The Sesame Street creators weren't stoners who tripped balls while creating content. They were very meticulous about what they were doing. The colorful, abstract, "trippy" visuals engaged young minds so they were tuned in for the preschool lessons presented. They even layered social messages in a very subtle, non-preachy manner on top of the primary lessons. Here's one of my favorites:
A car appears to have trouble starting. Its driver, a Pam Grier-like woman, struts out, pops the hood, and drops a lowercase letter 'r' into the engine compartment. Now that the engine is capable of making appropriate 'rrrrrrr' noises, she drives off: https://youtu.be/L8AJATJoo5s
What a lovely little lesson! Its primary purpose being to teach a letter and its consonant sound, they didn't stop there, they built a narrative around that premise featuring a black female character oozing confidence (positive depictions of black and other minority characters being a Sesame Street priority since the early days). Sesame Street was full of stuff like this, engaging children of all backgrounds in a positive way in multiple dimensions.
My son had some trouble at age 2 or 3 speaking his Rs. I remembered exactly that cartoon (30 years later) and tried to get him to imitate a car noise with it. Worked like a charm!
The current poet laureate of the US famously struggled with the letter R as a child. L and R are also kind of hard to differentiate for some non native english speakers. Interesting brain stuff, and I think sesame street really was working on a great level there.
>The Sesame Street creators weren't stoners who tripped balls while creating content.
I'm sure it wasn't while creating content. But in their off time, that was part of the culture.
Lots of intelligent and creative people use or used marijuana and/or psychedelics. The idea of reducing those people to a label like "stoners" is disingenuous.
I blame this for my interest in modern classical. I can't imagine them doing something so progressive today. But that's because they had a captive audience in the 70's.
That's amazing! I wonder if I saw that and tuned it out as one of the 'boring' segments. It's genius, of course, but I'm not sure I would have felt so at 6. (I did recognize it from this thread a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18253445.)
One of the great things about Sesame Street was how they could entertain the parent along with the child. I remember a sketch about some composer struggling to write a song which is obviously "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", who somehow gets coaxed into the following instead:
Twinkle twinkle little bird
Isn't eating crumbs absurd
Try a ham and cheese on rye
Or a piece of cherry pie
If the crumbs are all you want
Don't come in my restaurant
That appeals perfectly to the small child who immediately recognizes the song and thinks it's ridiculous to rewrite it; perfectly to the adult with an ironic sense of humor; and perfectly to anyone who appreciates the craftsmanship it takes to pull something like that off. (Edit: I found it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfqc07-C4Vw - I forgot the Kermit news reporter. What a brilliant thing. The nuances of those puppets are incredible.) (Edit 2: oh gosh, there were tons of those! https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Don_Music.)
Another example: using "To be or not to be" and "Let It Be" as devices for teaching the letter B:
I remember in the 90s they did a sketch where Cookie Monster was dressed as Brutus from Shakespeare's _Julius_Caesar_. They were trying to get him to recognize the numeral '2'.
> But that's because they had a captive audience in the 70's.
They experimented more in the early years before they settled into their current business model. Since then they've shifted age groups, the creation of everything involves committees, and there's a process for everything.
Think about their early years like a startup. Then the company grows into a FAANG and things change.
If you'd asked me yesterday to describe my memory of Sesame Street from childhood, that animation would have been what popped into my head. And I had no idea that it was Philip Glass. I just remember the music being weird and off-putting.
Yeah! It made perfect sense like 2500ms into the video! I just think it's kind of neat to get such clear telemetry on what my young brain thought of Philip Glass. I didn't remember the music literally, just my impression that the circle animation was neat, but ruined by the music. :)
Nice as that animation is, I bet it would be 1000 times more effective if a parent/teacher worked through it with the kid with paper, pencil, scissors, ruler, and compass.
I'm a bit taken aback that YouTube won't let me add these to a private playlist, because they're oriented towards kids. Huh? What does this accomplish?
> YouTube now treats personal information from anyone watching children’s content on the platform as coming from a child, regardless of the age of the user. This means that on videos made for kids, we limit data collection and use, and as a result, we need to restrict or disable some product features. For example, we no longer serve personalized ads on this content or support features such as comments, live chat, notification bell, stories, save to playlist, and others.
So it's to keep kid behavior from being tracked. Kinda cool.
First mistake: you're trying to apply your usual reasoning to an area governed by emotions.
