SesameTube

Sesame Workshop has just launched a fantastic new video site. It's still in beta, but if you go to video.sesameworkshop.org you can search through hundreds of classic Sesame Street clips. This is a really smart move on Sesame Workshop's part since there's clearly a demand for classic Sesame videos and most of this content was already available on YouTube anyway. This new site is a win-win for everybody; Sesame Workshop gets to control how it's content is watched and Sesame Street fans get to enjoy the videos they love legally.

Via ToughPigs.

Lock Up Your Kids; Classic Sesame Hits The Street

Sesame Workshop is finally releasing the long-requested early episodes of Sesame Street...but are they appropriate for today's kids?

Sesame Street Old School: Volume Two was released recently and contains some of the earliest episodes of Sesame Street. Considering that Sesame is probably the beloved children's series of all time, it's pretty amusing to consider the possibility that these DVDs aren't appropriate for preschoolers because they don't meet modern educational needs. Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times has been covering this; you can read her thoughts about it over at The Medium and listen to a recent segment with her about Old School Sesame Street from NPR.

Thanks to Ron and Kelvin for the links!

Flexitoon Puppets on the Web

The Boy Brothers, created by Flexitoon Puppets for the kids' series Shining Time Station.

Flexitoon Puppets have posted videos of their work on the web. In response to popular demand they've posted a compilation of clips from the classic Nickelodeon series Pinwheel (see previous post) along with musical numbers by their Juke Box Band from the popular `90s children's series Shining Time Station.

Thanks to Craig Marin at Flexitoon for sending this in!

Pinwheel

Before there was Lizzie MacQuire, before there was Ren & Stimpy, even before there was You Can't Do That On Television there was Pinwheel.

The series was set in the "Pinwheel Playhouse" and mostly consisted of humans and puppets interacting with each other, intercut with short Canadian and European cartoons. The puppeteers on the series included Craig Martin and Olga Felgemacher, probably better known for creating the Flexitoon jukebox band on Shining Time Station.

Although superficially Pinwheel was just another late `70s Sesame Street copycat (it even shared a few of Sesame's cartoons), it has an important place in broadcasting history as the show that put the fledgling Pinwheel Channel (soon to be renamed Nickelodeon) on the map and ran on the station for almost a decade, sometimes for up to five hours a day when Nick was starved for programming in it's early days.

While I don't think any of the episodes of the series were released on video and Nick has no plans of ever reairing it, you can watch the opening titles over at RetroJunk.