactly what
• 32:12
  we see with Roosevelt Franklin here, that they also mentioned
• 32:18
  that that's the space where black women were portrayed as
• 32:21
  having power was when dealing with their own family.
• 32:25
  And she does kind of have a sense of dominance in in that
• 32:30
  family family structure. It's just interesting that she
• 32:33
  falls so cleanly into all of these things that this book is
• 32:37
  saying is like the stereotypical character.
• 32:40
  Yeah, well, and I mean again, it's even in her name.
• 32:44
  She's just Roosevelt Franklin's mom.
• 32:46
  That's the extent of her character.
• 32:48
  It's what defines her. That's it.
• 32:50
  We never see her without Roosevelt Franklin.
• 32:53
  No. And surely, again, we're
• 32:55
  imagining there's got to be stuff that she's doing when he's
• 32:59
  at school. Or, you know, what are her own
• 33:02
  hobbies? What does Roosevelt Franklin's
• 33:04
  mom do in her downtime? I think it's time that someone
• 33:09
  who's more qualified to talk about this than me writes A
• 33:13
  writes an amazing fanfic about Roosevelt, Franklin's mother.
• 33:18
  But for now, you have anything else to say about her, Or can we
• 33:22
  move on to a very bizarre character?
• 33:27
  I I'm OK to move on. So let's talk about Granny Fanny
• 33:31
  Nestle Rd., a character who 1st appeared 2 months after
• 33:37
  Roosevelt Franklin's mother in April 1970, specifically in the
• 33:43
  112th. Episode of Sesame.
• 33:46
  Street because they just kept going with these, Christy.
• 33:51
  I feel like there got a there had to be a period of time where
• 33:53
  Jim Henson just legitimately did not sleep.
• 33:56
  It's possible, you know, we, we hear that he knocked out mostly
• 34:01
  the inserts on Sesame Street and he would like come in for a week
• 34:05
  and just do like a week straight of these inserts.
• 34:08
  Because that's the thing about Sesame Street is you've got
• 34:11
  these like 2 separate types of scenes.
• 34:14
  You have the sort of comedy or song inserts where we're like,
• 34:19
  in different places, you know, which is usually just a blank
• 34:21
  space in front of a brick wall or, you know, versus, like, the
• 34:26
  actual scenes on the set of Sesame Street.
• 34:30
  And these sketches would be the things that would get rerun and
• 34:34
  repeated in so many episodes. Unfortunately for Granny Fanny
• 34:38
  Nestle Rd. The Answer Lady Sketches only
• 34:42
  got repeated from 1970 to 1972. OK, yeah, so yet another
• 34:49
  character that I you know, as again as a 90s kid, I would not
• 34:53
  have seen hide nor hair of Granny Fanny.
• 34:56
  Well, you might have, because the one time she's with Guy
• 34:59
  Smiley and Here Is Your Life did re air until 1992, but that was
• 35:06
  the only one of her sketches that made it past Sesame's third
• 35:10
  season. I can still remember oak tree
• 35:15
  when he was just a little acorn. Oh no.
• 35:20
  That's not. Yes, that's the person who
• 35:22
  planted you in the ground when you were just an acorn all the
• 35:26
  way from the farmhouse down the road.
• 35:27
  Granny Fanny. Nestle Rd.
• 35:29
  Oh, Granny. It's so nice.
• 35:37
  And it's and it's not even one that she was like a main focus
• 35:40
  of. Correct.
• 35:41
  She has like no character in that one as opposed to the
• 35:44
  others, which I got to say, Granny has a strong character.
• 35:49
  I know what Granny Fanny's deal is.
• 35:52
  Christy, let's talk. Generally about Granny and then
• 35:56
  we'll get into some of the specific episodes and I'm sure
• 35:59
  I'll have media criticism stuff to say about her because I know
• 36:02
  myself. But what's the deal with Granny?
• 36:06
  Fanny Nestle Rd. Can you tell the audience who
• 36:08
  probably also doesn't know this character?
• 36:10
  So Granny Fanny. So OK, part of this, I think I
• 36:16
  was starting to head cannon a little bit with Granny Fanny I.
• 36:19
  Love that I'm ready. She appears to just be this
• 36:23
  little old lady who probably would prefer to be left of her
• 36:27
  own devices. But for some reason a strange
• 36:31
  announcer keeps coming into her her home and asking her
• 36:35
  questions on how to do things. And Granny, being ever so
• 36:39
  helpful, does her best to come up with a solution for the
• 36:43
  problem, only for her solution to be either create a new
• 36:48
  problem or just completely cause a new issue.
• 36:53
  Aren't you just? Aren't you just sweetie pies for
• 36:56
  coming to visit your old granny Fanny?
• 36:58
  And do you have a household hint for us today, Granny?
• 37:02
  I don't know, do I? Yes, you do.
• 37:05
  Oh, I do. Of course you're right.
• 37:07
  I'm sorry young fella, I just remembered.
• 37:10
  I think that's good. I I, I do question that it feels
• 37:13
  like Granny granny wants to be doing this.
• 37:17
  I I don't think it's completely being forced on her by weird
• 37:22
  voiced guy Smiley I. Those early, like the earliest 2
• 37:28
  sketches that you gave me, that's I think where I kind of
• 37:31
  get the impression that she's maybe this isn't quite what she
• 37:36
  set out to do with her day because she always kind of seems
• 37:38
  a little surprised that she's being tasked with a new problem
• 37:42
  to try and solve. That is fair.
• 37:45
  And, and let's actually let's talk a little bit about those
• 37:47
  first two sketches. So there's a real distinction.
• 37:51
  There's only 6 answer Lady Sketches, but those first two
• 37:55
  are distinctly different because they use older puppets than the
• 38:00
  than the later ones. So in the first two sketches,
• 38:05
  Jim Henson plays the answer Lady Granny Fanny Nestle Rd., Which
• 38:12
  is a little odd because that means Frank Oz plays Guy Smiley
• 38:18
  in those two sketches, which feels a little odd.
• 38:22
  But it just goes to show how much things were in flux in
• 38:25
  season 1 of Sesame Street that they they would be like, yeah,
• 38:28
  OK, you can be Guy Smiley today. I'll say he's never referred to
• 38:32
  as Guy Smiley, but he's ATV announcer and he looks identical
• 38:35
  to Guy Smiley. Muppet Wiki credits him just as
• 38:40
  Granny Fanny's announcer, so I have no other knowledge about
• 38:45
  him. Now, Christy, this is.
• 38:47
  Going to be a a weird deep cut question that you might actually
• 38:51
  know the answer to. Did you recognize the Granny
• 38:55
  Fanny Nestle Rd. puppet in in the 1st 2 sketches?
• 38:59
  So here's I actually I ended up looking it up on Muppet Wiki.
• 39:03
  OK, so you do know? Yeah, and it was, wasn't it?
• 39:08
  Like a Southern Colonel. It's the southern Colonel.
• 39:12
  It's the Southern Colonel who so some Muppet fans.
