The Muppets’ Missionary Position

Finally,” filmmakers Linda Goldstein Knowlton and Linda Hawkins Costigan exclaimed upon learning that Jim Henson’s affable Sesame Street Muppets were being used to teach South African children about HIV/AIDS, “An American cultural export we can be proud of.”

Sesame Street was originally created in 1968, at the height of the civil rights era. It was envisioned as a way of teaching urban, underpriviledged kids their ABCs and 123s—as well as tolerance and compassion. The idea was beautiful in its simplicity: take a recognizable urban locus and transform it from the kind of place where kids are bullied and sold drugs into a multi-ethnic utopia where everyone can laugh and learn in harmony. Throw in some lovable Muppets and you’ve got a successful, and insanely exportable, educational model.

Just talking about Sesame Street brings a tear to my eye, conjuring images of sitting in OshKosh finery with Kraft dinner running down my chin, clapping along with Ernie’s ode to Ducky.

Since a German company approached Sesame Street‘s producers (then the Children’s Television Workshop and now under the Sesame Workshop monicker) to help make Sesamstraße in 1972, the show has been translated into an ever-expanding number of languages and cultural contexts. Fearing that Big Bird would serve as a symbol of American Cultural Imperialism, the producers of Sesamstraße replaced him with a mambo-loving brown bear named Samson.

Sesame Street currently appears in over 120 countries, with over 25 of those being co-productions. They’ve learned that you can’t simply dump a dubbed version of an American show into a foreign market. Countries like South Africa, India and, yes, Canada, want to harness the educational power of the show while tailoring it to their own audiences (see Basil the Bear in Canada’s Sesame Park). As a result, the show’s environment, the set of a New York street, changes with each new cultural context it enters. The street (or the Park in Canada’s case) needs to be recognizable to the children consuming its content. The themes the shows address need to be recognizable too: thus South Africa’s controversial HIV+ Kami on South Africa’s Takalani Sesame, a show that incorporates all 11 of the nation’s languages.

Goldstein Knowlton and Hawkins Costigan’s The World According to Sesame Street (which screened yesterday at Hod Docs), is a look at how the show is used to promote peace and education in strife-ridden areas of the world. It’s at its best when it focuses on cultural translation and the effectiveness of the Sesame model, and while the film has been accused of boosterism , you’d have to be a pretty cynical sourpuss to say that the programs, which reach millions of children in areas that desperately need the program’s message of tolerance, are unworthy of celebration.

The film cuts between a rough history of the program’s emergence as an exportable model to the stories of two crews’ attempts to get Sesame Street co-productions off the ground: one in Kosovo and the other in Bangladesh.

The team in Kosovo is confronted with Serbian and Albanian populations that literally do not know or want to know each other. The Kosovar co-production team values the Sesame Street universe—where all can come together, regardless of the colour of one’s skin or the language one speaks—in the abstract, but in the end it’s decided that both the Albanian and Serbian populations need their own shows.

Sisimpur, the Bangladeshi production, meanwhile, must struggle with the intrusion of politics into its missionary project. This section is at its most intriguing and engaging when the issue of puppets’ eyes is raised. The Bangladeshi puppeteers point out that the Sesame Street muppets’ eyes do not subscribe to those traditionally used in age-old Bengali puppeteering practice. After much confering, a compromise is reached. A small space in Sisimpur is created where more traditional puppets live and tell stories through song and dance. As Children’s Television Workshop head Joan Gatz Cooney remarks upon learning of the development, “Jim Henson would be very proud of what you’ve done.”

Unfortunately, where the film suffers is in its desire to follow the Bangladeshi team rather than telling the story of the phenomenon. The World According to Sesame Street is fun, engaging, intriguing and, yes, inspiring. In that way, it does everything that its primary funders, Jeff Skoll’s activist—and thus far insanely successful—Participant Productions, would want from it. But where it falters is in its inability to distinguish the important from the unimportant. Why do we need to follow the Bangladeshi co-production from meeting to meeting with a government minister? Why do we need to see them waiting in a hotel room as riots consume the street? Why not instead address the story of the failed Israeli-Palestinian co-production that emerged directly after the Oslo Accord? It would seem the filmmaking team was looking for a human angle, that they wanted a set of core characters to follow. Maybe some people liked sitting in hotel rooms waiting for the phone to ring, but I would have preferred more discussion about the challenges of cultural translation.

In the end though, there’s no denying that this is an insanely powerful piece. Whether it’s the warm, fuzzy feeling an audience who grew up with the show gets from watching Elmo in German, or the hopeful slant it casts on globalization, I don’t know. All I know is that, after we spilled out onto the street, more than a few good friends of mine were suddenly talking about doing “something good.” Whatever that means.

The World According to Sesame Street will likely grab the festival’s audience award. Furthermore, its strong backing and huge audience appeal ensures that it will get a relatively wide release very soon. So if you didn’t get a chance to see it yesterday, keep an eye out.