The epic story of 30 circles as they battle the squares, and themselves
September 2, 2015 1:53 AM   Subscribe

Here's a collection of Sesame Street "30 Dots" shorts, from the show's classic days. They build in an entertaining way, but whatever they're supposed to teach beats the heck out of me.
posted by JHarris (52 comments total) 49 users marked this as a favorite
 
Extras!
  • Capital I ("We all live in a capital 'I'/in the middle of the desert, in the center of the sky.")
  • Lowercase N ("In an unknown far-off place, there was a lowercase 'n'/Lonely and cold, she would stare off into space, and it was known that she would cry now and then.")
posted by JHarris at 2:09 AM on September 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


posted by JHarris at 2:15 AM on September 2, 2015 [8 favorites]


posted by JHarris at 2:17 AM on September 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


posted by JHarris at 2:24 AM on September 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


We may return to Sesame Street later in the month, because believe me, I have a playlist.
posted by JHarris at 2:27 AM on September 2, 2015 [12 favorites]


... whatever they're supposed to teach beats the heck out of me.

Ya gotta conform, man, just gotta conform. (and the "squares" are evil)
posted by sammyo at 2:28 AM on September 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm guessing that's a bug for the station or programming block in the upper left during certain segments. That threw me off at first, and then just kinda ruined things.
posted by TheSecretDecoderRing at 2:40 AM on September 2, 2015


My current nostalgia trigger is the pinball count ("one-two-three-FOUR, FIVE, six-seven-eight-NINE, TEN, eleven-twelve.....")
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:27 AM on September 2, 2015 [14 favorites]


I'm longing for the day when someone finds the clip that goes CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP CHOMP as bites are taken out of the block colour background.
posted by h00py at 3:43 AM on September 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


My daughter and I will never tire of this plucky orange singing Carmen.
posted by ian1977 at 4:59 AM on September 2, 2015 [10 favorites]


I love the Carmen orange now but as a child, I found it utterly terrifying.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 5:10 AM on September 2, 2015 [6 favorites]


Loaf of bread... is deep in a memory place for me.
posted by travertina at 5:17 AM on September 2, 2015 [6 favorites]


I sing the pinball song out loud to my song several times a day, still working on speech with him. I just realized how long it's been since I've seen the actual animation, and that I'm way too square to sing it.
posted by beowulf573 at 5:36 AM on September 2, 2015


And I still think it was part of an Illuminati plot to introduce base-12 to American.
posted by beowulf573 at 5:37 AM on September 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I dont know why, but the baker falling with his pies has always triggered a deep existential dread in me. Even now I feel nauseous after searching for the youtube link and posting it here. /shudder
posted by Illusory contour at 5:42 AM on September 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


I love the 30 dots clips so much! I had forgotten about them until I visited a museum with my kid in the mid-late-90s - it had what might have been a Sesame Street retrospective or something about childhood in the 70s or a Henson tribute? And the 30 dots sketch was on one of the display screens and it hit me what crap Sesame Street had become in the 90s - how much humour it had lost, how much more of a blunt object it had become, how much less it was with kids instead of at them - I can't even articulate. Until seeing 30 dots again I had assumed that I just didn't find Sesame Street as wonderful anymore because I was a sad bitter grownup, but once youtube came along and I could find old Sesame Street stuff (this appeared to me in 2006 as the sole purpose of youtube) - I was just blown away by how excellent it had been in the early years.

30 dots is nonverbal humour. Its humour relies on pattern recognition, and there are visual and (not just aural but!) musical cues to what's happening and what should be happening. It's like peekaboo, and other games you play with kids where what is expected differs from what happens and delighted squealing laughter ensues. I don't know what it's like now, but when I was a kid, kids interacted with Sesame Street like they later did/do with Blues Clues (I haven't seen Dora but I think also Dora?) - we yelled at the screen when stuff happened wrong, we filled in the blanks and guessed stuff, probably because of kid voiceovers doing the same thing sometimes, sometimes in response to adult-actor/muppet prompting. Lots of Sesame Street was about predicting what comes next, seeing patterns, identifying things that don't fit a pattern, etc., and I think that's a useful pre-reading skill and life skill and reasoning skill. I mean, shit, this teaches left-to-right normality and eye tracking. That is a thing that isn't inherent in humans, but is super useful for reading, and is actually a motor skill, and it teaches it without seeming like it's teaching anything, using sequential appearance of large circles, high contrast (we mostly had black-and-white tvs back then), and musical reinforcement of actions. I'm probably getting all this very wrong, but also missing stuff - I gave it a lot of thought when I first saw the clip again since my kid was at a developing reading stage, but I have no actual clue what I'm talking about.

But my feeling about this sort of sketch, this sort of comedy from Sesame Street, and looking for the educational benefit, is similar to when I saw the text on a box a kickball was sold in at a toy store in the 90s, summarising its educational benefits. It's a fucking ball. Allow kids to be human kittens and play and fuck around and do kitten versions of adult stuff, including letting them in on the joke, talking to/playing with them like they have intelligence and a sense of humour and and they count as humans and are enjoyable to interact with even though they're not fully formed yet.

