Been off to a lot of weird places over the past couple of days - it's how I distract myself. Since my last post on chiptunes I've meant to delve into the chiptune scene but it's very diffuse, very underground. There's a stickied message board thread on a quiet board for chiptune makers asking people to list their favorites. It's 21 pages long and filled with dead links and it's a resource I know I will never fully explore. Sometimes I content myself with dipping a finger in and moving on. I found a record by a Japanese chiptune creator called Dong with songs all named after flowers and a record called Another Crack World that is _kind of_ like a chiptune version of those "lo-fi beats" Youtube keeps recommending to me except not really and a PC music disk from 2001 just called "Chipmusicdisk #1".
The chipmusic disks, particular from that era, are hard to get a hold of. Not "hard" as in you can't find them, there's a website that archives them all, but my understanding is you have to emulate the system they were made for. To get it into a more portable format is doable but it's work and a lot of these disks, nobody has done that work.
A lot of art is like that. It has a deep rich history and sometimes it gets shunted off into decaying piles. And shit disappears. Links go dead. That's how things get lost.
The thing I've been sniffing around this week - maybe it was from looking at those Paul Lally videos, but it got me back to old children's television, which in turn brings one back to Sesame Street.
It's weird to me, having grown up with Doctor Who as the nexus of "Missing Television", to adapt to the model of the Lost Media Wiki people. "Lost" doesn't mean the same thing to them. It doesn't mean "no longer available anywhere", it means "not accessible". As far as I know all the old Sesame Street stuff is still around, and since Sesame Workshop are not as protective of their, uh, intellectual property, a lot of the stuff they made is widely available, officially or otherwise.
But by no means all of it. Sesame Street has not been around for as long as Doctor Who, but it's been running continuously and more frequently for most of that time, so there's a lot more of it. It's one hell of a rabbit hole.
There are a lot of things Sesame Street and Doctor Who have in common as obsessions. They're both children's TV shows - I do think it's significant that a lot of this desire to recover the past stems from childhood. The phrase "Proustian madeleines" springs to mind. It's apparently a masterpiece, certainly _sounds_ right up my alley, but I've never read the book, probably won't.
The main difference, I think, is that Sesame Street is a considerably better TV show than Doctor Who generally was. It's not perfect - it's had its share of controversies - but with Sesame Street, one never runs across an instance where they casually drop the N-word into an episode, which Doctor Who absolutely did. Sesame Street was made by people who knew a lot more about what they were doing than most of the people who made Doctor Who did. They had actual research on early childhood development, ideas, theories, and a shitload of brilliant people to put those ideas into practice.
But like Doctor Who, it too reflected its times, in its way, which is to say that a lot of times in the '70s, shit got weird. I come back occasionally to those old episodes, the old clips, to see what people are looking at, what people know about, what people have dug up, and it's mostly accessible on Youtube, even though the locus is a separate fan community. Some of these clips become obsessions. The Lost Media Wiki, for instance, became obsessed with a cartoon shown on Sesame Street that traumatized them as children. This is another thing the Sesame Street and Doctor Who fan communities have in common - this obsession with childhood fear. What they remember most from their childhood are the things that terrify them. Few people remember the professor character whose schtick was so boring that he fell asleep, because he was so boring the kids fell asleep too. The "Cracks" sketch, though... that clearly touched something deep and primal.
I never saw it. I don't remember it. Thinking back on it, I don't think I have any traumatic memories at all of children's television, which seems to me unusual. Perhaps it's totally normal, though. I certainly had my share of irrational fears as a child.
Anyway, my first binge on Youtube quickly brought me to Sesame Street, and I quickly familiarized myself with some of the really strange things they did that I didn't see. "Count to Ten With Nobody", for instance. The early '70s are prime weirdness to me, I suspect because of the heavy use of the Moog synthesizer. The Moog was new and innovative and I think a lot of people didn't recognize how profoundly disturbing the things they were doing with it were to, especially, children.
