↖ “Hey, Rowlf, why don’t you call the show ‘Sesame Street’?” says Kermit the Frog. “You know, like ‘Open Sesame’? It gives the idea of a street where amazing things happen.”



On November 10, 1969, the first episode of Sesame Street, a CTW (Children’s Television Workshop) production, aired in the United States. It is the children’s television program that marks the beginning of educational entertainment.

The Italian version, titled Sesamo Apriti, aired on Rai2 only nine years later.

Neil Postman, an American media theorist, in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), outlined what he considered the three implicit “commandments” of educational entertainment, taking Sesame Street as a case study:

Thou shalt have no prerequisites.
Sesame Street functions as a prototype of an information system designed so that the learner (the viewer) can leave behind the notion of sequence and continuity in education. A building, metaphorically speaking, can be constructed even without foundations. 

Thou shalt have no doubts.
Nothing needs to be remembered, studied, or endured. Every piece of information is immediately accessible. 

Thou shalt avoid explanations. Argumentation, hypotheses, reasoning, and especially refutations are avoided.

Edutainment is a story told through images and music—a kind of narrative that, unsurprisingly, involved artists from the psychedelic and experimental circles of the period.
Watch these four short clips from Sesame Street and then listen to these tracks by Boards of Canada for a modern sonic resonance with the experimental, visually-driven ethos of early edutainment.









“Other scholars ironically point out that some studies conducted on family-oriented TV shows like Sesame Street actually increase aggressive behaviors just as much as violent programs do.”
TV Violence, Italian translation La violenza in TV, Charles S. Clark, 1993