Anyway, sorry for rambling, awesome post, thank you so much!
posted by you must supply a verb at 5:47 AM on September 2, 2015 [26 favorites]


True story: My husband and I met when he came into an open mike night where I was playing. It was my performance of "Capital I" that made him think I might be worth talking to.
posted by Daily Alice at 5:56 AM on September 2, 2015 [10 favorites]


I haven't hit play yet and my brain keeps playing the "DOOT doot doot doot" sound effects. It's weird how much of Sesame Street is buried in the back of my brain.

I always loved the shorts with the little red ball on a track doing various things in threes. It felt eerie and sinister, though: the little ball was all alone on a big empty structure in a mysterious dark expanse, and when the ball went through that last big funnel while the sad clarinet played, you knew it was going to get ground into powder or transmogrified into a cherry and eaten by some horrible kid. That poor ball.
posted by Metroid Baby at 6:08 AM on September 2, 2015 [10 favorites]


Also Kermit and Joey say the alphabet is the best.
posted by you must supply a verb at 6:30 AM on September 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


#5, "Third Dot Tries Red", is like the "Repent Harlequin, Said The Ticktockman" of the dot-verse.

Then #6 is more like "Animal Farm"...
posted by El Brendano at 6:41 AM on September 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


A lot of them remind me so much of youth and amateur music rehearsals.

Educational benefits? Pattern recognition, prediction, and symbolic abstraction are concepts that are obvious to most people over the age of 8, but not so much to the Sesame Street audience. And like a lot of great Sesame Street clips, it's beautifully designed to be funny to a wide range of audiences.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:48 AM on September 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


Also, a much maligned but still useful theory is that encountering collections of objects that are organized and sorted in different ways contributes to math literacy. (In fact, we know that at least some early Greek and Egyptian proofs used manipulatives, so the prejudices against them are often overstated.)
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:55 AM on September 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


And I still think it was part of an Illuminati plot to introduce base-12 to American.


With the pressure of the international community also behind it, I'm certain that if the Pointer Sisters had sang a neat song about the metric system, we'd be measuring the distance to Sesame Street in kilometers here now.

Until then...

Sesame Street Pinball Number Count (All Segments)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 6:56 AM on September 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


To me all of those nifty Sesame Street abstractions were proof that there were kind, thoughtful, imaginative, kooky, magical adults out there who were more evolved than the protoslug people that seemed to surround me during my childhood.
posted by ian1977 at 7:00 AM on September 2, 2015 [13 favorites]


What the hell squares, stop being jerks!
posted by lownote at 7:03 AM on September 2, 2015


This could actually be great music education on the topic of a theme and variations/development.
posted by lownote at 7:04 AM on September 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Can someone make this circles and squares thing into a MMORPG please
posted by oulipian at 7:05 AM on September 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


The poor four girl, who can't sink that putt!
Satanic goat-farmer six!
Terry Gilliam giant foot ten!
Ball munching Teddy Roosevelt Rushmore!

(I wonder if the choice of skin tone for the hand on the plunger was ever remarked upon.)
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:13 AM on September 2, 2015


Also Kermit and Joey say the alphabet yt is the best

God, I love this!
What I also love about SStreet is that (at least when I was a kid), the child actors weren't polished with fashionable wardrobe selections and bright-white smiles and voice coaching and perfectly timed dance moves. The kids were acting like actual kids!

Nowadays all the child actors are just little adults with too much makeup, expensive accessories, and exaggurated reactions to elicit laughs.
posted by bitteroldman at 7:15 AM on September 2, 2015 [5 favorites]


What I also love about SStreet is that (at least when I was a kid), the child actors weren't polished with fashionable wardrobe selections and bright-white smiles and voice coaching and perfectly timed dance moves. The kids were acting like actual kids!

GODDAMN JOHN JOHN
posted by murphy slaw at 7:20 AM on September 2, 2015 [7 favorites]




This is my trump card for "Sesame Street was cooler in the 70s" discussions.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:54 AM on September 2, 2015 [7 favorites]


Well, now I am sitting here crying over John John the Air Force Man. So, to distract myself, here is the Teeny Little Super Guy.
posted by ChuraChura at 8:08 AM on September 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


My current nostalgia trigger is the pinball count ("one-two-three-FOUR, FIVE, six-seven-eight-NINE, TEN, eleven-twelve.....")

Which, as I learned from this thread from 11 years ago, was performed by the Pointer Sisters.

(Seriously, though. Check out the Braces Tower remix linked in the thread. It is ON POINT.)
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:16 AM on September 2, 2015


The husband often works Lowercase N into his acoustic sets. It's a nice little sad song and everyone loves it.
posted by emjaybee at 8:18 AM on September 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


This is my trump card for "Sesame Street was cooler in the 70s" discussions.

yeah so also i think i remember this being on the blue before but Me and Julio as reimagined by someone pretty fucking disgruntled by the prick with the guitar continuously interrupting, but taking it pretty well on the whole
posted by you must supply a verb at 8:26 AM on September 2, 2015


I was two when Sesame Street came out, I was dead on the demographic for them. I learned to read, count and so many other things from them. I've been trying to wean my young son off Barney and onto Sesame Street without much luck so far, but hope springs eternal. The fact it's being removed soon from Netflix because of the HBO deal bugs me to no end.