• 39:17
  If you're a real, you know, Hubble, Wah All Star, you might
• 39:22
  remember that the Southern Colonel was an early sort of ad
• 39:28
  character that Jim performed, like Wilkins and Wonkins for the
• 39:32
  Southern Bread Company. I'd do anything for Southern
• 39:36
  bread. I'd even go to Yankee Stadium.
• 39:39
  But. Smarter than Yankee?
• 39:41
  You know, I might even like it up here.
• 39:44
  But I feel like where everybody knows the Southern Colonel from
• 39:49
  because it goes around the Internet all the time, or at
• 39:53
  least it used to. And I played a clip from this in
• 39:57
  episode 1 of this show is the performance where Jim is
• 40:05
  demonstrating how anything Muppets can get their features
• 40:10
  changed and become other characters.
• 40:13
  That is the. Southern Colonel that he's using
• 40:16
  to demonstrate that with. And this demonstration starts
• 40:20
  with Jim saying, here's a character we have who's a
• 40:23
  Southern Colonel. We have a lot of fun playing
• 40:27
  with the character when we're developing A puppet and we have
• 40:30
  here a Southern Colonel type character that we've he's worked
• 40:35
  similar to Ralph and some of our other characters.
• 40:38
  He's a he's a two person puppet and in this one I'm working the
• 40:43
  left hand and the head. And I'm working the right hand.
• 40:47
  Here's that sound. That's right.
• 40:48
  I've never really figured that out before.
• 40:51
  Son of a gun. He can be anything because where
• 40:56
  he ended up was in Goat Corners, Michigan as the Answer Lady, now
• 41:04
  Granny. I really like Jim Henson's
• 41:08
  performance of Granny Fanny Nestle.
• 41:10
  Room, Yeah. I do want to say it is funny.
• 41:13
  Yes, I I have to admit, I kind of imprinted on this first
• 41:19
  version of Granny Fanny like a little duckling, because she
• 41:23
  actually reminded me a lot of my paternal grandmother, even like
• 41:29
  her. How the Southern, the Southern
• 41:32
  Colonel puppet looks as Granny Fanny.
• 41:35
  That actually resembles my grandma quite a bit.
• 41:38
  And the cadence in Jim's voice, that kind of slower pace.
• 41:42
  And it, I, I, yeah, again, I, I kind of just ended up loving her
• 41:47
  a little bit. So the idea is, you know, I
• 41:50
  actually wrote in my notes that Granny is kind of like if Mr.
• 41:55
  Noodle could talk because the whole point is like she gets
• 41:59
  asked a simple question like Granny, what do you do when your
• 42:06
  dishes are dirty and granny's like.
• 42:11
  Let me show you yes. I have found a.
• 42:13
  Very simple solution here. What you do is you just throw
• 42:16
  The Dirty dishes away, you see, you just get rid of The Dirty
• 42:20
  dish. When a dish gets dirty, you just
• 42:22
  throw it away, you see. Nothing to do with dirty dishes.
• 42:25
  OK. Throwing them away, you see.
• 42:27
  And so that's the best way to do it, and you'll solve the problem
• 42:30
  in a big hurry, you see. And the announcer needs to be
• 42:35
  like, no granny Fanny, you need to wash them.
• 42:40
  I, I love her solution to sharpened pencil because it's
• 42:47
  especially her, her concern is that this sharpened pencil, it's
• 42:51
  so sharp, you're going to hurt yourself on it.
• 42:54
  And so you have to snap off the, the tip so that you can't, I
• 42:58
  guess, potentially wound yourself on this pencil.
• 43:03
  One thing I really loved about that is that she specifically
• 43:05
  addresses the ladies out there with this, this pencil tip.
• 43:09
  That was such an odd choice, I thought.
• 43:12
  You girls know what I'm talking about, But you know, I, I do
• 43:16
  think it's interesting because it is clearly supposed to be
• 43:20
  like a, a women's TV show, right?
• 43:24
  Like this would be the kind of thing that like housewives would
• 43:28
  watch, right? And I, I don't know a lot about
• 43:31
  this kind of TV show, whether it existed or not, but you get the
• 43:37
  sense that like helpful home. Tips.
• 43:41
  And it's talked about a lot in the book I was reading, but
• 43:43
  helpful home tips were the domain of women where it's like
• 43:48
  commercials would be like women. You know how you're always
• 43:52
  having problems with your toaster, you know, etcetera,
• 43:56
  etcetera. It was always just assumed that
• 43:59
  like if it's house stuff, women are going to be involved.
• 44:04
  I think my problem with these sketches, these first two in
• 44:07
  particular, is they go on so long.
• 44:13
  In each one granny has to solve like 4 problems and I'm like,
• 44:19
  you know, there's a saying, you get an improv and stuff like
• 44:22
  that. Like too short to suck.
• 44:25
  Like things are always fun. Things are always funnier when
• 44:31
  they're shorter. You know, I say that as someone
• 44:34
  who's recording, you know, I don't know, multiple hour and a
• 44:37
  half long podcast episodes on anything Muppets with wigs.
• 44:41
  But you know, it is it is definitely the case that like if
• 44:47
  it was just the pencil or just The Dirty dishes, not only would
• 44:52
  there have wound up being more of these granny Fanny sketches,
• 44:56
  but also they probably would have been funnier.
• 45:00
  Yeah, yeah. And I guess they did learn from
• 45:04
  it, because the later sketches do for the most part 0 in on one
• 45:08
  specific problem that she has to solve.
• 45:11
  Right. So that gets us into the the
• 45:14
  the, the sort of second set where they redesigned the granny
• 45:18
  puppet. She kind of looks like the
• 45:22
  Count. She's got like the Count base
• 45:25
  but with an old woman wig as opposed to this weird pink BLOB
• 45:29
  that is the Southern Colonel. And the announcer now doesn't
• 45:36
  look like Guy Smiley. I mean looks a little like Guy
• 45:39
  Smiley because he's got the same head shape, but looks different
• 45:43
  than Guy Smiley. But most importantly, the
• 45:46
  announcer is now Jerry Nelson. But even odder is the fact that
• 45:52
  Granny Fanny is Carol Spinney in one of Carol's only other
• 45:59
  recurring characters other than Big Bird and Oscar.
• 46:04
  He's got a range I guess. Granny Fanny, Nestle Rd.
• 46:10
  I think Carol's Granny Fanny is a little more annoying.
• 46:14
  Yeah. And also feels a little less
• 46:17
  intelligent. Yeah, and, and again, like I
• 46:20
  said, I really liked that first Granny, that iteration of her.
• 46:25
  And so seeing the second version, it felt like an
• 46:27
  imposter has taken over. She's so she's yeah, she's very
• 46:32
  energetic. I almost feel like she feels
• 46:36
  less like a real grandma to me. But that is, again, based on my
• 46:40
  perception of my own grandma and how she would act.
• 46:43
  But Granny Fanny, her, her zooming around that that little
• 46:48
  set of theirs. It's just, it doesn't feel I I
• 46:54
  like the slower pace of of Jim's Granny.
• 46:57
  That's amazing. You see I have the same problem.
• 47:03
  You do. Oh, yes, indeed, he's so.
• 47:06
  I have two little kittens and they look so much alike I can't
• 47:10
  tell them apart. Oh.
