Muppets with Puppets!

One of my favorite parts of the original Topper/Educational Toys SESAME STREET puppets was the super packaging (see two previous posts). The sides of the box were decorated with artwork by my favorite SESAME STREET artist, Jack Davis, though I had no idea of who the artist was when I was a kid back in 1971 and became enchanted with the imagery.  Here it is for you to peruse:

There is so much character (and story!) in the illustration. Almost everyone is having fun with their puppets. Ernie is feeding his Cookie Monster a cookie, Oscar seems excited to add a Big Bird to his trash collection, Cookie Monster seems to really like his little Oscar puppet.  But Bert has a puppet of himself, and neither Bert nor Bert's puppet seems all that happy with the situation.  But it's very "right."  Bert really doesn't seem like the kind of person that is into puppets, does he?

To close out this year's last blog post I thought I'd share a photo of one of my Roosevelt Franklin puppets playing with his own Bert puppet. Bert is a German import produced by the Igel toy company in 1994.  Happy New Year from Grover's Corner!

How It All Began - Part 2

Yesterday I told you how I bought Cookie Monster all by myself back in the Fall of 1971. Today, I'll finish the story of how I got the rest of the gang. In short, the answer was Christmas - and that was one of my absolutely favorite Christmases ever!

I had put the rest of the new SESAME STREET puppets at the top of my Santa list. But one thing that made the Christmas of 1971 so great was that it was a sort of transitional Christmas -  I was young enough to still have some belief in Santa, but also old enough to pick up on the clues that my parents were doing a lot of it. The biggest clue was that one night we were out doing Christmas shopping and my mom told me I had to stay in the car while she ran into the big "American Furniture" store and made me wait in the car. This was very unusual!  She came back out after a while and put something in the trunk. and somehow, either while she was loading it or unloading it, I got a tiny peek and was fairly suspicious that it was Oscar the Grouch! I don't recall the specifics. I also knew my father was working on some secret project.

I had a very hard time falling asleep that Christmas Eve and woke early Christmas AM. I remember waking and padding in to my parents bedroom and urging them to get up. Mom said it was too early, indeed it was still dark, but I jumped into my parents bed thinking that would make Christmas arrive faster.  From my parents bedroom I could see a little bit into the living room, nothing at all specific, it was very murky and shadowed. But my mind turned shadows into objects and characters. There was some structure I could barely see and creeping over the top was what looked like a large hairy head. My imagination immediately decided I was getting a Herry Monster for Christmas - even though I'd seen no evidence a Herry puppet had been made. [Actually no Herry Monster puppet was produced until 1978].

This is my current Oscar in his original box.

Eventually I was restless enough (or bothersome enough) and my parents relented. It was time for Christmas! There in the middle of the living room floor were Oscar and Ernie and Big Bird! Oscar was great! His box looked like a trash can. The backs of all these boxes looked like TV sets, and one could cut out the screen and use the box as a small puppet theatre. The lid to Oscar's trash can was printed in the cut-out "screen" section of the "TV set."

Ernie seemed incredible, too! He looked so perfect! Just like Ernie. I don't recall if I asked where Bert was - I was very pleased with all I'd gotten . But at some point that morning my Mom mentioned that Santa hadn't been able to get Bert to me yet, but that he was having Bert sent to Sears and we could pick him up in a few days. Who knew that Santa used Sears!

 

These are my current Ernie and Bert puppets in their original boxes.

This is not my Big Bird. I still need this box!

Big Bird was pretty awesome! He was about 20" tall and had wonderful (if very uncuddly) legs. He wasn't much of an actual puppet though. He had a hole in the back of his head where you could insert a finger. And via a tab, you could make him open and shut his beak. His wings had two little slits in the back so you could insert fingers and make him gesture as you held him.

The downside to Big Bird was that he came in very unfriendly packaging. You can't see it in the photo, but to keep Big Bird standing tall, his feet were bolted to a piece of thin plywood hidden in the bottom of the cardboard base.  Even after you ripped him out of his box he still had bolts sticking out of the bottom of his feet and my dad needed to go find a wrench to remove them. My dad grumbled quite loudly about that packaging! My dad may have been tired of tools as my other big present that Christmas was a tri-fold puppet theatre my dad had built. It was made of early 1970s paneling over theatre-style flats. My mom had made the orange felt curtains which opened on a traverse rod by pulling the cords at the side.