Sigh, I miss Jim Henson. If I ever had access to a time machine, before killing Hitler I'd go back to 1990 with a backpack full of antibiotics.
posted by beowulf573 at 8:48 AM on September 2, 2015 [7 favorites]


Well, now I am sitting here crying over John John the Air Force Man.

OMG seriously. What the hell feels?!
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:49 AM on September 2, 2015


"Capital I" and "Lowercase N" are two of my most favorite Sesame Street songs, though I am mostly partial to Joe Raposo tunes. "Somebody Come And Play" is a straight-up goddamn classic.
posted by briank at 8:57 AM on September 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


This thread is incomplete without Jazzy Spies.

One I haven't been able to find online is the Post Office song, a filmed segment about the progress of mail through the postal system, with a song sung -- by either one person or two in Simon and Garfunkelish duet -- with a single guitar. I can remember the music clearly but not many of the actual words, apart from the chorus which just went "The post office, the post office the post office" on rising notes.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:18 AM on September 2, 2015 [4 favorites]


... but whatever they're supposed to teach beats the heck out of me.

Others have noted how they promote pattern recognition and make kids laugh when things don't go quite right, but I also see a big dose of "how to get along in a group at school". The music is the teacher who sets the schedule, and the 30 dots are 30 kindergartners who are supposed to behave, but someone is always late, or red, or a square. There's also "we're circles, what are we supposed to do about that group of different squares we keep seeing?". Like the game "Mother May I", these trivial looking things are doing a lot of work to help kids create social structures and interpersonal relationships.
posted by benito.strauss at 10:13 AM on September 2, 2015


Illusory contour: when I was 2-3 I would start sobbing when the guy with the pies would fall down the stairs.
posted by persona au gratin at 11:06 AM on September 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm pretty sure Ray Parker Jr. is in that Stevie Wonder video.
posted by persona au gratin at 11:14 AM on September 2, 2015


That John John video is the greatest thing I've ever seen.
posted by persona au gratin at 11:15 AM on September 2, 2015


One thing I learned on the Blue is that the singers in the pinball video are the Pointer Sisters.
posted by persona au gratin at 11:22 AM on September 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


I went too long in my life not knowing that and will literally mention it every chance I get.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:26 AM on September 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Fun fact: Andrew Bird wanted to cover "Capital I" on one of his albums, only to get utterly cockblocked. So he wrote the song "Imitosis", which was inspired by "Capital I". (At work, can't link...sorry!)
posted by pxe2000 at 12:18 PM on September 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


I found it rather amazing that they still use the old bits, no doubt a nod to parents who were also brought up on it. I was happy to see fireworks letters, Capitol I and a bunch of other weird crap from my childhood though some of that new stuff you can absolutely keep. "Claymation" Ernie, yikes. My love for the firework letters was no doubt a liking for the open for Villa Allegre which used them as lettering though the bitching theme song didn't hurt either.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:00 PM on September 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


Okay so I'm going to do a Twitch stream soon, in which I (and the viewers) see how precisely and faithfully I can transcribe the musical segments from Early Sesame Street, by ear, without having listened to them in almost 30 years.. like, I'll be taking requests live and then doing the songs in realtime as people watch. Kind of like drawing cartoon characters from memory, but in this case doing full arrangements with a small orchestra worth of instruments and synthesizers. Then we can watch the video and see how well my memory held up, or if I was way off.

Decided to do this just now, after seeing the "Teeny Little Super Guy" link, and before I clicked it, I was like "I bet I can recall it mentally, and it will be exactly the same when I hit play," and it turns out I was right, even remembered it was in the key of C, but sadly my memory doesn't work this way for lyrics, only music.

So I'm not going to click any more links or watch any more of these, to avoid spoilers and make this as raw and embarrassing / funny as possible. I'll post in this thread when I set a date/time, probably next week. Watching the same rerun 5 times when you're 5 years old, with music THAT catchy? That shit isn't going away ever.

Everybody, everybody sleeps, doot-doo-doooooo, doot-doo-doooo

Oh this is gonna be so good. Thanks for this post, JH :)
posted by jake at 3:29 PM on September 2, 2015 [3 favorites]


When you do the Twitch stream, be sure to let us know!
posted by JHarris at 7:01 PM on September 2, 2015


On my way into work, I make a point of driving down La Brea from Sunset, so that I can see the bigass statue of Kermit atop Jim Henson Studios.

Because secretly I am still five.
posted by culfinglin at 7:35 PM on September 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


For a while I had this as my ringtone.
posted by Lucinda at 8:26 PM on September 2, 2015 [2 favorites]


« Older Featuring a relative of LazyTown's Robbie Rotten!...   |   Cotton Mather and Mass Panic Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments