![]() It reminded me of that, being in a room minding your own business and then being swept away.” “Then, in watching Sesame Street, it was the last place you’d expect to be scared. I remember that was super traumatizing to me. She was calling out for her parents and they couldn’t find her. I remember one episode where a girl was trapped in another dimension. So I watched a lot of The Twilight Zone-or watching my dad watch The Twilight Zone. The latter, Armond says, hit him particularly hard thanks in part to another show. And the fact that the girl is taken to another dimension.” The woman singing is singing in an eerie kind of way. The off-key music, like freeform jazz that doesn’t seem to be matching anything. But it’s really the whole thing before that. “Most people will point to the end, with the crack monster on the wall. “I think it was a lot of things,” Armond says of his aversion to the segment. Some could be abstract or even slightly surreal. Independent animation houses were also recruited and asked to follow the show’s pre-planned themes and messages. Filmation was an early contributor, rendering DC characters like Batman and Superman for the series. Everything about it, from Big Bird’s bright yellow feathers to Elmo’s childlike speaking cadence, was (and is) designed to draw children in.īig Bird is one of the elements that appeal to kids on 'Sesame Street.' / Mitchell Gerber/GettyImagesįrom the outset, the show made use of animation. Hooper to enrich an evidence-based curriculum. The brainchild of producer Joan Ganz Cooney and educator Lloyd Morrisett, the series used everything from Jim Henson’s Muppets to songs to friendly adults like Mr. While layin’ in her bed … the cracks overhead … Drawn to Itįrom its inception in 1969, Sesame Street took a multimedia approach to educational television. Then he heard a familiar voice start to sing. Inside was a DVD labeled with a single word: Cracks.Īrmond rushed inside and shoved the disc into his DVD player. There was no return address and no postage. Then, one morning, he walked onto his front porch and noticed a manilla envelope sticking out of his mailbox. He signed the document and faxed it back. All Armond had to do was agree to never distribute the segment online.Īrmond had nothing to lose. “I’d ask someone and they had never heard of it.”īut here was an anonymous note, faxed to the station where Armond was a morning show host, that seemed to promise some kind of closure. “For years I thought I had just dreamt it,” Armond tells Mental Floss. ![]() Though Armond eventually found others who were familiar with the crack monster, it seemed like an example of the Mandela Effect, a shared (but false) memory. Not even employees at Sesame Workshop, who told him they had no record of such a segment. No one he talked to seemed to remember the cartoon. ![]() Then Armond grew up, and the crack monster disappeared. The “crack monster,” as Armond called him, burrowed its way into his preadolescent brain, giving him nightmares. ![]() But it carved out an impression on Armond that lasted a lifetime. Like most Sesame Street cartoons, it lasted just minutes. The girl was having a good time-until another, far more malevolent shape appeared: A grimacing plaster monster who sneered until his sour demeanor forced him to crumble. He remembered plunking down on green shag carpeting and staring at a 25-inch console television at his home in Los Angeles, watching as a girl with a lilting voice was drawn out of her bed by friendly animals formed by cracks in her plaster wall a jazzy score played in the background. It was unsigned and carried a message that sent his heart racing.įor over 30 years, Armond had been searching for an animated segment on the PBS children’s program Sesame Street that he had first seen in 1975, when he was roughly 5 years old. Jon Armond was sitting in a radio station studio in rural Iowa when the fax came. ![]()
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