• 47:12
  My. And Jim does come back and
• 47:15
  perform Granny one more time in in the telephone sketch.
• 47:22
  But yeah, Carol's is a little zanier.
• 47:26
  Yeah, and also her. Her solutions actually start to
• 47:31
  make sense, although she's missing an obvious problem, like
• 47:35
  with the kitten sketch. She's talking about trying to
• 47:39
  solve the problem of I have two kittens and they're they're
• 47:44
  indistinguishable. How do I tell these kittens
• 47:46
  apart? And her, her solution is to
• 47:50
  propose getting them two different callers, which makes a
• 47:54
  lot of sense. That's a very sensible solution,
• 47:56
  Granny. But then the announcer points
• 47:59
  out, well, Granny, actually these kittens are
• 48:01
  distinguishable. There's a Gray one and there's
• 48:03
  an orange one. I don't know.
• 48:05
  That almost felt like a little strange with the setup of the
• 48:09
  previous shorts that I'm for some reason I get I'm I'm
• 48:12
  hearing to so strictly this is the granny Fanny cannon.
• 48:15
  I cannot deviate from this now. I'm picturing you and Anthony
• 48:19
  Strand did an article. I need to find it.
• 48:23
  I don't remember the title, but Anthony Strand once did an
• 48:26
  article where he pretended to be a Sesame Street viewer to the
• 48:31
  premiere episode of season 2 of Sesame Street and complaining
• 48:36
  about all of the changes that had been made.
• 48:39
  Like what is this new performer Jerry Nelson and what is he
• 48:43
  doing on my show? So I'm picturing you Christy,
• 48:46
  like going on social media and like doing hashtag not my Nestle
• 48:51
  Rd. like to. Like I liked, I liked the
• 48:56
  Southern Colonel's face shape for Granny Fanny.
• 48:59
  I, I don't know, I kind of like that more angular, the bigger
• 49:02
  jaw. Like she kind of felt more
• 49:04
  unique. Well, yeah, I mean it is a cause
• 49:07
  again, the the second redesign is just the Count.
• 49:10
  It's the the the Lavender Live Hand anything muppet the same as
• 49:15
  Count or Mumford. And even even when you think of
• 49:19
  a stereotypical grandma in cartoons, a lot of the times
• 49:23
  they have that same kind of style of hair with the bun, the
• 49:26
  glasses. Not my granny Fanny.
• 49:29
  Not your Granny Fanny. It is interesting though, you
• 49:33
  know, and I, I, I mentioned this, the the second of Carol's
• 49:36
  Granny Fanny sketches is the one where Granny claims that how she
• 49:41
  remembers the alphabet is that she has a bag that has
• 49:46
  everything that starts with a different letter of the alphabet
• 49:49
  in it. That sketch was confusing
• 49:52
  because she doesn't do the whole alphabet and then at one point
• 49:56
  stops doing the letters in order, which was confusing and
• 50:02
  concerning to me. Careful there, Granny An.
• 50:06
  Umbrella in that. Hey, yeah, hey.
• 50:08
  You word. Yeah, my goodness, that that box
• 50:12
  must be pretty heavy. Granny, of course, ahead.
• 50:14
  Of my tree. I said careful there Granny,
• 50:21
  look out now. Look out there, Granny, careful.
• 50:28
  Well, that's, that's all the time we have for today, folks.
• 50:32
  Be sure to tune in TuneIn next week when here.
• 50:37
  We go. We're going to put a pin in that
• 50:44
  because as we'll see in Granny's surprisingly long life, having a
• 50:51
  bag with many things in it becomes Granny's predominant
• 50:55
  character trait for a period there, which is kind of weird.
• 51:02
  And then of course, the only other one worth noting, as we
• 51:04
  did, is that there she does appear on Here Is Your Life Oak
• 51:08
  Tree, which is a guy Smiley sketch, this time the real guy
• 51:12
  Smiley. She's in it for probably about
• 51:16
  45 seconds. Yeah, yeah.
• 51:19
  Does not indicate anything. It is clear that they just
• 51:22
  wanted an old woman and decided that they were going to use
• 51:26
  Granny Fanny and refer to her as Granny Fanny.
• 51:29
  They probably just could have not, and then no one would have
• 51:34
  be talking about this sketch on my podcast.
• 51:38
  And she was kind of upstaged too, by that oak tree puppet.
• 51:41
  That was a great puppet. That was a great puppet,
• 51:44
  although it was deeply concerning when the table and
• 51:46
  chair showed up and they were like, we're a table and a chair.
• 51:51
  We used to be your friends. Oh God.
• 51:55
  But the. Thing about Granny Fanny is
• 51:58
  while there were no new Granny Fanny sketches made after 1972,
• 52:04
  Granny continued to appear in books through 1986.
• 52:14
  There was a 14 year period where you could see Granny Fanny in
• 52:19
  books but not on the show Sesame Street.
• 52:24
  She also, and I don't have as much information on Sesame
• 52:27
  Street Live, but friend of the pod Tony Whitaker was letting me
• 52:32
  know that she did appear in various Sesame Street Live shows
• 52:37
  for a while again up through the 80s.
• 52:42
  This. Character who again, no one
• 52:46
  remembers because how could any of us remember this character
• 52:51
  who didn't appear in any new stuff after 1972?
• 52:58
  I guess it's like you said though, is that when you need a
• 53:01
  grandma puppet, you pull out Granny Fanny.
• 53:04
  But that's less true of books, you know, like, and that's
• 53:09
  what's interesting to me is like, there was something.
• 53:13
  Something that someone liked about Granny Fanny or felt
• 53:17
  obligated. To use about Granny Fanny, you
• 53:22
  know, well, let's talk about some of these books.
• 53:25
  So there's there's an appearance in 1974's Big Bird's busy book
• 53:31
  where she is on a Guy Smiley game show with Harry Monster.
• 53:38
  Looking for something that starts with the letter D and
• 53:41
  Christy. How does Granny try to solve
• 53:43
  this problem? She pulls out her purse and she
• 53:46
  starts digging through, looking for things that start with the
• 53:49
  letter D. So it's again, it's it's that
• 53:52
  joke. And I'm like, OK, I get why you
• 53:54
  used Granny Fanny here, because we've established Granny's thing
• 53:58
  is that she has a purse. Yes, this is an appropriate use
• 54:02
  of the Sesame Street cannon. The Lure.
• 54:06
  Uh huh. Exactly.
• 54:07
  I I I gave it 2 thumbs up on my letterboxed review of picture
• 54:12
  books in 1974. Christy, do you have this?
• 54:16
  Problem with your purse? Cuz you know what I can kind of
• 54:20
  relate to Granny Fanny. Yeah, see, and I'm I'm kind of
• 54:24
  anti purse I. No kidding.
• 54:27
  Yeah, I I am one of those few. I need to have my items in a
• 54:33
  specific pocket so that I could tell by weight if I've had them
• 54:36
  or not. So I I'm more of a pocket or a
• 54:40
  pouch person, not a big purse person.
• 54:43
  The problem is like dresses don't usually have pockets and I
• 54:46
  usually wear dresses OK. Yes.
