DVD of Early "Sesame Street" Comes With Warning:

[Nathander]

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of ?Sesame Street,? how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She 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.?

Some one please tell me I'm not the only person who finds the idea of them dropping this scene because of it giving the bad idea of PIPE EATING as being inherently hilarious. That is one heck of a stretch of the imagination to find fault with its supposed "politically incorrectness".

As for the current, dumb-downed iteration of Sesame Street, I honestly feel bad for today's kids, because they don't know what they're missing. But there are a lot of reasons I feel bad for today's kids, mainly due to the fact that they're given only a few shreds of quality entertainment.