The "thing" I had mistaken for Herry Monster in the dim morning light was a large wolf puppet that was perched on the upper corner of the puppet theatre. Both he and a goat puppet were not SESAME related.

My sister and me playing in the puppet theatre.

It was a great Christmas!  A week or so later we went to Sears to pick up Bert.  I was somewhat disappointed when Bert was handed to me in a plain brown box and not the incredible display packaging of the other puppets.

The puppets arrived like this if ordered thru the Sears catalog.

The Bert puppet also quickly suffered from shirt-loss. The shape of Bert's head and neck, combined with the weight of his hands, seemed to put too much stress on the few stitches that held Bert's shirt on.

Both Bert and my sister have somehow lost their shirts!

And that's how I got my first SESAME STREET toys! I mentioned in the last post that I lost all of my original toys in a fire when I was fourteen. In recent years I've been able to replace them. However,  I still very much need both Cookie Monster and Big Bird in their original open-front boxes. If you've got one for me I'd be delighted to hear from you.

How It All Began

Welcome to GROVER'S CORNER! I am close to being a first generation SESAME STREET kid. I loved the show, but what really hooked me was the muppets, especially the monsters. I had tried my hand at making a Cookie Monster puppet with a sock and some googly eyes but I was kind of disappointed with the results - mainly because the eyes were flat, not the ping-pong ball eyes the real Cookie Monster had.

But in the Fall of 1971 I found an advertisement for some forthcoming SESAME STREET puppets (these were the Topper/Educational Toys versions.) I no longer remember where the ad was published, but I immediately cut it out and glued it into a scrapbook I had just started. The scrapbook was about half SESAME STREET and half I LOVE LUCY. I still have my scrapbook and thus still have the ad.

I suspect the ad was published in a glossy newspaper "magazine" like PARADE. I cut out the characters as well as I could. I remember being frustrated by Ernie and Bert's hair. Cookie Monster and Oscar where printed at the side of the ad and I cut them out and placed them on the "wall" to make them look right. I have since learned how to spell "cookie."

Anyway, I told my mom I had to have them and we started looking. I think the ad came out a bit in advance of the toys hitting the stores in Albuquerque.

I do not have this guy in a box yet!

One afternoon after school I had walked over to the nearby Skaggs Drugstore and lo! they had a Cookie Monster (two actually) though they had none of the other puppets.

I raced home and pleaded for a massive advance on my allowance. The puppets were actually quite expensive when they came out, listing at $4.95 each. Online inflation calculators translate this to almost $29.00 in 2014 money! My family was hardly flush (my mom was in Grad school) but she was also very understanding about life's necessities and she eventually gave me a crisp $5 bill. I tore back to Skaggs and if memory serves they had already sold one of the their two Cookie Monsters. I grabbed the remaining one and went to the checkout. I wondered if I'd have any trouble, if the check-out woman would question a small boy with an actual five dollar bill. She rang up Cookie Monster and asked me for $5.19.  Huh?!  I had just discovered sales tax. I'm sure my eyes began to well up and my lower lip began to tremble, and I don't recall what was said, but she let me have Cookie Monster without my having to pay the cursed sales tax.

The Cookie Monster shown above is not mine. My original puppets were lost in a fire when I was fourteen. I have replaced my Cookie Monster but I have not as yet been able to replace him is his incredible box. It is high on my want list! This photo was snagged from an online auction.

Cookie Monster was super, though! He was so beautifully made. He could even swallow cookies! The back of the box had cardboard cookies you could cut out. But my dad made the best Chocolate Chip Cookies ever and Cookie Monster preferred those, as they'd crumble. I, of course, could then help eat the crumbles.

In part two I'll discuss my favorite Christmas ever when Cookie's friends arrived. I will also be posting a more in depth look at the actual puppet, packaging artwork, modifications on how the puppet design changed over the years. We'll be popping around, discussing the rare foreign puppets, other toys, artwork, and much else. Welcome to Grover's Corner!

Click here to read Part Two

Me, Cookie, and Oscar