• 54:49
  Anyway, so yeah, I can relate to Granny Fanny.
• 54:53
  Then she shows up the same year in the bizarrely titled See No
• 54:59
  evil, Hear, No evil, Smell No Evil, Scratch and Sniff book.
• 55:04
  Surprisingly prominent role trying to solve the problem of
• 55:08
  the stinky clubhouse. Christy, how does Granny try to
• 55:12
  solve this problem? She once again, she pulls out
• 55:16
  her bag and starts going through the contents.
• 55:19
  Yeah, you know what? I didn't think about it until
• 55:21
  you pointed it out. But yeah, there's a lot of bag
• 55:23
  related stuff here. We see her show up the colored
• 55:27
  the wrong color in the Sesame Street family album.
• 55:30
  We see her show up in Spanish in Una Sopresa.
• 55:36
  She shows up in the Sesame Street cookbook helping Betty
• 55:40
  Lou make some kind of television food, and she's on the cover of
• 55:46
  three different coloring books in cover in the late 70s.
• 55:52
  I didn't notice that she was on the cover.
• 55:54
  Nope, she is on the cover of three coloring books.
• 55:58
  Really was a Granny Fanny fan. Let's take a take a quick look
• 56:02
  though at from around the same period, the Sesame Street film
• 56:06
  strips, which were a series of film strips in 1976 distributed
• 56:12
  to schools. The ideas that they were semi
• 56:15
  interactive film strips. So for the younger kids in the
• 56:19
  audience, and by that I mean people Christie and my age
• 56:23
  because Christie, were they showing film strips when you
• 56:25
  were in grades? No, we had VC, we had AVCR like
• 56:29
  we had the VCR on a cart. You know that they would.
• 56:32
  They would bring around big, big giant CRTTV perched upon the
• 56:37
  high cart. You know, when it was time to
• 56:39
  for me to watch Jack and the Beanstalk, the real story, in my
• 56:43
  elementary school music class, which we absolutely did, I have
• 56:48
  vivid memory of watching Brian Henson's Jack and the Beanstalk,
• 56:52
  The real story. They would bring that CRT
• 56:56
  around, but film strips were, you know, simpler.
• 57:01
  There was a, it was literally just like a projector that would
• 57:06
  show still images and there would be an audio track that you
• 57:12
  would have to sync up separately and would play along.
• 57:16
  So in this case, you've got still images of the Sesame
• 57:19
  Street characters and an audio track that would play and would
• 57:24
  indicate when it was time for the teacher to change the slide.
• 57:28
  And there's some cases too in the 4th of July, one that we'll
• 57:32
  talk about in a second, where the film strip tells the teacher
• 57:37
  to to stop and like, OK, now let's.
• 57:41
  Discuss. So, Christy, let's discuss.
• 57:44
  Granny shows up in two of these, and in neither of them does she
• 57:49
  really have any of the traits we've come to sort of establish
• 57:53
  for Granny, Fanny Nestle wrote. No, not at all.
• 57:59
  The Ernie Learns to skate one actually was I, I, I really
• 58:03
  liked her character in it. But yeah, she felt like a
• 58:06
  completely different person there.
• 58:09
  She's so OK, so I guess we'll start with Ernie Learns to
• 58:12
  Skate. Ernie Learns to Skate is a film
• 58:15
  strip about Ernie. You know, I, I know I, I told
• 58:18
  you to jump in in the middle because I was like, don't waste
• 58:21
  your time on the beginning. But Ernie is being bullied at
• 58:25
  the park for not knowing how to ice skate.
• 58:28
  And Granny sees him, you know, struggling to skate.
• 58:34
  And she offers him, like, some really good advice.
• 58:37
  Like, look, you know, you gotta keep trying, you know, like,
• 58:41
  you're gonna just give up and cry about it.
• 58:44
  Or are you gonna? Are you gonna?
• 58:45
  Yeah. Fiddle stitch.
• 58:48
  You're giving up too soon, and I won't allow it.
• 58:53
  I don't care. I'm angry.
• 58:55
  No. You listen to me.
• 58:57
  If you want to have a temper tantrum, you just go off by
• 59:01
  yourself. It hurts my ears.
• 59:05
  I'm sorry, Granny. I wasn't mad at you.
• 59:08
  I know you weren't. But Burt and I are trying to
• 59:12
  help you. That's right.
• 59:13
  You've got to cooperate. Now put your.
• 59:18
  That's, that's kind of what I liked about her is that she, you
• 59:21
  know, she is trying to encourage him, but she's she's also got a
• 59:25
  bit of an edge to her still. Like when Ernie starts having a
• 59:29
  bit of a temper tantrum, she very quickly tells him, like,
• 59:32
  you're not going to be doing that in front of me.
• 59:34
  You know, you're going to calm down and you're going to try
• 59:37
  again. And she's, you know, telling him
• 59:40
  about how, like, you don't become a champion skater
• 59:43
  overnight. Even the best skaters still fall
• 59:46
  every so often. It's all very sensible advice
• 59:50
  from someone who we previously see struggle to get ketchup out
• 59:54
  of a bottle because she forgot to take the lid off.
• 59:57
  Dating's a lot easier than pouring ketchup, let me tell
• 1:00:00
  you. No, I'm kidding.
• 1:00:01
  But it is a really nice character.
• 1:00:03
  And it's it's Jerry Nelson here doing a kind of.
• 1:00:07
  I mean, Jerry Nelson had like 1000 voices, but also you can
• 1:00:10
  picture all of Jerry Nelson's voices Somehow Those are both
• 1:00:13
  true. It's a kind of old lady Jerry
• 1:00:16
  Nelson voice. If you're picturing what Jerry
• 1:00:18
  Nelson would sound like as an old lady, you're picturing it
• 1:00:21
  correct. Also, I've already played an
• 1:00:24
  audio clip because that's how my podcast works.
• 1:00:28
  Again, I really liked her, but just like it's not necessarily
• 1:00:31
  Granny Fanny and at this point it isn't acting like Granny
• 1:00:35
  Fanny and also isn't sounding like Granny Fanny.
• 1:00:38
  I don't understand why they didn't just make up another
• 1:00:41
  character. Like it's so strange that they
• 1:00:44
  specifically chose this character for a film strip.
• 1:00:48
  It's not even like it's what we had this puppet lying around.
• 1:00:51
  It's like what you had to you could have drawn anyone.
• 1:00:54
  Could have been hairy. Monster teaching Ernie how to
• 1:00:56
  skate. If you only had Jerry Nelson in
• 1:00:58
  the studio, yeah. I guess it's it's maybe the
• 1:01:01
  trope of the the wise old woman you know coming in dispense her
• 1:01:05
  wisdom. Yeah, no, absolutely.
• 1:01:08
  But again, I loved it. I I really liked this character,
• 1:01:12
  even if it is so different than the Granny Fanny who doesn't
• 1:01:15
  seem to realize that one of her cats is orange and one of her
• 1:01:18
  cats is. Gray.
• 1:01:20
  Despite not being colorblind. Like you can't even use that
• 1:01:23
  excuse because she does realize eventually anyway.
