Celebrating the Unpopular Arts
 
Now I want to see Oscar the Grouch as one of Batman’s eyes on the street

Now I want to see Oscar the Grouch as one of Batman’s eyes on the street

The November (cover dated) comics where I saw ABC’s Saturday morning schedule advertised also had ads for another kids’ show on another network. Though I couldn’t have known it at the time, the show was a little bit different.

Looking at that ad I would have had no idea how big a deal Sesame Street would be. After my family arrived in the U.S.A. I became aware of the show but I can’t recall I had any interest. At 11 I was too old for the target audience but not old enough to find charm in shows directed at younger kids. By contrast I found Electric Company fun when it debuted on PBS a couple of years later.

If I’d seen the advertisement (it came out during my absence from comics reading), the presence of Superman and Batman might have convinced me to watch it. Does anyone know what their role on the show was and how long it lasted?

 

9 Comments

  1. Alaric

    I remember that there were occasional short Superman cartoons, teaching letters and sounds, I think? I don’t remember ever seeing Batman on Sesame Street.

  2. Gavin

    As an original season one Sesame Street viewer, I vaguely remember the cartoons when they were on. At four or five year old, they weren’t what held my attention the most (let’s drop more cakes down those stairs and run some more psychadelic counting cartoons!), and they disappeared from the show pretty quickly, so I suppose I wasn’t alone in that assessment.

    Here’s one:
    https://youtu.be/VUQfNxeKqjY?si=k4eBKaJCHKlr4x5X

    Better still, here’s more information than you can shake a batarang at, from the Muppet Wiki:
    https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Batman

  3. Jeff Nettleton

    Filmation was producing the Batman/Superman Hour and produced the cartoons, specifically for Sesame Street. There was one Superman (“S is For Superman”) and I think 3 Batman cartoons, plus one where Batman, speaking from a TV (Voiced by Olan Soule, the voice actor of the cartoons) offering a compromise to Bert & Ernie, who are arguing about watching Batman and The Man From Alphabet.

    I held memories of the Penguin cartoon, into my adult years, but other people never seemed to recall them. I was there with Sesame Street, from the beginning, when David was there, a different Gordon and before Luis and Maria.

    The Filmation segments were there through the first few years, in repeats, maybe up to 1971-72? Just a guess, based on my age, at that time. I still watched, as I got older, with my little sister, as well as The Electric Company and Mr Roger’s Neighborhood.

    The original voice actors are used (Olan Soule & Casey Kasem, for Batman & Robin, Ted Knight, for Joker & Penguin, Bud Collyer as Superman) and Filmation producer Lou Scheimer voices the Penguin’s henchmen.

    In this time frame, there were also commercials for the US Air Force recruiting, with Mission Impossible’s Peter Lupus, as Superman.

      1. Jeff Nettleton

        Electric Company was great. Between Sesame Street and The Electric Company, that was how I first learned to read. Sesame introduced you to the letters and other concepts, then the Electric Company had the silhouette segment, where two people would pronounce syllables of words, then the entire word. My mother once told me she discovered I could read when we drove somewhere and I was sounding out names on road signs.

        1. I remember catching it while in college, by which point I was old enough not to be embarrassed watching “kid stuff.”
          Weird to think now that it had Rita Moreno in the cast — at the time I didn’t know who she was, other than “actor.”

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