Second mistake: you're glossing over the obvious. "Save to personal playlist" tracks you by keeping a list of things you told it to save.
Third mistake: you're forgetting the wider context. Google is such a juicy target, that the criteria are becoming "can an adversary convince a clueless person this deserves a jillion credits fine?" Children's data is as toxic as medical data and you don't want it anywhere near your service, unless you really really have to and both legal and privacy agree there's no remotely viable alternative.
Source: I'm regularly taking the mandatory trainings in Google.
I guess that means YouTube tracks everything in playlists so rather than give up on tracking people they would rather disallow putting content marked as "for children" in playlists.
Thank you for the pinball number count link. The days they included that in Sesame Street were the best days and now that I have this link every day can be a best day.
I remember one about "The Seventh Seal" where a character is looking for his pet seal and counting. I don't imagine many of the target audience would get the Ingmar Bergman reference but respect to the show's creators for putting it in anyway!
People often wonder this about psychedelia art. But is it even possible? The alphabet one, for example. It takes awhile to draw the stationary design behind any of those letters, let alone an animated sequence that transitions to the next one. Surely the mind of someone hallucinating would have moved on to many other fleeting visions before even finishing the letter A.
In my experience, you use the psychedelics to give inspiration, and then you complete the artwork once you're (mostly) sober. Anything else and I and my friends couldn't complete anything coherent. But the dose makes the poison too: low doses of psychedelics can help with creativity and the flow state without making it impossible to focus or complete less-fun specific tasks.
The myth that drugs make you more creative is, well, a myth.
I've had a few content-producing startups and I can tell you that there was literally no correlation between the amount/quality of the art produced and whether the person making it was a drug-addict or not (everybody was treated equally at my place).
If you want to know the secret behind creative genius, it is, as in other things, hard work and dedication. No substitute for that.
I'm only referring to the particular style of visual artwork and audio in those clips and others from that era of Sesame Street, which connects to psychadelic imagery and music.
You are right, there's definitely a connection regarding the style. Perhaps as other commenter suggests, has to do with it being one of the predominant visual styles of that time.
Where does the part time smoker weed smoker vs crack whore fit at your startups?
Are they all addicts? Did you notice a difference with the microdosers? Was your offices setup to foster a more productive environment with the addicts or did you put them in cub-farms.
>Where does the part time smoker weed smoker vs crack whore fit at your startups?
As long as they behaved properly on premises, I didn't give much of a thought about their hobbies.
>Are they all addicts?
No. About 30%.
>Did you notice a difference with the microdosers?
There was a guy who did this, actually. He was kind of mediocre at work so we usually assigned him the easy but boring, repetitive stuff. n = 1 so I won't draw conclusions here.
>Was your offices setup to foster a more productive environment with the addicts ... ?
No, it was just a regular office. And no, they had no special benefits nor special handicaps because of their drug use. They never complained or requested any sort of special treatment. If anything, they were kind of ashamed for it, but I never brought the subject up.
I know it's hard to believe for some, but you can really treat everyone with dignity and things just ... work.
Bachelor of Arts (Multimedia) with honours and a Diploma of Education in Arts here.
I was high quite often. Though you wouldn't call it an addiction, and I found having a session before sitting down to create a piece helped the creative process.
If you read what I wrote, I said I saw "no correlation".
For every guy that used drugs and was very talented I had another one who was clean and on par. I had guys who were regular drug users told me that they liked to work clean and then smoke a joint afterwards to chill.
I know you're trying to push you viewpoint but there's really not much to discuss. Perhaps it works for you, but if you look at the whole picture, there is no correlation.
To be fair, it was more your distinction of 'drug addict or not' which I'm commenting on, which is pretty revealing of your opinion on people who take a drug.
Drug addicts DO exist. And they have a hard time landing jobs because of that. If anything, I helped them and allowed them to have the same opportunity as others without those issues. And they performed well, so I don't see the issue, honestly.
That's what you wanted to read there. So it would fit within your history or whatever baggage you're carrying; none of which is my problem, and I mean that with sympathy. You need to stop projecting onto others.
I'll rewrite my initial post with more detail and clariry, I hope:
• I've had a few "artsy" startups in the past.
• Because of this, I have employed about 200 people in creative roles.
• Some of these people had issues with drug abuse, as they straight up told me or came out on background checks.
• (Bonus) Since I am a super nice guy :), I gave them a pass on that and a chance to perform. This, in stark contrast with 95% of similar businesses which just had probably smiled them goodbye and then ghosted them.
• I found out that there was no difference in the amount of "creativity", to put it that way, between the drug addicts compared to people who were not.
• Since I think this is an interesting insight, I decide to share it here.
• Somehow, that's a bad thing for some. I guess you can't please everybody, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
You just appear to have a moral superiority complex, in the sense that to you people are either "clean" or an "addict", you feel you are doing people some kind of favour for "giving them a chance", and assuming that I have some kind of emotional baggage.
Quite the opposite, I'm afraid. Though I'm clearly not the only person here that picked up on your comments, so I'm going to leave it at that.
Why do they still make Sesame Street episodes? There's 51 seasons of content, but the audience is realistically only going to spend a few years of their lives watching it. Kids these days should probably get a "best of" selection of episodes that aren't ridiculously out of date. Otherwise, most of it is evergreen.
Newer Sesame Street episodes refer to social issues which were not on the forefront of the 70s, or wasn't deemed something kids should know about.
The South African Sesame Street now has an HIV-positive muppet, the US Sesame Street has an autistic muppet (Julia), Abby Cadabby was added ~10 years ago for better gender balance, and I feel in general newer Sesame Street does much more work in including hispanic immigrants/culture than older Sesame Street (might be bias).
Times change and Sesame Street needs to reflect that.
I haven't watched Sesame Street for like thirty years, but my memory of it was that every episode had both new segments and best of segments.
I think more things would feel out
of date than you'd think, though by now they probably do have enough evergreen segments to manage ~3 years of shows they would likely not cover the full range of desired topics.
My guess is to keep the adults engaged. If an episode of Sesame Street has a cameo from a known actor or musical star, that's for the adults, not really the kids. (The Katy Perry/Elmo Stop and Go song is really catchy, for example.)
thank you, I so needed that metaphor! Evergreen. That's the term I've been looking for for tons of things.
Indeed, there's no need for more Sesame Street — AND because kids can and should watch the best of the best of kids stuff already out there, there's no need for new versions of most ANY kids shows and so on.
The library already has more good kids books than any kid needs. Why make more? I'm not being sarcastic.
I can think of a few reasons:
- new subjects like tensions around social media or parental-addiction-to-phones or global warming
- new stuff that fills missing gaps in the representation of different cultures and perspectives
But mostly, why not just FIX outdated stuff too! When it comes to books, if only 30 year old stuff were public domain instead of absurd copyright terms, we could take all sorts of great things and just clean up outdated racial or sexist elements or update the context etc.
The MAIN reason to make new stuff is for the creative process itself, but we don't need it to get most of the attention. By pure numbers, the best 50 books of the year 2019 will be mostly worse compared to the best 50 books of all of the 20th century. But there's economic drive for constant infinite growth, and this is the cultural version of it. Cultural artificial obsolescence (or really just the false pretense of obsolescence).
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar, and especially not generic ideological flamewar. It turns specific, interesting threads into generic, boring ones. (Flamewar can be exciting, agitating, or maddening, but not interesting in the local sense of that word.)
The title of the thread is literally “From radical experiment to...”. To not follow through that conversation and complete the circle is being disingenuous to those of us who want to have an honest discussion about the indoctrination of the youth of this nation. Peeling a band-aid is going to hurt and you can chose to do it quickly or slowly, but it still needs to be ripped off.
I was with you up to "honest discussion" and then you (from my perspective) jumped off the flamewar cliff with "indoctrination of the youth of this nation". I'm sorry, but that's just the sort of tedious rhetoric that we're trying to avoid here. This is not because of an ideological commitment on our part—it just makes for lame, nasty, terrible internet discussion.
HN threads are supposed to be conversations. No one wants to have a conversation with someone going on about "the youth of this nation".
> No one wants to have a conversation with someone going on about "the youth of this nation".
It’s a puppet show who’s target market is children under the age of five. By most objective standards thats the “youth of a nation”.
As someone that grew up watching the show, with very fond memories, it does pain me to see what it has become. It’s not just about the show dumbing itself down. If someone wants to have grown up conversation about that then I’m game.
But if they’re afraid that any such conversation might lead to criticism, of other related or unrelated left wing political movements, well sucks to be them. These changes don’t happen in a vacuum and any frank discussion has to at least acknowledge them. Or hey let’s just flag conversations with don’t like and pretend they don’t exist.
Are you referencing something specific? I watched that whole clip you linked, and there’s nothing in it that would “pervert” a child’s mind.
It’s a clip explaining what protesting is, and what racism is. Both seem like valid things to explain on a kids show. Is your issue that it’s lightly in support of the BLM protests?
(not the person you were replying to) I think there are ways in which you can teach children ages 3 to 8 about these kinds of real issues, but that clip is seriously ham-fisted and not engaging. Whether they intended it or not, to me it leans more in the direction of indoctrination than what I'd like to show kids if I had any.
Children have no innate concept of racial discrimination or victimhood. It’s not a natural concept. It only exists because it’s drilled into their minds by good intentioned but poorly thought out ideas. Telling half the class that they’re a victim and the other half that they’re an oppressor is a recipe for disaster.
The way to end racism isn’t to brainwash children that world around them is full of racists. It’s to completely ignore the concept so they grow up with no concept of racism whatsoever. Then when they’re older and first learn about it, it’s such a laughable concept that they’ll understand that only a complete idiot would be a part in it.
I read to my fellow kindergartners because had I learned to read from Sesame Street & The Electric Company; my parents were in college and too busy working/studying to teach me.
TV isn't the worst babysitter if you have the right material.
Sometimes, when I have a few things to remember, I start repeating the list. It always turns into "A loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter."
Terry Tao’s parents credit his early development with learning to read around age two. He learned to read from Sesame Street Season 9 - which happened to be when they were experimenting with an improved curriculum for “higher-order reading skills, such as verbal blending and letter sounds”.
Despite being publicly funded, these early seasons are now basically inaccessible to the public (except for curated clips). Why aren’t old seasons made freely available online? Instead they are locked up in the National Archives with strict access control.
If I knew how to peddle conspiracy theories this would be my favorite one: That "they" are suppressing Sesame Street Season 9 because it was making people too smart. Why are they keeping it under lock and key? Show us the tapes!!!
Also, HBO ruined sesame street. The pacing and noise is totally wrong for child comprehension. It used to be educational. Now it's just the same commercialized brain-scrambling bullshit as everything else "made for kids".
Sesame Street's big success came from convincing parents that they could virtuously and effortlessly teach their kids just by turning on the TV, so the parents could then take a nap or do something else.
The reality is it's probably the most inefficient teaching method ever devised. It takes what, about a 1000 hours of watching it to teach kids 26 letters and count to 10? I don't believe passive education is effective. Even in college, I didn't learn anything from lectures unless I took notes.
SS never progresses. Every episode starts over from the beginning. It's like Groundhog Day. There is no Sophomore SS: Long Division.
I learned the alphabet from singing the ABC song in school. Didn't take long.
Just yesterday I came across an old card with "Events from 1971" on it, one of which was "Sesame Street banned by the BBC". It seems that, in the UK, the BBC really didn't like it to a surprising degree - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street_in_the_United_Ki...
Looks like it was mainly because there was already a lot of high-quality programming for children in the UK at that time, and that too many Americanisms would be confusing for kids (my wife watched it in the UK and grew up thinking the last letter of the alphabet was pronounced "zee" for a long time).
I think I learned how to read by watching Sesame Street. My mom told me that I watched a lot of Sesame Street as a small toddler and she discovered I was able to read when I started reading words written on the fridge out loud.
I watched some of the new Sesame Street with my toddlers and it’s frankly just boring and cheap now. All the other characters have been sidelined for Elmo. The songs and themes are really repetitive too.
I mean I know it’s for infants, and it feels petty complaining, but the episodes from the 80s are like a million times better lol
Changing the "main character" from Big Bird to Elmo, and other re-structuring of the show, really did harm it a ton.
Sells merch better, though. And I dunno, maybe zero kids would still watch it in a world of smart phones and YouTube and other relatively frantic entertainment for pre-schoolers, if it were still as sedate as it once was. Maybe kids can't relate or look up to Big Bird like they can wacky, high-energy Elmo, anymore.
I thought I read something about how Grover was the main character, intended to be a little older than the viewers, while Big Bird was supposed to be a little younger and more of an audience surrogate.
Of course that all depends on your own definition of what a "main character" is, but it's hard to deny it became The Elmo Show at some point.