• 1:01:26
  Now Christy, the 4th of July 1 was probably very confusing to
• 1:01:31
  you because the 4th of July is a holiday that we have here in
• 1:01:36
  America. Oh, OK, so we we have a little
• 1:01:41
  different here. We celebrate the 1st of July,
• 1:01:44
  you know. This is weird.
• 1:01:46
  First of all, Granny is performed by Richard Hunt here.
• 1:01:50
  Second of all, Granny's thing is that she's excited to be playing
• 1:01:53
  Betsy Ross on the 4th of July float, and she wants the float
• 1:01:59
  to be painted turquoise with a little bit of purple.
• 1:02:03
  Mixed in. Well, that's just the thing I
• 1:02:07
  came to see you about. I've been making my Betsy Ross
• 1:02:10
  costume, you know, and it's almost finished.
• 1:02:13
  Oh, you're going to make a Super Betsy Ross Granny, I could just
• 1:02:17
  see you now riding on the float and sewing the first American
• 1:02:22
  flag. Ah yes, it will be quite a
• 1:02:24
  thrill. Now I wanted to tell you about
• 1:02:27
  the color the float should be painted.
• 1:02:29
  I think it should match my costume, sort of a Violet with
• 1:02:33
  just a hint of turquoise. Won't that be lovely?
• 1:02:36
  Which is called brown. I didn't think of that.
• 1:02:44
  He's just picturing it you. Can't mix those colors.
• 1:02:47
  You can't mix them. They don't mix.
• 1:02:50
  What was your thought on Granny Fanny in this?
• 1:02:53
  Did you have a thought on Granny Fanny in this?
• 1:02:55
  I truly have no opinions about this 4th of July film strip.
• 1:02:59
  I mean, again, like she's just kind of a different character
• 1:03:03
  here. It feels like she very picky
• 1:03:06
  about the color of the float. She kind of does the this is
• 1:03:10
  maybe another stereotype of old people is that they have
• 1:03:13
  opinions and they believe their opinions are the correct ones.
• 1:03:17
  I mean, she doesn't get totally nasty about it, but she is very
• 1:03:21
  insistent that this parade float needs to be turquoise with a a
• 1:03:27
  hint of Violet. It is interesting though, you
• 1:03:29
  know, because it is. She's fighting with Biff, who
• 1:03:32
  wants the float to be float colored, which is brown
• 1:03:37
  according to Biff, which again is what turquoise plus purple
• 1:03:43
  would. If you mix those colors
• 1:03:45
  together, you'd probably get brown.
• 1:03:47
  So maybe they should have just. But what's interesting is that
• 1:03:50
  this is like a really childish argument between 2 Sesame Street
• 1:03:55
  characters who are like 100% indisputably supposed to be
• 1:04:00
  adults. Yeah, yeah, and, and the
• 1:04:02
  argument is solved by Big Bird, who I forget canonically he's
• 1:04:06
  like 766. Yeah, he's 6.
• 1:04:13
  But also also the, the, the kids at home, because this is where
• 1:04:16
  Big Bird is like, OK, you can pause the tape, you know, and,
• 1:04:20
  and talk it over. And he tells them that they
• 1:04:24
  should compromise. And I'm like, oh, so like perp,
• 1:04:27
  you know, turquoise and brown stripes.
• 1:04:29
  And he's like, no, we're going to compromise by making it red,
• 1:04:31
  white and blue. And I'm like, well, that's just
• 1:04:33
  what you want, baby bird. That's not.
• 1:04:36
  I'm going to try that from now on.
• 1:04:38
  If I'm in an argument, let's compromise by doing things my
• 1:04:41
  way. We move from there into, like I
• 1:04:44
  said, three coloring books where Granny Fanny appears on the
• 1:04:48
  cover in different vehicles. She's on a unicycle in one of
• 1:04:52
  them. Oh, she's knitting while on a
• 1:04:54
  unicycle in the From Here to There coloring book.
• 1:04:57
  So yeah, this enters a strange era for Granny Fanny where
• 1:05:01
  suddenly her things become, well, two things, vehicles and
• 1:05:06
  fitness. Because in the late 70s, early
• 1:05:12
  80s, everything I could find of Granny Fanny involved her on a
• 1:05:17
  unicycle, or in a helicopter, or driving a school bus, or
• 1:05:25
  swimming in the ocean, or going for a jog.
• 1:05:28
  She's got an impressive range of hobbies and and driver's
• 1:05:32
  licenses. But again, now we're completely,
• 1:05:36
  we're completely away from what was established as, as as Granny
• 1:05:40
  Fanny. I mean, I would like to think of
• 1:05:43
  her as a helicopter pilot. Well, that's kind of rad.
• 1:05:48
  I mean, that's The thing is like, should I be complaining
• 1:05:50
  that this character is is well-rounded?
• 1:05:53
  But I guess I just don't. I don't feel like I really know
• 1:05:56
  Granny Fanny. No, it it very much just feels
• 1:06:00
  like somebody had a a big folder or big book of all the available
• 1:06:07
  Sesame Street characters and they would flip through it and
• 1:06:10
  they landed on the Granny Fanny page and thought, OK, I'll draw
• 1:06:13
  this one into the book. That is absolutely what it feels
• 1:06:16
  like, you know? It is interesting though,
• 1:06:18
  because again, going back to our to our discussion of tropes from
• 1:06:22
  earlier, no, the helicopter pilot is admittedly not a trope
• 1:06:27
  and it is interesting that Granny Fanny did become a
• 1:06:30
  helicopter pilot. I can say that that is not
• 1:06:34
  something discussed in any of the theory I was reading.
• 1:06:39
  But we are here at the kind of spinster slash widower or widow
• 1:06:44
  character, rather spinster character.
• 1:06:46
  It's also worth noting that, you know, one of the things the book
• 1:06:50
  talks a lot about, like I was saying, is the idea that like, a
• 1:06:53
  woman's space is in the home. And women were not usually
• 1:06:58
  portrayed on TV as having jobs. And we do have Granny Fanny
• 1:07:03
  having presumably a job here. But Grannys job is the home.
• 1:07:08
  Grannys job is teaching other people about the home.
• 1:07:12
  And again, like these helpful home tips for ladies and again,
• 1:07:18
  that fits right into these these tropes here where it's like.
• 1:07:22
  Of. Course the old lady character is
• 1:07:25
  going to share friendly tips about home.
• 1:07:28
  That is what an old lady does. And it isn't until she just
• 1:07:33
  starts making cameos and picture books that we start to see more
• 1:07:36
  of her than that. You know, unicycling and
• 1:07:40
  helicopters and swimming in the ocean.
• 1:07:43
  But that's not really the character that was portrayed in
• 1:07:46
  the in the bulk of what you would assume people were seeing.
• 1:07:51
  Yeah, and again, and it doesn't feel like it's a purposeful
• 1:07:54
  decision to make Granny have these activities as hobbies
• 1:07:58
  again. It just feels like somebody
• 1:08:01
  wanted to draw an old grandma character and decided to put her
• 1:08:05
  in. But she sticks.
