Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader (64 page)

• Each side has its own Big Bird-type character that serves as the central figure(s) on the show. The Israelis have Kippy, a giant purple porcupine, and the Palestinians have a giant rooster named Karim. Only the Israeli side has an Oscar the Grouch character: Moses, a muppet who lives in a wrecked car instead of a trash can. Why no Palestinian Oscar: “One Israeli grouch is enough on the show,” says Palestinian producer Daoud Kuttab

• Relations between the Israeli and Palestinian Muppets are less friendly, and more formal than they are on the U.S. show, a condition set by the Palestinian producers. “The Israelis wanted ‘full normalization,’” says Kuttab. “They wanted the Muppets to start dancing right away. We said no kissing, no hugging. There is still a tension between our two peoples. If the characters are too happy, the show won’t succeed.”

• On the U.S. show, the Muppets are free to wander at will. On the Israeli-Palestinian show, Israeli Muppets are allowed to visit the Palestinian side only if they are invited over by the Palestinian Muppets. (During the real-life Israeli occupation, Israeli soldiers were free to enter Palestinian homes without permission.)

Common Ground?

Since the two sides lived on separate streets, the Children’s Television Workshop proposed creating a neutral zone: a park where Israeli and Palestinian Muppets could meet and play. But the Palestinian side nixed the idea, arguing that in the real Middle East, there is no neutral ground. Who would own the park? “We felt strongly that there should at least be a sign in the park marking the border between Israel and Palestine,” Kuttab says.

“I kept arguing that no child would ask who the park belongs to,” says Dolly Wolbrum, an Israeli producer working on the show. That’s an adult perspective. The Palestinians kept saying that isn’t how things are in real life. That’s true, but is there an Israeli street with a purple porcupine walking around it in real life?” The park idea was dropped.

UPDATE:

Then in January of 2000, Uncle John was reading The
London Daily Telegraph
, and spotted this article...which unfortunately wasn’t really much of a surprise:

A pioneering television series intended to bring Israeli and Palestinian children closer together faces the axe after an intrusion of political tensions into its Jewish and Arab production teams.

The Holy Land version of Sesame Street, made separately in Hebrew and Arabic...has ended up a victim of stereotypes, with the Israelis seeing the Palestinian characters as dirty, and the Palestinians regarding the Israelis as violent.

Its American originators are now reviewing the project and may scrap it....

A spokeswoman for the Children’s Television Workshop in New York...acknowledged last week that the task of eliminating “political realities” from the Israeli-Palestinian project had proved impossible.

Meetings are now under way to consider whether it is worth going ahead with a new series.

But the spokesman gave a warning that raising new funding for this would not be easy. “We are reviewing all the goals that we set out to realize,” she said. “We never expected a TV program to change what is happening out there in the real world.”

—The
London Daily Telegraph
, January 9, 2000

*
      
*
      
*

INTERNATIONAL SESAME STREET

Wherever it goes, “Sesame Street” has a big impact. For example:

In China (1996)

“Now ‘Sesame Street,’ will be teaching kids how to pronounce words in Chinese. The American television show is being recreated in China under the Mandarin moniker ‘Zhima Jie.’ Some of the original characters, including Big Bird, have moved overseas, but a few new ones have also been added for ‘local color.’ Among them: Little Berry, known in China as ‘Xiao Meizi,’ and blustering vegetarian Puff Pig (‘Hu Hu Zhu’).

“‘Zhima Jie’ is completely created, written and produced by Chinese educators and TV professionals—which has resulted in the introduction of a new concept to the culture: the combination of humor and education in a TV show. “We had to train them,” explained a Children’s Television Workshop spokesperson “not to teach them production but to teach them what ‘Sesame Street’ is about. Considering they do not speak English—and what we have to go through to get the idea across—for them to finally say, ‘Ah, we can do that here,’ is remarkable.”

—CNN News, 1996

In Egypt

“Meet the Arabic-speaking cousins of Big Bird, the Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch. ‘There’s nothing women can’t be,’ sing these Muppets—Khokha, Filfil and NimNim. They live on an Egyptian street and are ready to entertain children in ‘Alam Simsim,’ literally ‘Sesame’s World.’

“Khokha, the program’s star, is a very curious pink and fluffy Muppet with dark hair. She wants to become a pilot, a doctor and an engineer—all at the same time.

“Egypt’s first lady, Suzanne Mubarak, is the most visible supporter of the show, a co-production between Karma Production in Egypt and New York-based Children’s Television Workshop. ‘The Ministry of Education wants to increase girls’ participation in education, so we have an abundance of images showing girls involved in learning,’ says CTW’s Robert Knezevic.”

—ABC News, June 6, 2000

In South Africa

“South African children will soon [have] ‘Sesame Street’—but its vital educational mission will for the first time be carried across the radio waves.

“Although this is the 20th international co-production of Sesame Street, it is the first time ever that the program airs on radio. The local version is entitled ‘Takalani Sesame.’ The first 78 episodes of the series are in Zulu and Xhosa (with a bit of English thrown in) and will be broadcast in June by Ukhozi FM, Umhlobo Wenene and community radio stations, reaching about 10 million listeners.

‘“Sesame Street South Africa’ is the result of an international co-production between the American Children’s Television Workshop and Durban-based Vuleka Productions.