My son likes 'muppet babies' that's a show for little kids, it's without Elmo, but with most of the Muppet show characters that came from Sesame street - and it is sort of interesting, i watch it togather with my son. Unfortunately it is without Bert and Ernie and without Cookie Monster, miss them.
I wasn't allowed a TV as a child. I credit this for learning to read very early (by myself for the most part).
I always felt Sesame Street was some kind of leftist softie propaganda, but that may be a side effect of growing up in a culture that didn't allow TV to children.
I really think learning about reality; i.e the natural world, physical work, making "stuff", math, the nature of life and death are better for kid's mental well being then any flavor of abstract propaganda.
Yeah, I wasn't allowed much TV, but was allowed Mister Rogers and sometimes Sesame Street as a kid.
I lean pretty progressive/leftie/inclusive, and I think I recall some of those ideas from both of those shows (but I also got some of that from my parents and teachers).
Which I suppose is why I wonder about bits like the "three of these kids belong together" and programming a child with mental machinery to look for differences in other kids for the sake of finding differences. And the "belong together" language around spotting differences sounds loaded, given adult societal context.
I'd honestly love to hear what child psychologists and social anthropologists think about that bit in Sesame Street.
For example, is it suggesting (or reinforcing) the idea of looking for differences/nonconformism in their child peers, and if so, what are the implications of that?
Not long ago the new television ad featuring Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster pitching the iPhone 6 would have been considered a deplorable exploitation of children’s culture for profit. But this final collapse of a putatively public educational project into the realm of corporate marketing caused little stir, quite possibly because Big Capitalism was written into Sesame Street’s DNA from Day One.
Sesame Street was born as a ruling class experiment in social control, managed and funded by the Carnegie Endowment in concert with the Ford Foundation and federal agencies. Carnegie’s Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) created the show as a conscious response to late 60s urban insurrections and African-American revolutionary sentiment.”
That article seems to just be a sequence of innuendos and insinuations meant to surround Sesame Street with unsavory associations without ever actually providing evidence of them. Seriously, they're arguing that Sesame Street is responsible for advertisers copying their format and failing to teach long-form critical thinking to pre-schoolers.
> There's a lot to suggest that Sesame Street is not the harmless quirky kids' show it's made out to be.
If there's anything to suggest it, it's not in this article. The author seems to be angry that a children's television program was not designed as a vehicle for encouraging socialist revolution.
That's hilarious, because I've recently been a little annoyed because I think Sesame Street was designed as a vehicle for encouraging socialist revolution. The designers of Sesame Street were open supporters of a great deal of collectivist and proto-socialist policies (look at Joan Ganz Cooney's Wikipedia page), and literally created a state-funded educational vehicle as their life's work. One of the key recurring themes of Sesame Street is "you should share what you have with others", and its implied pairing, "there's something wrong with you if you don't share what you have with others".
To be fair, I don't know how well any of that worked on anyone. I watched Sesame Street when I was young and I certainly didn't retain those lessons. I think the more enduring lesson that Sesame Street unintentionally teaches people is "it's normal to learn things from the TV".
I think Sesame Street was designed as a vehicle for encouraging socialist revolution.
One of the biggest lessons I remember from childhood was sharing. One of the biggest. Kids are encouraged to share everywhere in the US. You can find hundreds of articles on encouraging your children to share in US parenting magazines.
That hundreds of millions of children who grew up in the US were encouraged to share as part of some kind of sinister socialist plot is... fanciful.
> One of the biggest lessons I remember from childhood was sharing. One of the biggest. Kids are encouraged to share everywhere in the US.
I have seen a small amount of dialing back on this in the preschools my kids went to. Kids are encouraged to share, and they can't be possessive of a toy, but they aren't required to share, or to give up a favorite item to another kid. If kid 1 wants to play with a truck for a whole hour, that's fine. Kid 2 just has to wait, or find something else. However, once kid 1 sets down the truck to go on the slide, it's fair game to kid 2.
I'm sure neither you nor I watch Fox News; I typically recommend people ignore cable news completely.
What does lead to socialism/communism is the modern urban/suburban American lifestyle. If you grow up in a fully state-funded education system, have all of your personal outcomes controlled and motivated by government initiatives, and live in a city that is ostensibly fully controlled (facilities, transportation, construction, etc.) by the government, you start to believe that all good things come from the state, and you start to believe that all problems can be fixed by more legislation and rules, paid for by more taxes and enforced by state actors. I've been around too many disparate sets of people whose only understanding of how large-scale problems can be solved is "more government" to think that I'm seeing a phenomenon that's unique to my own experience.