• 1:08:06
  Around 1981, she's in the Sesame Street Circus of Opposites
• 1:08:11
  alongside Rodeo Rosie, who we'll be talking about in two weeks on
• 1:08:15
  this show. I guess that's a spoiler, but
• 1:08:18
  we'll be talking about Rodeo Rosie in two weeks.
• 1:08:21
  And this is also the this is really interesting because this
• 1:08:25
  book Sesame Street Circus of Opposites first book to feature
• 1:08:29
  Elmo. So it's a real changing of the
• 1:08:32
  guards here where Granny Fanny is leaving us just as Elmo is
• 1:08:38
  entering. And I gotta say.
• 1:08:40
  I get. Why Elmo was a more popular
• 1:08:42
  character than Granny Fanny Nestle?
• 1:08:44
  Wrote. I'm sorry, Granny.
• 1:08:48
  One day, one day people will accept you like I accept you.
• 1:08:51
  And then the final appearance of Granny Fanny ever was in a
• 1:08:55
  magazine story from 1986, a Sesame Street Holiday story.
• 1:09:01
  Rover's Gift? Oh, OK, that's well, that's a
• 1:09:04
  nice one to end it on, I guess. Can you can you talk a little
• 1:09:08
  bit? Did you read Grover's gift?
• 1:09:09
  I know I I shared with you some scans from it.
• 1:09:12
  Yeah, so it's it's essentially the gift of the Magi story with,
• 1:09:18
  but this time with Big Bird and Cookie Monster who want to get
• 1:09:23
  gifts for each other. Granny Fanny has a a store that
• 1:09:29
  sells custom T-shirts for teddy bears and so just such a
• 1:09:33
  specific. But it also sells.
• 1:09:36
  It also sells other things because she's, she's teaching
• 1:09:40
  Grover how to make latkas there, right?
• 1:09:42
  Oh. Yeah, that's right.
• 1:09:44
  So it also sells potatoes. Like, yeah, well, you got to
• 1:09:48
  diversify a little bit. Teddy bear T-shirts and latkas.
• 1:09:55
  But so she so cookie monster buys he trades his jar of
• 1:10:01
  cookies for AT shirt for Radar and then a big bird trades Radar
• 1:10:07
  for oh, I think it was a cookie jar.
• 1:10:10
  Sorry. Yes, he trades the cookie jar
• 1:10:12
  for Radar. And then at the very end, Grover
• 1:10:14
  comes in and he gifts them the gifts that they traded into
• 1:10:20
  Granny. It's interesting because it
• 1:10:24
  really feels like Granny Fanny is supposed to be Mr. Hooper in
• 1:10:29
  this. Yeah.
• 1:10:32
  Especially like, have you seen Christmas Eve on Sesame Street?
• 1:10:35
  I It's been a long time. OK, well no, no, no, it's OK.
• 1:10:40
  I'm not here to to to judge anyone for what they have or
• 1:10:43
  haven't seen. But one of the famous scenes
• 1:10:46
  from that is a gift of the Magi retelling with Bert and Ernie.
• 1:10:53
  Bert sells his paper clips to Mr. Hooper to buy a soap dish
• 1:10:58
  for Ernie. Ernie sells rubber ducky to Mr.
• 1:11:01
  Hooper to buy a box for Bert's paper clips.
• 1:11:06
  And again, you've got this idea of Granny Fanny as a a kindly
• 1:11:10
  store owner on Sesame Street. This also seems to suggest, as I
• 1:11:15
  said that Miss that Granny Fanny Nestle Rd. is Jewish.
• 1:11:19
  And as as a Jewish woman, I, I want to, I want to welcome
• 1:11:23
  Granny Fanny to the family. Thank you Granny.
• 1:11:29
  But again, you once again feel like this is just like we chose
• 1:11:34
  a character out of a bag, you know, like why is it Granny
• 1:11:39
  Fanny? And by this point?
• 1:11:42
  Again, we are 14 years. Removed from new granny Fanny
• 1:11:47
  sketches. Yeah, and she's still showing
• 1:11:50
  up. You know, what I love the most
• 1:11:53
  about this story is that I thought it was building to a
• 1:11:57
  conclusion where Granny Fanny comes in and, and she gives
• 1:12:02
  Cookie Monster and Big Bird their respective treasures back,
• 1:12:06
  you know, and, and she, she says something about the meaning of
• 1:12:09
  Christmas and but no, that's Grover that comes in.
• 1:12:13
  So Granny Fanny was totally fine holding on to Radar and Cookie
• 1:12:17
  Monsters Cookies. Christy, I am.
• 1:12:19
  So glad you pointed this out because Granny Fanny in my notes
• 1:12:23
  I wrote she is a less nice Mr. Hooper because in Christmas Eve
• 1:12:29
  on Sesame Street, it ends with Mr. Hooper showing up in Bert
• 1:12:33
  and Ernie's apartment and being like, I wanted to give you guys
• 1:12:38
  your paper clips and rubber ducky.
• 1:12:40
  Granny is just fine with it. And presumably Grover had to buy
• 1:12:45
  these things back from from Granny.
• 1:12:48
  Yeah, I think so. Granny, Granny Fanny probably
• 1:12:52
  just forgot because that's also that.
• 1:12:54
  You know what? Character.
• 1:12:55
  You know what that is it, that that's it.
• 1:12:58
  She She suddenly reverted back to Season 1 Granny Fanny.
• 1:13:02
  She forgot she was so busy picking up specks of dust with a
• 1:13:06
  tweezer and putting them into her dust jar.
• 1:13:10
  Anything else to say about Granny Fanny?
• 1:13:13
  No, I think that's pretty much it.
• 1:13:14
  I, you know, I guess I was surprised by how much that I, I
• 1:13:19
  came to love her. Again, that is based on her
• 1:13:22
  resemblance to my paternal grandma.
• 1:13:25
  Even her forgetfulness is very much something my grandma did.
• 1:13:30
  So I came into this podcast not knowing who Granny Fanny was,
• 1:13:35
  and now I think I might be one of her only fans.
• 1:13:39
  But not her only fans. No, no, never.
• 1:13:44
  So I want to talk about one final character today because
• 1:13:49
  we're going to spend probably all of two minutes talking about
• 1:13:54
  this character. So as I said.
• 1:13:56
  Granny, Fanny Roosevelt, Franklin's mom, and Betty Lou,
• 1:14:01
  who we talked about in our second episode, were the only
• 1:14:05
  recurring named female Muppets on Season 1 of Sesame Street.
• 1:14:11
  The only other one who could potentially fall into this bowl,
• 1:14:15
  this bucket I guess is the better word for it, is Little
• 1:14:18
  Bird. Why?
• 1:14:20
  Why are you barking at me? Oh, I thought maybe you were
• 1:14:23
  some kind of little dog, you know?
• 1:14:26
  Well, I'm not a dog. Oh, sheep, sheep, sheep, sheep.
• 1:14:30
  But little bird isn't female. I need to stress this.
• 1:14:35
  Little Bird was only females. Sometimes it was some writing
• 1:14:42
  confusion. Most likely.
• 1:14:44
  Fran Brill, who started performing Little Bird in season
• 1:14:48
  2, said that she always intended Little Bird to be a boy.
