November 10, 1969…”Sesame Street” Debuts On PBS

November 10, 1969…”Sesame Street” Debuts On PBS

Here is the full debut episode of the show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9NUiHCr9Cs&ab_channel=Blue%27sClues%26TheWigglesFTW

Since almost almost everyone in the world knows the show, since it’s now on in 123 countries, we’ll celebrate the anniversary with a look at the early production history.

In the photos below, we see the original home of the show which was done from the old RKO 81st Street Theater at 2248 Broadway. The theater was owned by Teletape Productions, but before this, it had been the home of the first and only CBS color studio on the east coast…Studio 72 which was created in the fall of 1954.

Also shown here is an early cast and crew photo with the Marconi Mark VII color cameras. The color photo of a Mark VII shooting Grover is the one that I now have in my collection…it was Camera 2 and in the closeup, you can see that the dome tally light number is the same. There were six Mark VIIs in use on the show.

Teletape was a video production company that merged with Reeves Sound Services in 1974 and became Reeves Teletape. Before that, Reeves had been more of a sound and video post edit company.

According to our friend Dennis Degan, who worked at Reeves Teletape, R/T moved ‘Sesame Street’ production in 1983 from 81st Street to the 55th Street studio, which was formerly WNET-TV’s studio on 9th Ave at 55th Street. They made this move because R/T sold the 81st Street studio. They originally bought it from CBS in 1967.

Sesame Street was produced at 55th Street from 1983 to around 1990, first with R/T, then in 1987 with Unitel Video, as R/T went out of business. Sesame moved to Kaufman-Astoria Studios in 1990 where it has remains to this day. The RKO 81 studio was torn down in 1986. This little history lesson was brought to you by the letter B for Bobby. Enjoy and share! -Bobby Ellerbee

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