Personal Stories
Google Celebrates 40th Anniversary of Sesame Street by Producing a Doodle of Big Bird
Today (November 4th) marks the 40th Anniversary of one of the highest rated childrens television show, of the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s and amazingly still on today. For many of us, older American’s, it was one of the only television shows that we watched during our prepubescent days. Now, yes there were others: Fraggle Rock, Inspector Gadget, just to name a few, but none of them had the tradition and the educational value that Sesame Street did. Personally none of them made us laugh every time Ernie woke up Bart, or provided us the warm fuzzy feeling as we watched Big Birds famous little waddle.
In celebration of this joyous event Google has produced their very own doodle of Big Bird. For many of us, Big Bird is the iconic character that we have grown up to know and love. For me, I personally enjoyed the Cookie Monster, but that of course was my personal preference and lead to my over weight child hood. Ok, moving right along...
This history of the Sesame Street goes back 40 years when Jim Henson, created the famous Muppet characters. An interesting and less know fact, is this extremely popular television show was actually produced by a non-profit organization originally called the "Children's Television Network". This organization started in 1966 by Carnegie Institutes Joan Ganz Cooney, who was hired to perform extensive research on child development specifically on how television can be used to educate and prepare children for school. Soon after an 8 Million dollar grant the Children's Television Network was formed and thus our lovable Big Bird was born.
