Who Named 'Sesame Street'?
Can you tell me how to get, how to get to "Fun Street"?
No, but most children and adults can tell you how to get to"Sesame Street." Now, the people who created the iconic PBS program are sharing the origin story of the street's name.
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"We went with it because it was the least bad title," says producer Joan Ganz Cooney in the Sesame Street Workshop blog. She says they were under the gun because the press and publicity people "were going nuts. How were they going to promote a show that had no name?"
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Alternate show titles included "The Video Classroom," "1-2-3 Avenue B," and, simply, "Fun Street." Yucky, yuckier, and yuckiest are more like it. "1-2-3" was the strongest contender, according to the blog, but producers worried that it was too New York-centric for mass consumption. Right on, producers.
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But it's not as if anyone was clapping when writer Virginia Schone pitched the title "Sesame Street." The initial reaction was terrible and nobody was impressed. People thought kids wouldn't be able to pronounce "Sesame." Ha. Alas, it was "the 11th hour and fifty-ninth minute," according to producer Jon Stone. And Dave Connell, the show's executive producer, sent a memo to the staff: "If nobody came up with a better idea, as of Monday we were going to call it Sesame Street."
