Welcome to the Tweed Trends podcast. Hey, Evette, what's trending today? Hey, I'm Evette, hey girl. And you are tuned in to Tweed Trends.
It's the quickest way to find out what's trending today. Welcome back, guys. Today is Sesame Street Day. I'm so excited.
Let's get started. I don't know about you, but I cannot imagine a world without Sesame Street because it has been around literally for my entire life. It was founded back in 1969 with a $7 million grant from the United States Department of Education and the Ford and Carnegie Foundations. Well, let me back up.
I was surprised to know. You might not be surprised to know this, but I was very surprised to know that there is a possibility that Sesame Street could have not been a thing. And that's mind-boggling to me because they have been around for over 50 years. Literally, they are the longest running children's show ever.
They've got the crown for that. And if I have anything to do with it, they will continue to wear that crown because I feel like everybody needs a little bit of Sesame Street in their lives. But back to what I was saying about possibly not being a thing, did you know that lawmakers in Mississippi and Alabama fought to defund PBS because they had images of black and white children playing together? This was back at the inception back in 1969.
Lawmakers in Mississippi and Alabama did not want this PBS, they didn't want the entire channel. They were like, no, defund this thing because you should not have black children playing with white children on television. Talk about the hate. So I just thank God that there were some smart people back then that knew that those lawmakers in Mississippi and Alabama were full of it and that they needed to take that nonsense someplace else and brought us this beautiful thing that we know as Sesame Street.
And you know, because Sesame Street, in my opinion, is the helper of parents, is the helper of guardians. If you have children, then Sesame Street is like your best buddy and you got to treat them as such. Sesame Street will always maintain its relevance. And I say this because they have a way of using these puppets to tell stories about tough topics just as well as they can talk about the educational topics.
So whereas they're teaching your kid about numbers and letters and sounds and feelings and emotions and how to treat people, they're also covering different topics like prison, mourning, racism, bullying, divorce, disasters, like natural disasters, those types of things. And so that's why I say their relevance is ongoing and it doesn't even matter if it's an old episode or a new episode, kids love this stuff. And so the fact that the makers and the writers there at Sesame Street, they can take a tough topic and break it down in such a way and present it to your children that they can digest it on a child's level and understand it and be able to speak intelligently on these topics sometimes more intelligently than the adults can do it. It's amazing.
But they've also brought a lot of other bits and pieces into the show over the years. It's changed over the years and I'm not even gonna lie. I was a hater for a hot little second there because it wasn't exactly the way that I remembered it from when I was a kid. And then on top of that, my daughter and I just watched it the other day, we're probably gonna watch it again today.
She is in second grade now and it has changed from when she was a toddler. Some of the songs have changed and I'm like, oh my gosh, I gotta learn a new song now because they don't sing that one the same anymore. But it doesn't matter because it comes quick and we all love it, we have fun with it. So just to kind of go over some of the other characters that they've brought into play along the years, there was back in the 70s, there was Linda the Librarian and from what I understand, she was actually deaf and she taught sign language.
So for a lot of children, Sesame Street was the first place they were introduced to sign language. Then there was a young girl, her name was Tara and she was in a wheelchair. Lily, one of the Muppets, she was homeless. Then there's Julia, Julia's one of the newer ones.
Julia is autistic. Rosita is Hispanic, not that we didn't already have Maria on there from way back. There's Cami and now Cami is from the South African version of Sesame Street and she actually is HIV positive. And she talks about HIV and AIDS along with other different topics.
There's Zari and what's his name, Xerach. Zari and Xerach, they are from Afghanistan, Sesame Street. And their whole thing is talking about equal opportunities for all, not just boys, but boys and girls. Xerach is Zari's younger brother.
And he is like, oh, I want to be just like my sister. And she's like, you gotta go to school, you gotta get your lesson. And you know, you can do great things. One of my all time favorites is Sege.
She is the one that sings, I love my hair song. That is, I recorded that episode. And speaking of the episodes, well, I'll get to that later. I just love Sesame Street.
I love it, I love it, I love it. More characters. There's Alex. Alex has a parent that's in jail.
And so there are so many different things that Sesame Street has brought in along the way to help bring everybody to the table. And then on top of that, you know, all of the puppet characters, there are different colors and different things like that. So it shows that we don't have to be the same. We don't have to look the same.
