by bintangkecil on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 | Entertainment, News, World

Big Bird from Sesame Street is 40 years old! Big Bird, Oscar, Ernie & Burt and the entire Sesame Street show turns 40 on November 10.

The yellow star lent his legs to the site’s homepage today, to mark the show’s 40th birthday.
To celebrate, Sesame Street’s website has been running a contest, where visitors can vote for their favorite episodes from the the show’s impressive four-decade public television run.

Sesame Street

Sesame Street is an American educational children’s television series and a pioneer of the contemporary educational television standard, combining both education and entertainment. Sesame Street is well known for its Muppets characters created by Jim Henson. It premiered on November 10, 1969, and is the longest running children’s program on US television.

The show is produced in the United States by the non-profit organization Sesame Workshop, formerly known as the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), founded by Joan Ganz Cooney and Ralph Rogers.

As author Malcolm Gladwell has stated, “Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them“.

Sesame Street was the first children’s show that structured each episode and made “small but critical adjustments” to each segment to capture children’s attention long enough to teach them something.
Sesame Street uses a combination of animation, puppets, and live actors to stimulate young children’s minds, improve their letter and word recognition, basic arithmetic, geometric forms, classification, simple problem solving, and socialization by showing children or people in their everyday lives.

Big Bird

Big Bird is a character featured on the children’s television show Sesame Street which airs on PBS. A common misconception is that he is a muppet, but in 1989, Jim Henson explained that characters played by people in suits, rather than just hands in puppets, do not qualify as muppets. He is sometimes referred to as “Bird” by his friends.

Officially performed by Caroll Spinney since 1969, he is an eight-foot two-inch tall bright yellow bird. He can roller skate, ice skate, dance, sing, write poetry, draw and even ride a unicycle. But despite this wide array of talents, he is prone to frequent misunderstandings, on one occasion even singing the alphabet as one big long word (ABC-DEF-GHI), pondering what it could ever mean. He lives in a large nest behind the 123 Sesame Street brownstone and he has a teddy bear named Radar, after Walter “Radar” O’Reilly of M*A*S*H, who had a teddy bear and was also lovably naive and innocent. Radar was given to Big Bird by Gary Burghoff when he guest starred on the show. Later on, however, it was said that Big Bird got the bear as a gift from Mr. Hooper.

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