3/20/2024 0 Comments Sesame street font with characters![]() She follows last year’s introduction of a black Muppet named Tamir. So, it is entirely in-keeping with that mission that Sesame Street this week announced the arrival of Ji-Young, the show’s first Asian-American Muppet. Ji-Young (right), pictured with longtime Sesame Street character Ernie, is the first Asian-American Muppet on the long-running children’s program. “We were going to save the world and we were going to eradicate racism,” recalled Sonia Manzano who played Maria for more than four decades and was one of the first Latinas on American television. It can only be fully understood by its context amid the Civil Rights movement. Sesame Street has always been a show with a mission, a sense of social vocation. And so it captured their world, including the fact that most human characters were from racial minorities. From its very inception, it was aimed at poorer inner-city kids, largely black, in the hope that by the time they reached school, they might be on an equal educational footing with middle-class kids. Its characters run corner stores and live in trash cans. ![]() It doesn’t exist in an imaginary world of rainbows and meadows, or on rigidly constructed, cartoon-like sets. Perhaps the secret is that it is so clearly a creature of urban New York. And I love its miraculous aesthetic – so perfectly distilled in its iconic theme song – of being simultaneously child-like and cool. ![]() I love that it’s so watchable even for adults, with comedy operating on multiple levels. I love how it meets kids at their level but doesn’t condescend. ![]()
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