19 February 2001: Kermit the Gorf.
Mark R. Brand

Do you remember the old-school Sesame Street television series?  I’m not talking about the shitty new one with Elmo and all the little fairy muppets.  I’m talking about the REALLY old school Sesame Street where the old guy shit the bed of cancer and they had to explain to Big Bird how his friend really wasn’t ever coming back.  I’m talking about the Sesame Street where Big Bird was suffering from dyslexia and had to constantly try to re-spell the word “frog” in a special t-shirt for the aforementioned green muppet.  Kermit the GORF, Kermit the FORG, Kermit the GROF.  I’m talking about the Sesame Street that had a memorable cast of characters who weren’t worried about things like political correctness or race.  There was a big bald black guy that wore brown turtleneck sweaters and mutton-chop sideburns as if he was Shaft, and spoke in ebonics whenever applicable and nobody saw a problem with it.  There was an Eastern European character that was an obvious middle-finger to our Baltic cousins called the Count.  There was a little funny blue guy that I always liked the best named Grover who was constantly fucking things up because he was greedy or shortsighted, or simply not smart enough to make his plans work.  There was a huge blue beast called Cookie Monster that represented the ID in all of us, eating whatever he could eat, a slave to his appetites, not caring if he lost half the cookie each time he ate one because he was eating them so voraciously.  There were an endless cast of murmuring little creatures who said things like “Yup yup yup yup yup”, and had no other purpose than to be background characters in the life story of this little group.  The Yup Yups were the other world, characters, but not characters.  When they poked their lives into the lives of the main cast, they were important, at all other times, forgotten.  And then there were the little kids.  Tons of them.  No one ever remembered what the little kids looked like or what their names were because it just wasn’t important.  They were the constant inquisitors of the main cast, the badgering children who existed simply to keep a real-life eye on the main cast and to keep them out of trouble.  The adults were the sages.  The Big People were the ones to go to when you didn’t know what to do or when you didn’t understand something, and they were the ones that would inevitably step in to correct a problem that had become bigger than the experience or skill of the main cast.  There was the enthusiastic. and sometimes inexplicably wise, balladeer.  Kermit was the average guy, the eyes that saw everything.  Kermit was the narrator, the hero, and in many ways one of the most interesting characters of 1980’s storytelling.  Kermit also constantly faced new challenges and bad luck, but Kermit, unlike the other muppets, acted like maybe HE could someday be an adult, one of the wise sages.  Kermit was just a muppet, sure, but sometimes, Kermit could solve problems in a roundabout, ploddingly logical, way.  Kermit was in intellectual.  Sure, maybe there were some things he didn’t quite understand yet.  Things that only age and experience could bring, but Kermit was the one that tried to understand, tried to do good, and occasionally succeeded.  Big Bird was the child that every child is.  Big Bird not only didn’t understand what was going on half of the time, but he was constantly being hoodwinked by the other characters and put up as the patsy when another character did wrong.  Big Bird had a very interesting imaginary friend called Snufalupagus that only he could see.  None of the other characters believed him that Snufalupagus was real.  The thing was, though, Snufalupagus WAS real.  Or at least he was real to Big Bird.  So even though Big Bird was just a child, there was something special about being a child that the others had lost.  There was something that Big Bird could see made some kind of magical and inexplicable sense.  And even though some people could understand it if Big Bird wanted to make shit up, Big Bird knew his friend was real.  The old Sesame Street, for all its gaudy and commercialist 80’s hoo-haa, was a quality show for children to watch.  It took kids places and exposed them to things that were perhaps not so nice about life.  And it showed them that if you try, you too can be an adult and wise and then someday it will be your turn to help the other confused people that were too young to know about life on their own.  I think the children of today would benefit from reruns of Sesame Street.