And so the wimpification of modern culture continues. The early episodes of Sesame Street, the show that defined childhood for nearly forty years, have been released on DVD with the sticker that has defined childhood for the last twenty years—a warning that the contents may not be suitable for children.

At the New York Times, Virginia Heffernan has some fun guessing what dark secret might be lurking in those early episodes that today’s kids aren’t tough enough to handle. Oscar’s mood disorder? Cookie Monster’s suicidal starch-and-sugar diet? Disturbingly aggressive pillow fights? As a matter of fact, yes:

Carol-Lynn Parente…. told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
…On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

NPR also notes that some segments ran much too long for modern viewers’ attention spans. I can’t wait until 2027, when the classic Teletubbies episodes are finally issued in nanochip format. Minus all the scary stuff, of course. And the intellectually challenging bits.