“The director of Vuleka Productions, Julie Frederikse explains: ‘The primary goal of this project is to reach as many pre-school children as possible—including the poorest of the poor—and the reality in South Africa is that radio is the most capable medium of achieving this.’

‘“Sesame Street’s’ South African version has created a number of original characters which give the show a local flavour: Neno, Moshe, Zuzu, the spirited taxi-driver, Zikwe, wise old grandpa, Mkhulu, and the bike-riding hawker, Thuli.”

—The Teacher/Mail & Guardian
, February 29, 2000

*
      
*
      
*

Dumb Riddles

1.
A man builds a house with all four sides facing south. A bear walks past the house. What color is the bear?

2.
Before the days of motor cars, a man rode into town on his horse. He arrived on Friday, spent three days in town and left on Friday. How is that possible?

3.
Can a man legally marry his widow’s sister in the state of California?

4.
How much dirt is in a hole four feet deep and two feet wide?

Answers

1.
White: the house is built directly on the North Pole.
2.
The horse’s name was Friday.
3.
No—he’s dead.
4.
There’s no dirt in a hole.

Most of us think of jukeboxes as frivolous (or nostalgic) entertainment, but once they were considered mechanical marvels. They played a critical role in developing popular music; in the early 20th century, they were the first phonographs most people saw, and the only ones people could afford. Without them, there would have been no market for blues, jazz, or “hillbilly” music, and the record industry might not have survived. Hard to believe? Read on.

T
HAT’S AN EARFUL

When Thomas Edison invented the “Edison Speaking Phonograph” in 1877, it was an accident—he was actually trying to create a telephone answering machine. When that didn’t work, he suggested a new use for it: a dictation machine for business executives.

The one thing Edison did
not
want his proud machine used for was entertainment. But that’s precisely what happened.

THE MUSIC MACHINE

On November 23, 1889, a man named Louis Glass bought an Edison machine, installed a coin slot, and set it up inside the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. Glass’s phonograph didn’t have much in common with 20th century jukeboxes: it played a wax cylinder; it had no electric amplifiers—just four listening tubes, so only four people could use it at a time—and it could only play a single song over and over.

But most people had never even
seen
a record player...so it was quite a novelty. The machine—which cost a nickel for a two-minute song—reportedly brought in more than $15 a week, big money in 1889. Glass set up a dozen more around San Francisco, and raked in the profits.

A NEW BUSINESSS

Word of the money-making machine quickly spread. Dozens of
saloons around the country copied the idea, and within a year a whole new industry had sprung up to capitalize on the fad.

THE AMERICAN ENTERTAINER

Seventeen years later, the first true “juke box” was introduced. It was called the “Automatic Entertainer”—a slightly misleading name, since it had to be cranked by hand. But it did play the new 10-inch discs instead of wax-and-cardboard cylinder recordings. It also offered more than one selection; it had a huge 40-inch horn instead of listening tubes (though you still couldn’t hear it unless you were standing nearby); and it could even tell the difference between “slugs” and real coins.

Its most impressive feature, however, was its record-changing mechanism. This was mounted inside a glass cabinet at the top of the machine, and customers could actually watch the machine pick their record and play it. For most people, that was worth a nickel by itself. They would stand and gawk as the machine performed for them. Thereafter, the jukebox was as much of an attraction as the music it played.

AN ELECTRIFYING DEVELOPMENT

The Automatic Entertainer and its descendants dominated the industry for the next 20 years. But they were still missing something: volume.

In 1927—at about the same time that the electric guitar was being developed—the Automatic Music Instrument Company (AMI) changed that. They introduced the world’s first electrically amplified music-playing machine.

“Electrical amplification was the single most important technical improvement in the history of the machine,” Vincent Lynch writes in
Jukebox: The Golden Age.
“Suddenly the jukebox was capable of competing with loud orchestras. It could entertain large groups of people in large halls, all at once, for a nickel.”

MUSIC NOT PROHIBITED

The timing couldn’t have been better. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, radio was the hot new medium. It threatened to make both jukeboxes
and
phonographs obsolete.

But as soon as jukeboxes could be heard in crowds, they found a profitable new home: speakeasies. Alcohol had become illegal in 1920, and rather than stop drinking, millions of Americans started frequenting these illegal bars. They needed entertainment. “Automatic phonographs” were the perfect solution: they were cheaper and less risky than big bands, and more entertaining than a piano player.

In small, low-rent speakeasies, they were also the only way to get around the prejudice and elitism of radio. Network radio—as powerful an influence on music trends in the 1930s as MTV is on rock today—shunned most “race” music such as jazz, rhythm and blues in favor of classical and mainstream pop hits.

Because of this, black speakeasies—known
as juke joints
(originally slang for prostitution houses,
juke
came to mean “dance”)—preferred to get their music from automatic phonographs. “For all practical purposes,” says one music critic, “there was no place a black musician could have his records heard on a large scale but the jukebox.” In time, the machines became so closely associated with juke joints that they became known as
jukeboxes.

Well...
To be fair, it wasn’t just booze that saved the jukebox. Because of the Great Depression in the 1930s, most families couldn’t afford their own Victrola phonographs and records. But they
could
afford to pop an occasional nickel into a jukebox.