It’s Not Easy Bein’ Brown: Rita Moreno, Lena Horne and The Muppet Show (original) (raw)
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Launched on Public Television in 1969, Sesame Street is most known for its remarkable puppets (Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, etc.), later known as muppets, created by the legendary puppeteer Jim Henson. These muppets were often larger-than-life, especially in the case of Big Bird, and have become part of the imagination of generations of Americans, and not only. A number of new muppets have been added over the years, some remaining as stalwarts, while others only for a certain period of time. I will argue, among other things, that the eccentric muppets normalized alternative lifestyles, behaviour, body sizes, racial tolerance, different skin colours and diversity. It was also revolutionary, however, for its focus on intercity minority children and inclusion of a diverse range of crew members (women, African-Americans, Latinos, disabled people, LGBT, among others). The regular inclusion of guest celebrities (the list is extensive to say the least) also provided not only entertainment, but progressive ideas concerning race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. This paper will explore the cultural significance of this awardwinning and groundbreaking television classic, which celebrated eccentricity, creativity, tolerance and diversity.
Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 2021
Through the abundant use of the bawdy, humorous songs of British music hall, The Muppet Show delivered a potent critique of constructed notions of a protectionist childhood. Paradoxically perhaps, the music hall songs, carnivalesque comedy and frequent depictions of sex, sexuality, and violence also did much to construct The Muppet Show’s intended “family” audience while simultaneously providing a direct challenge to its normative sanguinuptial (blood and marriage) construction. This intergenerational family audience is crucial to the child’s interpretation of The Muppet Show’s complex and contentious content - subject matter that is rarely included in media made for a solely child audience. While the musical sketches open up an interpretive space for the child to encounter, resist, and subvert the range of fluid identities hinted at onscreen, the process is simultaneously constricted by the musical-visual texts themselves and by The Muppet Show’s family-reception context. As such, this case study reveals the inherent tensions of targeting a family audience through music and television.
Bridging the gaps? Sesame Street, 'race' and educational disadvantage
2019
Sesame Street is the longest-running children’s television show of all time: it has become almost a sacred institution, which is guaranteed to generate a warm, nostalgic glow. Yet fifty years on, it’s important to recall some of the controversy that surrounded its early days. In this essay, drawing on original archival research, I go back to the origins of Sesame Street and the Children’s Television Workshop, the non-profit organization that created it. The programme was targeted at preschool children in general, but particularly at disadvantaged, inner-city children – and, at least initially, at African-American children specifically. It did this in two main ways: firstly, through its representation of inner-city life, and of racial diversity; and secondly, through attempting to raise the educational achievement of black children in particular. In exploring these two issues, I show that this was a difficult – and at times, quite confused and contradictory – endeavour. This essay is part of a larger project, Growing Up Modern: Childhood, Youth and Popular Culture Since 1945. More information about the project, and illustrated versions of all the essays can be found at: https://davidbuckingham.net/growing-up-modern/.
Sophie Tucker, Racial Hybridity and Interracial Relations in American Vaudeville
Theatre Research International
This article discusses Sophie Tucker's racialized performance in the context of early twentieth-century American vaudeville and black–Jewish interracial relations. Tucker's vaudeville musical acts involved mixed racial referents: ‘black-style’ music and dance, Jewish themes, Yiddish language and the collaboration of both African American and Jewish artists. I show how these racial combinations were a studied tactic to succeed in white vaudeville, a corporate entertainment industry that capitalized on racialized images and fast changes in characters. From historical records it is clear that Tucker's black signifiers also fostered connections with the African American artists who inspired her work or were employed by her. How these interracial relations contended with Tucker's brand of racialized performance is the focus of the latter part of the article. Here I analyse Tucker's autobiography as a performative act, in order to reveal a reparative effort toward some...
Blackface and minstrelsy in Hollywood musicals through the early twentieth century have been long studied but how these performances appear on the radio through purely aural cues has yet to be throughly investigated. In this project, I consider the remediation of MGM’s “Holiday Inn” by Screen Guild Theatre alongside the popular radio show Amos ’n’ Andy to begin to address this lacuna in scholarship. These radio programs give insight into how race was perceived as true to the performance—and not necessarily the performer’s body—on the radio, resulting in the “star phenomenon” constraining performances in radio adaptations. As Richard Dyer claims, the star phenomenon consists of everything that is publicly available about stars, rendering them multi-medial and intertextual. Likewise, Hollywood musicals were not fixed works but regularly modified to extend their reach and increase the popularity of the film as well as their stars—thus expanding modes for circulation of celebrity in the era of the studio system’s dominance. Bing Crosby’s performance of race and blackface in Screen Guild Theatre’s “Holiday Inn” illustrates how the long tradition of minstrelsy continues through radio performances of racialized voices and bodies. Through a close analysis of the web of signs in which Amos’n’Andy and “Holiday Inn” were entangled, I argue that in remediations from screen to radio, blackface performance is affected by racial nervousness surrounding stars’ identity construction. Through dialect, timbre, and context, Amos’n’ Andy’s white stars Godsen and Correll built on minstrel show traditions to develop their black characters that purportedly “felt real,” to both black and white radio audiences of the time. Contrastingly, in Screen Guild Theatre’s performance of “Holiday Inn,” color lines between bodies take on a different approach than that in the film. The performance of the song “Abraham” features racialized vocal and physical performances by all three featured performers, yet these affects are downplayed on radio. Here, white bodies remain white, while black bodies bear the burden of difference. The ways diverse contemporary audiences understood and interacted with the black characters and white performers resulted in how programs portrayed, or did not, blackface characters on the radio.
¡Manzana! Scram! Latinx Community Activism in Sesame Street since the 1970s
2023
Sesame Street encapsulates the relationship between social activism and diverse media representation. In 1971, when Emilio Delgado (1940-2022) was cast as Luis, TV and film opportunities for Latinx were mostly “banditos [sic, bandidos], gang members, low-life characters, and sleepy Mexican under a cactus. But I was part of several groups of Chicanos and Latinos that came together to protect that. We were meeting with producers and directors and big honchos in Hollywood, telling them, ‘you’ve got to look at us like people. There are doctors and teachers in our community, but we are not being represented that way’” (Davis 230-1). Artists like Delgado exemplify a continental community consciousness bent on promoting education and narrowing the achievement gap for all children (Cooney 13).