Sesame Street

Sunny Day

An eight-foot-two yellow bird worked from inside the costume, with the performer's right arm held straight above his head to run the beak and eyes. A tiny monitor strapped to his chest was the only way to see where the bird was walking.

• Puppetry

Sunny Day

Performed by Frank Oz from 1969. He does not swallow anything: the puppet has no throat, so every cookie is shoved past the mouth and showers down the front of him in crumbs.

• Puppetry

Sunny Day

The red monster who speaks about himself in the third person spent years as an unremarkable background puppet before Kevin Clash took him over in 1985 and turned him into the show's centre of gravity.

• Puppetry

Sunny Day

Orange for the whole of the first season before turning green. His trash can is later revealed to contain a swimming pool, a bowling alley, a farm and an elephant.

• Puppetry

Sunny Day

The opening theme by Joe Raposo, Jon Stone and Bruce Hart states the show's premise as a question a child might actually ask: how do you get to Sesame Street?

• Music

a-ok

Roommates in the basement flat at 123 Sesame Street, originally performed by Frank Oz and Jim Henson. Their sketches were among the first material written for the series and were shot as standalone inserts.

• Puppetry
• Behind the Scenes

a-ok

Count von Count's compulsion to tally everything he sees comes from real folklore, in which a vampire who meets scattered seeds or grains is obliged to stop and count every one.

• Puppetry

a-ok

Ernie's bath song was released as a single and reached number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970, putting a bath toy in the American top twenty.

• Music

a-ok

Grover began as a shaggy green monster in a 1967 Christmas special and only later arrived on the street in blue, eventually becoming Frank Oz's most physically demanding performance.

• Puppetry
• Behind the Scenes

Down the Block

When Will Lee died in 1982 the producers refused to recast him or send the character on a trip. Instead Big Bird is told plainly that Mr. Hooper is not coming back, in an episode scheduled for Thanksgiving Day 1983 so that parents would be home to watch it alongside their children.

• Behind the Scenes

Down the Block

In 1985 the adults finally saw Snuffleupagus. The change was made on advice that a running joke about grown-ups never believing what a child told them had become actively unsafe during a national panic about child abuse.

• Behind the Scenes

Down the Block

The funk counting film running 2 through 12 was composed by Walt Kraemer. Its vocals were misattributed to the Jackson 5 for decades; they were sung by the Pointer Sisters.

• Music
• Rumour

Down the Block

A 1978 disco album with Grover in a white suit on the sleeve, parodying Saturday Night Fever. Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees sang on the record and posed with the Muppets on the cover.

• Music

Down the Block

The 1985 feature film puts Big Bird into foster care with a family of dodos and becomes a road movie about a runaway child. It underperformed badly at the box office in a summer dominated by Back to the Future.

• Behind the Scenes

Basement of 123

In 1970 Mississippi's state commission for educational television voted not to carry the show, with a commission member telling a reporter the state was not yet ready for its highly integrated cast of children. The vote was reversed within weeks once it reached the national press.

• Banned
• Politics

Basement of 123

A 1983 prime-time special in which the cast is locked overnight in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Big Bird spends it helping an Egyptian prince trapped for millennia, and the climax has Osiris weighing a child's heart against a feather.

• Behind the Scenes
• Nightmare Fuel

Basement of 123

Cookie Monster's prototype turns up in a 1967 IBM staff training film and in snack-food commercials, where the same puppet devours a machine and, in one spot, is blown up by it.

• Behind the Scenes
• Lost Media

Basement of 123

A 1967 pilot in which a live-action superhero solved letter-based mysteries. Children who watched it could not follow it at all, and the workshop treated the failure as its founding lesson in what not to make.

• Behind the Scenes
• Lost Media

Basement of 123

At Jim Henson's 1990 memorial service in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Caroll Spinney walked out in the full Big Bird costume and sang Bein' Green, then looked upward and said goodbye to Kermit's performer.

• Puppetry
• Behind the Scenes

Under the Set

NASA approached the show about flying Big Bird on a shuttle flight alongside its Teacher in Space programme. The idea was abandoned, partly because the costume would not fit in the crew compartment. The mission was STS-51-L.

• Behind the Scenes

Under the Set

The show's first Black Muppet, created and performed by Matt Robinson, was quietly written out in the mid-1970s after complaints that the character traded in stereotype. He is still largely absent from official retrospectives.

• Behind the Scenes
• Politics

Under the Set

The South African co-production Takalani Sesame introduced an HIV-positive Muppet in 2002. Members of the US Congress objected publicly before establishing that she had never been intended for American broadcast.

• Politics

Under the Set

Jim Henson's 1957 coffee commercials star a puppet who shoots, stabs, cannons and detonates his companion for declining Wilkins coffee. Around 180 ten-second spots were made and many are lost.

• Lost Media
• Behind the Scenes

Under the Set

A joint Israeli-Palestinian production launched in 1998 with two separate streets and crossover visits between them. It has been suspended and restarted repeatedly as the political situation shifted.

• Politics

Under the Set

A 1997 joke website pasted Bert into photographs of dictators. In 2001 his face appeared on anti-American protest posters in Bangladesh, after a printer pulled bin Laden images off the internet without looking closely at what was in them.

• Politics
• Rumour

Below the Street

In 1976 Margaret Hamilton reprised the Wicked Witch of the West on the street. Children in test audiences were badly frightened, the episode was pulled after a single broadcast, and for decades it existed only as a rumour among adults who half-remembered it, until a recording surfaced online in 2022.

• Banned
• Lost Media
• Nightmare Fuel
• Rumour

Below the Street

A 1992 episode in which Snuffleupagus's parents separate was written, produced and then shelved permanently. Test screenings found that children came away believing their own parents might vanish. Only fragments have ever surfaced.

• Banned
• Lost Media

Below the Street

A 1975 animated segment about a face that emerges from a crack in a bedroom wall. A generation remembered it and could not prove it existed; internet searchers hunted it for roughly thirty years before the film was identified and recovered.

• Lost Media
• Nightmare Fuel
• Rumour

Below the Street

A 2012 Al Jazeera documentary set out how music written for the show was played at extreme volume at US detention sites. Composer Christopher Cerf took part in the film and said he had no idea his children's songs were being used that way.

• Politics
• Music
• Nightmare Fuel

Below the Street

Five test episodes were made and screened to children before the premiere. The research found the live studio segments lost attention against the Muppet inserts, which is why the puppets were moved onto the street itself. The pilots themselves are only partially accounted for.

• Behind the Scenes
• Lost Media