"Classic Sesame Street Boxset" Out in October (1 Viewer)

[Lord Dalek]

Some general thoughts.

Video: Eratic. It seems either CTW were provided or simply had very bad cameras. The 1969 and 1972 episodes suffer from some of the worst banding I have ever seen in a late 60's television series taped on 525 line NTSC 2" Quad (even worse than NTSC-sourced Doctor Who!).



Notice the swatches of pink chroma on Big Bird. Its pretty bad.

Sound: Mono encoded as stereo. Fidelty is naturally limited but still nice and warm. Sesame Street was never the show to demonstrate your sound system (it only went into stereo a few years back) but what we have could have been a whole lot worse.

Content: As previously mentioned, at least two of these episodes have had logo plastering at their tailends, (Episode 1 should have the NET logo and Episode 136 the Mcdonald Carey PBS thing) but the version of the 1972 P-Head used is probably the sharpest and brightest I've ever seen. Six in one I guess.

So many great gems here in the bonus features. Sadly Pinball Number Count isn't here but I imagine it'll be on Volume 2.

All in all a good set.

 

[Jay Pennington]

That isn't a result of the cameras but of the tape and/or player. I wouldn't be surprised if the early 2" shows were transferred to more managable formats years ago, with mixed results.

 

[Patrick.C]

Wasn't it listed on the packaging?

 

[Lord Dalek]

Yes but its still not in the set.

 

[Jonathan_Clarke]

Got mine from DDD. I love the way they laid these out (season premiere and best of extras) but they could have done so much more. Each season should have gotten at least an hour of extra sketches. I've seen MANY classic clips on youtube from this era that are missing on this set.

 

[JohnS]

This is a great set, and seeing stuff on youtube helps me remember what stuff I want or have forgotten about.

I'm anxiously waiting untill this sesame street classic comes out
Kermit sings alphabet with girl (ABCDEF-Cookie Monster)

NOw that we have Sesame Street and Electric Company
I would also LOVE to have Bloodhound Gang box set to come out.

 

[Paul Miller]

What does the new deal with Genius mean for future releases of the Old School Series?




Paul

 

[Bryan^H]

Paul asked a good question.

Does anyone know if a Sesame Street Old School vol 2 is planned?

 

[Lord Dalek]

I assume so but Sesame Workshop hasn't announced anything about it.

An increased episode count would be nice too.

 

[Jack Platt]

WOW!!!

I remember that song "A Little Bit in the Beginning!" Great stuff! Does this version have one of the most fondly remember Sesame Street songs of all time on it? The classic, "What's the Name of that Song?" (a.k.a "La Dee Da Dee Dum.)

Jack

 

[MatthewA]

Since Sony Wonder was relaunched, does the Weinstein Company's deal with Sesame Workshop still apply?

I agree about the increased episode count. And would it kill them to try and clear some of the music (it was jarring to see a lead-in to the song "Consider Yourself" and then have it cut off right before it begins) or try and correct the color to get rid of those yellow lines?

 

[Mark Y]

That's not in the Volume One set. However, that song was performed in the first show of the 1974-1975 season (ominous show number #666), which also is the first appearance of Roscoe Orman as Gordon #3. So assuming the second volume follows the pattern of the first (the "season premieres" of the next five seasons), this should be in there. I myself would prefer more of the earlier seasons (and though the set they released has a lot of great stuff in it, I would have preferred the approach of the "Electric Company" sets, which have a lot more full episodes in them) but I'm sure it will be worth having either way.

 

[Mark Y]

Not sure how much magic they can do with these tapes. They were recorded on quad tape years and years ago, and I believe I've read that a lot of the tapes have had to be copied a few times over the years...it's a huge library of episodes. As we learned regarding the aborted official DVD release of Hanna-Barbera's "Banana Splits Adventure Hour," Quad tape is an antiquated format, and those old frail tapes need to be transferred to something useable...the Splits shows (the ones that were saved) were transferred to modern one-inch tape in the late 1980s, but in some of the transfers, the heads were out of alignment and it's very noticeable in scenes with a lot of red in the image...so what do you do, use it as is, or try and reassemble the shows from a variety of other film and tape elements? ($$$$$$$$$$)

Sesame Workshop did clear a lot of music for the set, but not everything (unfortunately). Fortunately, both "Consider Yourself" and Stevie Wonder's "1-2-3 Sesame Street" were included when those episodes aired on Noggin.

