Nightmare on Sesame Street?

Sesame Street, the iconic television show, debuted in 1969, and has been on the air ever since. The show aims to educate children through entertaining media, making it one of the first programs to focus not just on making kids smile, but also helping them grow. Humor, music, and more are leveraged to that end, and the show has found a lot of friends along the way — many, many celebrities have visited Sesame Street over its 50+ year run.

But one of them wasn’t so popular. In fact, for years, she never came back. Not even in re-runs.

Actress Margaret Hamilton, a former kindergarten teacher, is best known for her portrayal of the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 classic film “The Wizard of Oz.” More than 35 years later, she reprised the role in a four-episode arc of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the similarly iconic kids TV show, and without any controversy. So when the producers of Sesame Street invited her to appear on the show as the Wicked Witch in 1976, as seen above, they didn’t think much of it.

The plot of Hamilton’s episode highlighted how wicked the Wicked Witch could be — but not to the degree of the Wizard of Oz. Here’s how Collider summarizes it:

The episode begins with David (Northern Calloway) stepping out of his store into a heavy, spooky wind, one that blows a broom out of the sky and into David’s hands. Not just any broom — this broom belongs to the Wicked Witch of the West, and she wants it back. She first appears lurking at the side of the store, accompanied by a heavy metal riff. After being electrocuted when she first tries to grab her broom, she spends the rest of the episode demanding the broom back. The Wicked Witch even disguises herself as a kind old lady, but nothing works until she politely and respectfully says “please.” Once she has the broom back, she says, “I’m going to fly back to Oz as fast as lightning and never see Sesame Street again.” She flies off, but ever the show-off, she cries, “This is glorious! Look! No hands.” The broom promptly falls again, and back into David’s grasp, prompting David to start crying, not wanting to go through the whole thing again. Fin.

The episode, per the show’s producers (via Muppet Wiki), was designed “to demonstrate fear and ‘the value of planning by creating and implementing methods of retrieving the broom,’” and, potentially, in the power of saying “please.” But unfortunately, the demonstration of fear went a bit too far. As Mashable reported, “The episode itself features some creepy, jangling music whenever the Wicked Witch appears on screen, and includes a scene where she actually threatens to turn poor old Big Bird into a feather duster.” While hardly as scary as anything involving Pennywise or Chucky (or even flying monkeys), it was scary enough that children and parents alike complained. Sesame’s offices received notes like the one below, describing kids experiencing nightmares of the Wicked Witch.

In response, the producers of the show did additional research to learn about the impact of the episode — and that research confirmed the kids’ and parents’ reactions. The episode was just too scary for the Street.

Given these findings, the show’s producers decided to pull the episode from the re-run cycle — and, in fact, never air it again. When Sesame Street came to the HBO Max streaming platform, this episode wasn’t added to the dozens of classic episodes otherwise made available. The episode was believed to be lost to history.

But that changed in 2019. That year, Sesame Street celebrated its 50th anniversary, and as part of the celebration, Sesame Workshop — the nonprofit behind Sesame Street — donated digital copies of every episode in its first 49 seasons to the Library of Congress in conjunction with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. And that included Epsidoe 847, better known as the Wicked Witch episode. The episode was also aired for perhaps the first time in more than 30 years at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, as part of Sesame’s 50th anniversary celebration. And after that, once again, it was gone. Fans could come to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting and view the episode, but that was the only way to see it.

That changed in June 2022. A fan had somehow made a recording of the episode (likely while watching it at the Archive) and uploaded it to reddit. Over the years, more and more recordings have made their way onto YouTube and similar sites, and with increasing quality. As a result, the Wicked Witch has come back to Sesame Street. You can watch the footage here if you’re so interested — and while it probably isn’t as scary as its reputation suggests, you may not want to watch it with any little kids around.

Bonus fact: The 1939 movie “The Wizard of Oz” starts in sepia-toned colors and then transitions, almost magically, into full technicolor part of the way into the film. Today, that transition is easy — CGI and other after-effects make it trivial. But at the time, there were no such computers to create the transition. So how did the producers do it? With a lot of paint and a Judy Garland lookalike. CreativeBloq describes it: “The moment is disguised by the use of a sepia-painted set and dim lighting to make it look like the film is still in black and white. The door is actually opened by Judy Garland’s double, dressed in a sepia-toned outfit to complete the illusion. After she backs away, Garland herself steps forward in her blue gingham dress.” You can see the transition in action, here, and if it’s too good to notice the change, well, that was the goal.

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