Hooper and Big Bird’s baby pictures, which are eggs. “We built a tree and attached to it kitchen cabinets and shelves, with a proper mailbox and a kitchen lamp,” Gallo says. Oscar the Grouch and Michael Jackson on “Sesame Street” in 1978. “People don’t like change … Moving him was radical.” (For Elmo, too: In a video, the puppet gripes that Oscar’s trash can is right under the window to his room, and “gets a little smelly in the summer.”) But Oscar’s new position, Gallo says, better allowed the furry grump “to comment on all the crazy crap in the neighborhood.”īig Bird’s nest was relocated from a crate surrounded by barrels to a tree. The scenic designer caused an outrage when he moved Oscar from the left side to the right side of the Sesame brownstone - and added a blue compost bin next to his trash can. That makeover was minor compared to Gallo’s next assignment: to find distinctive places for the characters to live. To maintain a sense of history, he installed black-and-yellow tiles under the store window, paying homage to those in the original Hooper’s. Figuring that a store like Hooper’s would have internet access today, he added a “Free Wi-Fi” sticker next to the old Bell telephone sign. He installed a 19th-century pressed-tin ceiling inside the store, changed the light fixtures and added vintage awnings and a neon sign outside. Gallo changed Hooper’s garish exterior to a rich, glossy green. So he decided to redo the corner store’s color scheme with “urban realism” in mind - still kid-friendly, but with a little more character. “They were choosing bright colors more like the way people imagine a children’s show should look.”īut when Gallo looked at real kids’ drawings of urban neighborhoods for inspiration, they didn’t focus on those eyesore shades. “It looked like an Ikea, with yellow-and-blue walls and a pumpkin-colored awning,” he says. He winces remembering Hooper’s color scheme. When you buy a box set of the show from the early years, it comes with a warning sign that the content might not be appropriate for children.”Īlthough those touches were long gone by 2015, Gallo still had a lot of work to do when he was called in to refresh the show for its 46th season. He thinks those curious design choices were a sign of the times. Hooper was a curmudgeonly guy,” Gallo, who oversaw the most recent overhaul of the “Sesame” set in 2015, says with a laugh. Today, that space is a bodega-like convenience store, but back then, it was a soda shop with a rather un-“Sesame” sign in the window, reading, in broken Spanish, “NO HABLO ESPANO.” The LIFE Images Collection via G The show’s famous brownstone, 123 Sesame Street, is at one end of the Street on the other end was Hooper’s Store. There was “a trash heap in the middle” of the block, production designer David Gallo tells The Post. Maybe too real of a New York City street. Based on a mashup of brownstone blocks in Harlem, the Bronx and the Upper West Side, it aimed to capture a real New York City street. Take the original “Sesame Street” set, fashioned by production designer Charles Rosen in 1969. Like any New York block, Sesame Street has seen its ups and downs, questionable design choices, gentrifications and tear-downs in the past half-century.īut unlike actual city streets, the television address had to prioritize sensitive kiddie viewers with its various face-lifts. 'Sesame Street' co-creator Lloyd Morrisett dead at 93 We found last-minute NYC 'Sesame Street Live' tickets. tourists as Cookie MonsterĬops warn of 'creepy' Cookie Monster terrorizing town: 'Steer clear' NYC's ‘anti-Semitic Elmo’ now tormenting Calif.
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