 

[moogaboo]

Sesame's entire video library was transferred to digital some years ago. I believe they have an in-house database that can call up clips whenever they need one.

As for Volume 2 of Old School, I see Amazon has a November 7 release date listed -- but of course there's been no official announcement as of yet.

 

[Lord Dalek]

IIRC there are some early 70s eps that only exist on 16mm Kine.

 

[Ethan Riley]

I believe that is correct. Some of the earliest episodes only seem to exist in B&W I guess, because from time to time I have seen old clips and they were in scratchy B&W kinescope prints. I do recall them showing such clips on the news when one of the cast members died a few years ago. And I thought oh no--all the old 70s are only available on kinescope. Good thing that isn't true at least!

 

[Mark Y]

FWIW, Noggin used to run older shows (1969-1989) under the title "Sesame Street Unpaved." There was a rotation of 67 shows, a few from each of the first 20 "seasons." They were edited by a few minutes each, but the quality was generally very good (though when I watched them on digital cable, there were some noticeable compression artifacts). None were from kinescopes, but it would stand to reason that in picking and choosing the shows, if there were some that only had been preserved that way, those probably would not have been chosen. I know there is at least one show circulating among collectors from a B/W kinescope, but that isn't uncommon (and it doesn't necessarily mean that's the only way that particular episode survives). Collector copies of some "Electric Companies" circulate that way too.

 

[Jack Platt]

It would stand to reason that the executives of The Children's Television Workshop may have kept "The BEST" (by popularity) of Sesame Street skits preserved. But one may wonder how many complete unedited episodes still exist from the show's early days? (1969-1974 or so.) I don't think there would be a rush to put kiniscope episodes on DVD because of their presumed poor quality and the cost of the restoration process. Hopefully CTW, did the best they could with the prints and shows that are currently available.

Jack

 

[Jack Platt]

Interesting observations that the DVD's have a comment that says, Sesame Street is geared for ADULTS and NOT Children! (Also, the story says that classics such as Monsterpiece Theater have been reshot.) The original version had Cookie Monster smoking a pipe and than eating it. How do you feel about this? Story here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/ma...in&oref=slogin

 

[Mark Y]

A few years ago, I would have asked the same question. It all comes back to my general belief that in certain cases (local TV productions, daytime shows, etc.) the likelihood of a show or series being preserved depends on whether the producers/networks/owners of the property believed (at the time) it could be repeated later. The Sesame Street shows were repeated a number of times over the current season (in Chicago, I remember it airing several times a day and in the early 70s, sometimes several episodes were shown over weekends) but those specific shows were never seen again once the new season started. So naturally, I was shocked to find that at least a selection of them had been preserved. Same goes for The Electric Company, although in the case of TEC, I did have a tape dupe of at least one episode (from a B/W kinescope) that later ended up airing on Noggin from a superior video source. I think those B/W kines that circulate on some shows were made for some other purpose, like showing on closed-circuit TV to the Armed Forces or something.

I read an article on line some years ago that described the archiving process for CTW's older shows. The article stated that "the library" (all the old episodes of SS, TEC and other shows) had been duplicated a few times over the years as newer video formats were introduced, and I got the strong impression that (against expectations) they did indeed preserve a large inventory of entire shows, because the article made reference to how much easier it is today (in the digital domain) to find older clips and film inserts to use again, and how in the past, they had to fast forward through an entire old episode to find those segments. It was very interesting reading.

Here's the article:

http://web.archive.org/web/200012042...721/0721.6.htm