In the late '70s you have weird stuff too. For instance, there is the Disco Toothbrush song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ4nLTlCkLo
But it's not really that weird, is it? It's just a nice disco song. It's weird because of the place disco occupies in our culture landscape, several years of utter ubiquity, complete confidence that this was The Way, followed by abrupt, well, cancellation, for a host of reasons, some good, some bad. If you were going to do a song about brushing your teeth in 1978, of course it was going to be a disco song. It's not inherently weirder than the "Miami Mice" parody that ran intermittently in the mid-'80s; it's mostly notable to me for being a pretty good disco song.
On the other hand the cartoon titled "Cartoon Face Morph" - present in both male and female versions because the gender binary was a huge fucking thing in the '70s - is genuinely weird and disturbing. There's a picture of a man or woman and it goes through some funhouse mirror changes - the forehead bulges, the nose elongates, the chin juts out - and all of this is accompanied by extremely dissonant analog synth noises. I don't know what the underlying pedagogical purpose was. Maybe there was none. The guy who made it, a guy named Etienne Delessert, look, he worked with Piaget, he illustrated children's books, the assumption is that he knew what he was doing. Maybe he didn't, though, that's the thing about these assumptions. I mean, he also worked with Eugene Ionesco. That was the thing about Sesame Street, the way these influential pedagogues had roots in the avant-garde. Robert Dennis and Peter Schickele came directly to Sesame Street from doing the music to the infamous underground play "Oh! Calcutta". There doesn't... there doesn't seem to be much of a join. Grace Slick counting to ten in song isn't _that_ far removed from her work with the Jefferson Airplane.
Delessert did a couple other things for Sesame Street. The one I came here to post about was a cartoon he did where a hen hatches pterodactyl eggs. This is a conceptually pretty strange film, for sure, but it's not as outright scary as Cartoon Face Morph. It's just weird.
What makes it weirder is... here's something else Who and Sesame Street have in common, their fundamentally international character. Films made for Sesame Street were shown all over the world, dubbed into different languages.
Sesame Street's case, though, is weirder and more complicated. Sesame Street isn't a narratively driven show - it's a patchwork of different films, different ideas, interlocking pieces that, once made, are repeated independent of the episode they were first broadcast in once or many times. Doctor Who is affected by some of this. There are censor clips, clips from old episodes of Blue Peter or Australian computer documentaries, but this variety of footage absolutely pales in comparison to the plethora of sources for the many, many films made for Sesame Street.
One of the clips I remember most fondly from my childhood was a little blue and red typewriter that would roll out, humming tunelessly. It would type out a letter, and then something starting with that letter would show up. There were 26 of these clips made, and thanks to the miracle of the Internet, there's an easily viewable compilation of all of them.
And this, again, is pretty awesome, not just because as a child I did want to see them all. Because the video - which is only in 240p - is extremely revealing of all the various places these videos were collected from. Some of them are official, some of them have old broadcast station chyrons, some of them have file sharing site detritus overlaid on top, VHS lines, films discolored yellow with age and with no effort at color-correcting made... most of them are in pretty good quality but even with that you can readily see all the things that happen to physical and digital media.
The ability to watch all 26 of them at once is, as well, a relatively recent phenomenon, recent enough that you can still see talk on the Internet of the letter "O" being unavailable. People had screen clips, they knew "O" was for owl, but they couldn't watch it. The clip of "O" is really degraded, with a high-pitched whine running through it and discoloration and a Wondershare logo AND a production company logo on top of it, but it's there, it's watchable.
Which, finally, brings us around to the "Hen and Pterodactyl Eggs" clip.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZHFTxxRRM
You see, some of the Doctor Who episodes were dubbed into other languages - the Arabic soundtrack to "Planet of Giants" is officially available on the DVD - but in all of those cases the English audio track also exists. This is not necessarily the case with Sesame Street. There are a large number of films or sketches that exist only in German or French or, as in this case, Arabic.
I'm cool with that. Some people I'm sure are right now hunting for this in English, but I get what's going on here pretty well I think.
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