• 1:14:53
  He doesn't get referred to as a girl until later in the 70s, so
• 1:14:58
  he doesn't count. But just in case somebody at
• 1:15:00
  home is like, well, what about Little Bird?
• 1:15:02
  No, Little Bird doesn't count. Stephen 2, as we discussed last
• 1:15:06
  week on this show, is when Fran Brill joins the show and Fran
• 1:15:11
  Brill takes over performing Betty Lou.
• 1:15:14
  And in season 2, she'll also get her own character named Prairie
• 1:15:19
  Dawn. But shortly after she gets
• 1:15:22
  Prairie Dawn, Fran Brill gets a character named after Fran
• 1:15:27
  Brill, Franny. And Franny asks, what if Prairie
• 1:15:34
  Dawn was kind of boring? Hey Frannie, you've been
• 1:15:39
  learning about all different kinds of musical instruments
• 1:15:42
  today, haven't? You.
• 1:15:42
  Oh yeah, I sure. Am the glasses that Gordon had
• 1:15:45
  right? Right.
• 1:15:45
  And the recorder. Oh yeah, that was neat.
• 1:15:48
  You made that out of a pipe. Yeah, and an old broomstick,
• 1:15:51
  right? Do you know how to make a kazoo
• 1:15:52
  A kazoo? No, I know what it is.
• 1:15:55
  It's another instrument. That's right.
• 1:15:57
  How can you make one? Kind of boring and and sort of
• 1:16:00
  just sometimes mumbled to herself a little bit or gets
• 1:16:04
  talked over. So I should just say, before we
• 1:16:08
  get into the one Franny episode we're going to discuss, Franny
• 1:16:13
  is a green anything Muppet. So looking kind of like Lefty
• 1:16:18
  the Salesman or Sherlock Hemlock, except she literally
• 1:16:22
  has Prairie Dawn's wig. It is the same wig, presumably,
• 1:16:28
  that they put on Prairie Dawn and she wears a dress and is a
• 1:16:35
  soft spoken little girl who appeared in three episodes of
• 1:16:41
  season 2 of Sesame Street. Now I mentioned we only watched
• 1:16:45
  1, and that's because two of her three appearances are what we
• 1:16:51
  refer to as the lost episodes of Sesame Street.
• 1:16:55
  You can read more about this on Muppet Wiki, but there are some
• 1:16:58
  episodes that even Muppet Wiki does not have access to and two
• 1:17:03
  of those three feature Franny. So we can only talk about 1
• 1:17:08
  episode from March 12th, 1971. Again in season 2 it is music
• 1:17:15
  day and Franny is kind of mumbly and gets talked over.
• 1:17:20
  I don't love it. I as someone who is kind of
• 1:17:25
  awkward, I kind of love Freddie specifically because she got
• 1:17:30
  talked over and, you know, she just kind of haunts the
• 1:17:34
  background of of the. Episode The funniest thing the
• 1:17:39
  the clip that I sent you. So the episode is about Gordon
• 1:17:44
  and Gordon's friend the Carpenter who we previously
• 1:17:47
  talked about in our second episode on Betty Lou as making
• 1:17:51
  helping Betty Lou build a box. But Gordon and Gordon's
• 1:17:58
  Carpenter friend are teaching the kids how to make musical
• 1:18:01
  instruments. And fun fact, this is the
• 1:18:04
  episode that the song What Makes Music that would later be
• 1:18:08
  featured on one of the Sesame Street disco albums is from.
• 1:18:27
  But Franny doesn't sing What makes music, so I didn't send
• 1:18:31
  you that. Franny kind of just stands
• 1:18:33
  around and makes suggestions of what to do, gets talked over,
• 1:18:41
  gets explained how to make a kazoo too.
• 1:18:46
  But in the clip that I sent you, it literally begins with Franny
• 1:18:50
  going. And a couple others that you've
• 1:18:52
  never heard before. Huh.
• 1:18:54
  Oh, no, never. Look, wait a minute.
• 1:18:55
  Just play the alphabet song right?
• 1:18:58
  Yeah, just no. And that, that kind of gave me,
• 1:19:01
  out of all the videos that you sent me, that absolutely was the
• 1:19:05
  biggest laugh of the night for me.
• 1:19:08
  Gordon goes, no, we already did the alphabet song.
• 1:19:12
  Ridiculous, ridiculous. You know, I, I get the sense and
• 1:19:17
  I'd love to follow up with with some of the wiki team who who
• 1:19:21
  has access to some of the early scripts, but I get the sense a
• 1:19:24
  lot of this was ad libbed and that is absolutely how it feels.
• 1:19:29
  Where like Fran Brill was like, oh, have my character suggest a
• 1:19:34
  song too. And just like Gordon wasn't
• 1:19:37
  ready and like knew there wasn't time to do it.
• 1:19:40
  So it was just like, no, no, just.
• 1:19:44
  Shoots her down mercilessly. But there's not much else to
• 1:19:47
  say. She she's not a character who
• 1:19:50
  lasted. She's kind of boring.
• 1:19:53
  We're gonna, you know, we're gonna take take a whole episode
• 1:19:56
  next week to talk about some early Prairie Dawn stuff.
• 1:19:59
  But I wanted to knock out Franny because technically she counts
• 1:20:03
  as a recurring female character. A recurring female.
• 1:20:06
  Muppet. And I was like, well, the
• 1:20:09
  exposition has to go somewhere. What if, What if we're missing
• 1:20:14
  some absolute gold in those those lost episodes though, that
• 1:20:18
  completely redeem her character? Well, Christy, I got good news
• 1:20:22
  for you. Oh.
• 1:20:24
  I have descriptions. So.
• 1:20:27
  I'm gonna read you these descriptions and you're gonna
• 1:20:29
  tell me if they sound like gold, OK?
• 1:20:35
  Episode 231 March 30th, 1971 Franny comes to Hooper's store
• 1:20:42
  to run an errand for her mother, ordering 7 plastic coffee cups.
• 1:20:52
  She does a quick She does a quick errand around the corner
• 1:20:56
  while Mr. Hooper puts them in a box.
• 1:20:58
  When Franny returns, she doesn't think that all the cups fit into
• 1:21:02
  the box, but Mr. Hooper assures her that there are still 7 by
• 1:21:07
  counting them. Franny asks to have them placed
• 1:21:10
  back in the box. Then again, can't believe they
• 1:21:14
  all fit. Mr. Hooper senses this is going
• 1:21:17
  to go on for a while. Christy, did we miss Gold?
• 1:21:21
  Yeah. I mean, I'm not, I'm not going
• 1:21:24
  to lie in my head I could see if I could picture Mr. Hooper
• 1:21:29
  getting madder and madder and madder, and that would make me
• 1:21:33
  laugh a lot. OK, now here's another one and I
• 1:21:37
  forgot to write down this episode number so I apologize,
• 1:21:40
  but Branny comes to Mr. Hooper's to buy 2 dollies.
• 1:21:47
  Mr. Hooper has four dollies. And Franny can't decide which
• 1:21:52
  ones to buy. She's able to classify them into
• 1:21:55
  many groups of potential purchase, such as size or skin
• 1:21:59
  color. She finally decides to get the
• 1:22:01
  two dollies wearing overalls, but tells Mr. Hooper to hold off
• 1:22:06
  on wrapping them until her birthday in three months.