And we can still be friends. We can still get along. We can still have fun together. So I mentioned the relevance of Sesame Street.
And I don't know if any of you caught it, if you saw any of the tweets about it. But people were bringing Sesame Street into this most recent elections outcome. The fact that the current sitting president is saying, you know, stop the count, stop the count. Well, people, I love people.
They were putting these tweets out there with these crazy memes with the count from Sesame Street. Basically saying, you can't stop the count. And to me, that's hilarious. That's clever.
I love it. People need to keep that kind of humor up because that's what we need, especially in these days and times. But so whereas the people online were poking fun at the president by way of the Sesame Street character, the count, were you aware that Sesame Street itself has been poking fun at Donald Trump since back in the 80s? I don't think I noticed it.
And I guess because as a kid, I didn't know who Donald Trump was. But I know who Ronald Grump was. He was one of the grout characters on Sesame Street. And it was very obvious.
It was very clear, looking back on it, where they had grump towers that they were trying to build and whatnot, that these were clear jabs at Donald Trump. And I just can't help but to Giggle just thinking about it. But then when you think about it, oops, what was that? When you think about it, a while back, gosh, when was that, that was probably around 2017, where the president was considering a budget that would drastically take away funding from channels like PBS and NPR and whatnot.
And people were up in arms about it because it was like, it was kind of like that was Jenkins thing. Like, nobody's saying that about Miss Jenkins. Well, don't nobody play with the funding to Sesame Street, seriously. And it's interesting, the argument they had, basically, what they were trying to say is that as a government, they could justify asking a single parent or somebody that's living in a place where maybe mining or something was their livelihood.
And now they don't have that any longer. They could justify asking that person to pay for other things through their taxes. However, they could not justify any type of money going towards funding something along the lines of APBS. And like I said before already, people sleep on Sesame Street.
They think that always just a show. Sesame Street is more than a show. It is a way of life. Parents, what would you do without Sesame Street?
For real. Sit and think about it. There are times that you were able to catch a breather, sit down and pull yourself together because Big Bird and Mr. Snuffoluficus and everybody was going on an adventure.
And your kid was all dialed in. I know I was able to do my daughter's hair like a champ. When we were watching Sesame Street, she wasn't noticing anything. It was just like, oh, yeah.
So let me get this hair done in this hour. Now, grain it. Since, and I'm going to assume that it was since that whole 2017 deal talking about the whole budget and whatnot, that Sesame Street has gone from an hour to 30 minute program. And so they've cut out a lot of stuff.
And I'm really sad about that. Because to me, the hour was perfect. Getting an hour of Sesame Street in a day, an hour of education and character building type talk, that was something serious. Now, one thing I do want to say also is that in case you didn't know, Sesame Workshop is a nonprofit 501c3.
So you know where I'm going with this, right? That's today's episode. But I got to go ahead and finish that last little bit that I was throwing in there from the last segment, that yes, Sesame Workshop is a nonprofit of 501c3. And you know what that means?
That is a great place to put your donations. If you love Sesame Street, like I love Sesame Street, because I'm rocking my Big Bird shirt and everything today. Because Big Bird let me know that it was all right to be the tallest being out there. And that wasn't even a part of the message.
But just by seeing him being taller than everybody else and as a kid, I was always the tallest one in class. It was OK to be Big Bird, because Big Bird was cool. But anyway, so like I was saying, make some donations to Sesame Workshop. Because as far as their licensing agreements and their videotapes, those markets have both hit some really hard times simply because we've got stuff like Netflix and streaming services that are cutting into the DVD situation.
And there are so many other characters out there that unless your Elmo, Big Bird, Cookie Monster, then a lot of these other characters are not getting the love out there. Therefore, the licensing agreements are kind of taking a serious hit. Sesame Street needs us, guys. We've got to be there for them.
They've been there for us for over 50 years. We need to be there for them. Got it? All right.
So you know what you got to do. Head on over to Twitter and look up at Sesame Street. That's at S-E-S-A-M-E-S-T-R-E-T. Or you can go to the website, sesame street.org.
While you're on your computer, don't forget to check me out. Hey, that's at heyevette. Or just look for the hashtag tweet trends. You can find me on Twitter.
You can find me on Instagram. And you can even find me on YouTube, my new YouTube channel. Hey, that's all right. Have a great Tuesday.
And I'll see you back here again on Thursday.