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.”Are parents really unable to explain to kids that smoking is NOT okay? I must say that as a toddler I watched Sesame Street religiously, and I never once interpreted these spots as promoting tobacco. I was not once tempted to try to eat a pipe myself.
Can we PLEASE get a grip?