• 1:22:11
  OK. That's funny.
• 1:22:13
  I like that. Yeah.
• 1:22:15
  I wish we were talking about that episode.
• 1:22:18
  Well, I do not have access to that episode and believe me, I
• 1:22:23
  asked to the I asked the wiki team.
• 1:22:26
  I thank them in every episode. They could not help me access
• 1:22:29
  the episode where Franny buys 2 dollies.
• 1:22:34
  At last, maybe one day. Anything else you want to say
• 1:22:37
  about Franny? Do you want to list dolls you
• 1:22:39
  have access to on your desk? I mean, I've got Magna Anjuman
• 1:22:44
  from Digimon. No kidding.
• 1:22:47
  Any other? Any other thoughts on any of
• 1:22:49
  these? Any of these three characters?
• 1:22:51
  Our granny, Fanny Nestle Road and friends episode.
• 1:22:55
  No, I, I think I'm good. Thank you so much for having me
• 1:22:59
  on this. Thank you so much for being on
• 1:23:01
  this, Christy. It's truly such a pleasure.
• 1:23:04
  I always love hanging out. And again, I I figured, you
• 1:23:09
  know, if I was gonna send the clips anyway, I could send them
• 1:23:13
  to someone who doesn't know Granny Fanny.
• 1:23:16
  Nestle Rd. Well, I'm glad I know her now.
• 1:23:21
  Christy, do you have any anything you'd like to plug for
• 1:23:23
  the audience? I guess if you just want to
• 1:23:27
  check out my Muppet Princess Bride illustrations or my
• 1:23:31
  Labyrinth prop replicas, you could feel free to check me out.
• 1:23:35
  I'm on Instagram, Tumblr, Blue Sky, couple other places but
• 1:23:40
  those are the main ones and I'm there as KO makes things.
• 1:23:44
  Christy, do you also want to, do you also want to plug your
• 1:23:46
  podcast or does that go in a separate sphere?
• 1:23:50
  Oh man, OK, well if you want to see the unfiltered, usually me
• 1:23:57
  after having just chugged A7 up. Christy, yes, I do have a
• 1:24:03
  podcast that I host with my friend Bree and we talked about
• 1:24:06
  bad Princess movies. Basically just any goofy silly
• 1:24:09
  movie, sometimes good ones that feature a Princess we like to
• 1:24:15
  chat about and have a silly time.
• 1:24:18
  So that is just the bad Princess Movies podcast.
• 1:24:21
  I I do swear a lot on it. Just gonna say because I feel
• 1:24:26
  like a lot of the Tough Pigs podcasts, I don't remember.
• 1:24:29
  I don't think you guys swear a lot, and I definitely swear a
• 1:24:32
  bunch on my we. Don't it's it's like one thing
• 1:24:35
  that we've kind of, we've kind of all agreed not to do.
• 1:24:39
  That doesn't mean that, you know, you guys aren't allowed to
• 1:24:42
  on your podcast. I don't know.
• 1:24:44
  It's just something, it just feels weird, like I'm doing a
• 1:24:47
  show about bear in the Big Blue House.
• 1:24:49
  It feels like maybe I should. Because you're not.
• 1:24:52
  Anyway, Christy, thank you so much for being here.
• 1:24:55
  It's it's always a pleasure talking to you.
• 1:24:57
  Thank you so much for all of your help on all of our Pride
• 1:25:00
  Month stuff. We're recording this shortly
• 1:25:03
  after Pride Month, so thank you for that, and I'm glad I I gave
• 1:25:09
  you a new favorite Muppet character Season 1, Granny
• 1:25:12
  Fanny, Nestle wrote. Thank you.
• 1:25:33
  And there you have it. Between this episode and our
• 1:25:37
  earlier ones, now you know everything about every single
• 1:25:41
  recurring female Muppet who appeared in Season 1 of Sesame
• 1:25:44
  Street, plus Franny from Season 2.
• 1:25:48
  And that's it, you know, season 1 brought us Betty Lou, who
• 1:25:52
  might not be a character at all. Granny Fanny, who's fun but
• 1:25:57
  doesn't last. Roosevelt's mother, who only
• 1:26:01
  exists as a mother. In Season 1, we'd also meet Big
• 1:26:06
  Bird's grandmother, Granny Bird, but she's only in one episode in
• 1:26:10
  Season 1, so we'll talk more about her later on.
• 1:26:14
  For now, I want to remind you just how dire this is when
• 1:26:18
  compared to the classic, unforgettable male characters
• 1:26:22
  introduced in this season. Ernie, Bert, Big Bird, Oscar
• 1:26:29
  Guy, Smiley, Cookie Monster. It's not that the writers and
• 1:26:34
  performers and builders of Season 1 couldn't make strong
• 1:26:38
  characters, but when it came to women and girls, audiences had
• 1:26:43
  extremely little, causing a strange symbolic annihilation of
• 1:26:48
  many types of women. Which takes us to Season 2.
• 1:26:53
  As we discussed last week, Fran Brill joined the show in Season
• 1:26:57
  2. At first, she'd mostly play
• 1:27:00
  Betty Lou, but in 1971 she began playing a second pink little
• 1:27:06
  girl, and, well, it's kind of shocking how quickly that
• 1:27:10
  character developed into someone special.
• 1:27:14
  And, you know, that's a very long word you're spelling there.
• 1:27:16
  You got a lot of letters, little girl, you know.
• 1:27:18
  Oh. Yes, well, it is moderately
• 1:27:20
  extensive. Moderately extensive, very heavy
• 1:27:23
  talk. Next week on A Prairie Dawn
• 1:27:27
  Companion, I talk about Prairie Dawn in the 1970s with a very
• 1:27:32
  special guest. I hope you're all pageant ready.
• 1:27:36
  See you soon, I really. AM.
• 1:27:43
  Quite Prairie Dawn Companion is a production of toughpigs.com.
• 1:27:47
  It is written, produced, edited and hosted by Becca Petunia, an
• 1:27:52
  executive produced by the Tough Pigs Muppet Fan podcast
• 1:27:55
  executive producer Johannes. Thanks to Scott Hanson, Shane
• 1:28:00
  Keating, Tony Whitaker and the Whole Muppet Wiki team for
• 1:28:04
  helping me with research. The book St.
• 1:28:07
  Gang by Michael Davis was also indispensable.
• 1:28:11
  Thanks to Katie Lynn Miller, Mikhail Richardson, and Eli Lee
• 1:28:15
  for help with script revisions. Follow Tough Pigs on social
• 1:28:19
  media. You can support us on Patreon or
• 1:28:22
  by buying a T-shirt on our tea public.
• 1:28:25
  Join the conversation on the Tough Pigs discord.
• 1:28:29
  You can support a Prairie Dawn companion and lots of other
• 1:28:33
  podcasts too by giving Muppet fan podcasts with toughpigs.com
• 1:28:38
  five stars on your podcast reviewing app of choice.
• 1:28:54
  Got to stuff for Nostris here too.