In this history of �Sesame Street,� Davis writes that when the show d�buted, in 1969, the goal of its creators was nothing short of righting �the inequities in our society� through the education of lower-class preschoolers. Such populist choices as an urban setting, a multiracial cast, and a catchy brand of �edutainment� reflected both the mood of the era (it should �jump and move fast and feel and sound like 1969,� a producer said) and painstaking research: a series of seminars held in the summer of 1968 was attended by developmental psychologists, television-industry insiders, and children�s authors and entertainers (Maurice Sendak endured boring sessions by making X-rated doodles; Jim Henson�s sandals and beard sparked fears that he was a Weatherman). The book�s strongest sections are culled from extensive interviews with Joan Ganz Cooney, who oversaw production for more than twenty years, but the narrative loses steam once the show hits the air.
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Superman started out in the comics, but the ink was barely dry on the pulp pages before the Man of Steel moved on to the movies (first in spiffy cartoons, then in low-rent serials), a TV show, and, eventually, film blockbusters, some of them good, some awful. In any event, the iconic Kryptonian was a consistent moneymaker. Rossen is comprehensive on the ups and downs of the Man of Steel’s cinematic career, supplying plenty of juicy detail and signally noting that DC Comics kept creative control—and profits—away from Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, Supe’s creators, and treated the Fleischer brothers, who produced the sublime early Superman cartoons, as or even more shabbily. Wonder if the movie Hollywoodland got the story of 1950s TV Superman George Reeves right? Rossen dishes the dirt on Reeves’ tragic end and—a rarity in Hollywood scandal reportage—does it with attribution! As Rossen notes, the story he tells is as much a cautionary tale of Hollywood excess as it is a history of a modern mythological figure. Essential for pop-culture collections. --Mike Tribby
About the Author
Michael Davis was a senior editor and family television columnist for TV Guide from 1998 to 2007. A Neiman Fellow, he has also worked for The Baltimore Sun and Chicago Sun-Times.
From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com "Sesame Street," the children's TV show that debuted in November 1969 and is still going strong, is part of the wallpaper of contemporary popular culture, a fertile source of memories, motifs, music and more to virtually anyone under 45 in the United States -- or the 119 other countries in which the series airs. How ubiquitous is "Sesame Street"? Consider this: Shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, anti-American demonstrators in Bangladesh flooded the streets waving posters of Osama bin Laden seated next to the show's popular yellow muppet Bert, who along with rubber-ducky enthusiast Ernie makes up one of the most relentlessly chaste same-sex couples since J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson shuffled off their mortal coils. In their rush for images of their new hero bin Laden, the demonstrators had unwittingly downloaded pictures from one of countless Bert Is Evil websites that photoshop the famously fussy character into scenes with history's greatest villains (Bert has been spotted with Hitler, Stalin and Mao, among others). Street Gang, by former TV Guide columnist and editor Michael Davis, is an exhaustive account of how we got to "Sesame Street." Written in cooperation with the woman behind the show, Joan Ganz Cooney, it charts the program from its conception in the waning days of the Great Society. "Sesame Street," Davis writes, effectively created modern educational programming by asking, "If television could successfully teach the words and music to advertisements, couldn't it teach children more substantive material by co-opting the very elements that make ads so effective?" Cooney had been a successful producer of well-regarded but little-watched public television programs. Aiming especially to reach low-income and minority kids, she pulled together a cast of veterans from such shows as "Captain Kangaroo," while assembling educational researchers to guide the pedagogy of the new show. No contributor was more important than Jim Henson, the muppet master whose laid-back hippie persona masked a bulldog businessman who never fulfilled his dreams of succeeding with a mature audience. Although much discussed in the book, Henson, who died unexpectedly in 1990 at 53 from "a runaway strep infection gone stubbornly, foolishly untreated," remains an almost completely enigmatic character. Some of the best passages in Street Gang recount behind-the-scenes stories, such as the time in the mid-1970s when Cooney secured an extension of federal funding for the show by successfully petitioning the patron saint of limited government, Sen. Barry Goldwater. And given the general uplift of the show, it's always compelling to read about nasty backstage wrangling, including an early '90s brouhaha when the show's politically correct research director insisted that for a particular muppet skit "the part of a chicken should only be played by a chicken." Yet Street Gang is mired in unnecessary details, endless litanies of names and prose that is several shades more purple than the skin of Count von Count, the show's obsessive-compulsive, mathematically inclined vampire. "Jon Stone approached a typewriter in the same way that a concert pianist approached a Steinway," Davis writes in a typical flourish, describing a co-producer of the show. Elsewhere, he intones that when Cooney decided to wean her production company off federal assistance, "she had unwittingly made a kind of Sophie's Choice. Sesame Street would survive, The Electric Company would not." Worse still, Davis seems quick to repeat every positive claim ever made about "Sesame Street," from singer and frequent guest-star Judy Collins's recollection that the show gave her "a spark, a will to live" during her boozy years in the '70s to a public broadcasting honcho's assertion that "This is the most important thing since the discovery of the atom bomb." While there's little doubt that "Sesame Street" has great market- and mind-share, whether on TV or in the nation's toy stores, it's far from clear that it has succeeded in its self-declared mission of preparing preschoolers for K-12 education. Indeed, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which has tracked students since the early '70s, reports that there has been precious little increase in reading and math test scores among the generations raised on "Sesame Street" (despite the more than doubling of inflation-adjusted expenditures per pupil over the same period). That's not a knock on a show that continues to entertain millions of viewers, but a truly "complete history" certainly would have grappled with such questions in a more critical fashion.
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