Most American citizens are disconnected from law, fighting, farming, construction, manufacturing, etc., and the ones that aren't usually range from weak to strong conservative.
Socialism/communism isn't "when the government does stuff"* - you should really read up on what they actually are (though given the US education system, you'd be forgiven for not knowing).
Of course, my mistake! I only learned what socialism was just yesterday from a series of Tucker Carlson videos.
Would you be so kind as to explain how socialism does not involve decentralized control of a set of resources by each individual member of the group, allocated through a codified representative legal system and enforced by members of the same group? I'm sure my underdeveloped American mind can't grasp any nuance past "government bad, company good"!
I can't put it better than the very first line of the Wikipedia definition:
"Socialism is a political, social, and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production."
Why are you now referring to a "group" and "members of the same group" whereas previously you referred to the "state" and "state actors"? These are not (necessarily) the same things.
Is there a significant difference between a group of people controlling resources that are also following and enforcing laws and the state, except for the number of people that are participating in the enforcement? If you have the ability to carry out or enforce a law, which is maintained by a group of people, you all become the state, and your neighbors/"community members" acting against you effectively becomes state action.
My point is that people who rely on the modern government for most things can be easily convinced that "social ownership of the means of production", as the wikipedia page puts it, is the best economic system to aspire to, because they perceive themselves as already partially there. They experience resources as easily obtained and distributed by a group of people they "elected", and so the mental leap to "let us use this system for everything, and we'll simply participate in the distribution and eventually it'll be socialism" is very easy to make. This leap is not as easy to make for those that actually participate in the production and organization of industry and society.
It's not necessarily sinister; if anyone organizing collectivist propaganda believes that what they're doing is good and virtuous, then it's just a regular plot.
As for its efficacy- many, many young people today openly identify with socialist and pre-socialist movements. I suspect it had to do with all of the childhood programming everywhere, as you mentioned. If Sesame Street happened to be a part of that giant effort, it doesn't necessary make it a conspiracy, just part of a political movement.
Is it your belief that the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation were trying to foment a socialist revolution? This is of course nowhere to be found on her Wikipedia page, but Cooney was a former US Information Agency officer and an alum of the CIA's Congress for Cultural Freedom.
You know, I couldn't tell you. That's new information to me.'
Here's what I'm wondering, in that case; if she is indeed a deep state plant working on behalf of the global-capitalist-regime-disrupting American "government" (which I do believe is an accurate description of USGov), then why participate in a giant push for state-funded collectivism, socialism, multiculturalism, and pacifism? Are you asserting that her motives were to serve the state by pretending to agree with the mission and central tenets of Sesame Street, or that her motives were pure but happened to be useful for the state?
I'm not being snarky, those are real questions that I don't know the answer to.
There are kind of two questions in your comment so let me paraphrase and address them separately.
Why would the USGov want to support a show like Sesame Street, with its left-wing perspectives of collectivism/socialism/etc?
First, I would point out that while elements of "the government" are involved, this is not necessarily a government project per se that we are talking about. The Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation are private entities, but ones which exert a lot of influence including over the government in various ways.
In the specific example of Sesame Street, I think that espousing ostensibly left-wing viewpoints can still work to their advantage if it allows them to smuggle in other concepts which blunt any sort of revolutionary thinking. Hence, you had early season episodes which were about making peace with urban decay -- the cracks in your walls as imaginary friends, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0y0ffj__R4g&feature=youtu.be
Was Cooney a witting agent of the state/ruling-class or was she genuine but useful to them?
It's very difficult or impossible to tell really. Generally, the way things like the Congress of Cultural Freedom worked was by first filtering for artists with a particular voice or perspective, and then subtly promoting certain perspectives, themes, and techniques for them to use in their artwork. This allowed the application of a great deal of leverage over the cultural scene without going to people and explicitly saying "we want you to make art for the CIA" (although I'm sure there were also more than a few witting agents).
All the sketches below are ones I've seen when I was little.
The legendery Pinball Number Count, with music by the Pointer Sisters : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZshZp-cxKg
Totally tripped-out alphabet, and I mean totally tripped-out : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waxmzwxpKOo
Multi-armed guru counting to twenty a few times including in Spanish : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOkbuwRUTZo
Little kid gets lost in a weird neighborhood : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqPcQeMEnFc