It was November 10, 1969. While most of America was grappling with the Vietnam War and the fallout of the moon landing, a group of radical educators and television producers launched a social experiment on public broadcasting. They didn't call it a revolution. They called it "Sesame Street." If you go back and watch the Sesame Street 1st episode, it’s honestly jarring. It isn't the polished, high-definition, celebrity-packed powerhouse we see today. It’s gritty. It’s a bit slow. It’s experimental in a way that would probably terrify modern network executives who are obsessed with retention metrics and 3-second hooks.
Most people think Sesame Street was an instant, unanimous hit that everyone loved from the second the theme song played. That’s just not true. It was actually banned in Mississippi early on because the state commission for educational television wasn't ready to show a racially integrated neighborhood. The first episode wasn't just about teaching the alphabet. It was a political statement wrapped in a brownstone stoop.
What Actually Happened in the Sesame Street 1st Episode
The very first person we see isn't a puppet. It’s Gordon, played originally by Matt Robinson. He’s walking down a dirty New York City street. He meets a young girl named Sally. He tells her, "Sally, you've never seen a street like Sesame Street before." He was right. Television for kids back then was mostly Captain Kangaroo or Mr. Rogers—both wonderful, but they lived in quiet, suburban-feeling fantasy worlds. Sesame Street looked like the Bronx or Harlem. It had trash cans. It had peeling paint.
Gordon takes Sally on a tour, and we meet the original human cast: Susan, Bob, and Mr. Hooper. There’s no Elmo. There’s no Abby Cadabby. Even Big Bird looks... off. In the Sesame Street 1st episode, Big Bird was played by Carroll Spinney, but the costume was raggedy and the character was written as kind of a "village idiot" rather than the surrogate six-year-old he eventually became. He was goofy and lacked the soulful curiosity that made him an icon later.
The structure of the episode was modeled after commercial television. Joan Ganz Cooney, the creator, realized that kids were mesmerized by beer commercials and catchy jingles. She basically said, "If we can sell them Budweiser, we can sell them the letter W." So, the first episode is chopped up. It’s "sponsored" by the letters W, S, and E, and the numbers 2 and 3. It jumps from live-action to animation to Muppets with a frantic energy that educators at the time thought would rot children's brains. They were wrong.
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The Muppet Problem
Here is a weird fact: Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch were the only Muppets who lived on the actual street in the beginning. In the Sesame Street 1st episode, Bert and Ernie only appeared in filmed sketches. They didn't interact with the humans. Why? Because the educational consultants were afraid that mixing "fantasy" creatures with "real" people would confuse children’s developing minds.
Testing changed everything.
The producers did "distractor" tests where they showed kids the show while a slide projector flickered images on a nearby wall. When the humans were on screen talking about milk or sharing, the kids looked at the slides. When the Muppets came on, they were glued to the TV. The researchers realized that if they didn't put the Muppets on the street with the humans, the show would fail. This change didn't happen fully in episode one, but you can see the seeds of that struggle.
Bert, Ernie, and the Milk Dilemma
The first sketch featuring Bert and Ernie involves Ernie trying to build a "W" out of pieces of wood while Bert tries to read. It’s classic. It’s the dynamic we’ve known for fifty years. But in this 1969 debut, Frank Oz and Jim Henson were still finding the voices. Ernie is a little more chaotic. Bert is a little more high-strung.
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There’s also a famous bit in the Sesame Street 1st episode where Ernie uses a straw to drink Bert’s milk while Bert isn't looking. It sounds simple, but it was a masterclass in "visual thinking" for toddlers. It taught logic, cause-and-effect, and—let’s be honest—how to be a bit of a pest.
Why Oscar Was Orange
If you look at the Sesame Street 1st episode, you’ll notice Oscar the Grouch isn't green. He’s bright orange. Jim Henson decided to change him to green in Season 2, explaining it away by saying Oscar went to "Swamp Mushy Muddy" and turned green overnight. But in 1969, he was this fuzzy, tangerine-colored curmudgeon who lived in a trash can. The concept of a character who liked trash and was intentionally rude was a massive risk. Public television was supposed to be polite. Oscar was the counter-culture.
The Secret Pilot That Almost Killed the Show
Before the official Sesame Street 1st episode aired, there were actually five "test" episodes that were shown to groups of children in Philadelphia. They were a disaster. The kids hated the long stretches of humans talking. The producers realized they had to scrap almost everything and start over.
This is why the first episode feels so fast-paced. It was a desperate attempt to keep the attention of a generation raised on the "idiot box." The creators at the Children's Television Workshop (CTW) spent $8 million—an insane amount of money in the 60s—to research how kids learn. They used eye-tracking technology to see exactly where a four-year-old looks on the screen.
- They found kids look at the center.
- They found kids ignore "talking heads."
- They found music is the ultimate "glue" for memory.
In the first episode, you hear "Rubber Duckie" hasn't quite arrived yet, but the musicality is there. The "Three of These Things" song made its debut, challenging kids to use categorization skills. It was high-level cognitive science disguised as a puppet show.
The Legacy of the First Broadcast
When the credits rolled on that first hour, nobody knew if it would last a week. The New York Times gave it a glowing review, but many parents were skeptical. They didn't like the "urban" feel. They didn't like the noise.
But the kids? The kids were obsessed.
By the end of the first season, Sesame Street was reaching millions of households. It was the first time television was used as a tool for social equity. The Sesame Street 1st episode wasn't just about the letter E; it was about the idea that a kid in a low-income housing project deserved the same quality of early education as a kid in a private preschool.
Actionable Insights for Fans and Historians
If you want to truly appreciate the Sesame Street 1st episode, you shouldn't just watch it as a piece of nostalgia. You have to look at it as a historical document.
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- Watch for the Background Details: Look at the "set." It wasn't a studio lot in the traditional sense; it was designed to look like a place where people lived. The posters on the walls and the items in Mr. Hooper’s store are time capsules of 1969.
- Analyze the Pacing: Compare it to a modern episode. You'll notice the 1969 version allows for much more silence. There’s room for a child to think.
- Track the Muppet Evolution: Notice the puppetry techniques. Jim Henson was still perfecting how to make a hand puppet look like it was actually making eye contact with a human.
- Find the Unedited Version: Many clips online are "best of" segments. To get the full effect, find the complete 60-minute broadcast. It’s available through various museum archives and special DVD anniversary releases.
The Sesame Street 1st episode remains a blueprint for every piece of educational media that followed. It proved that you don't have to talk down to children. You just have to meet them where they are—even if that's on a dusty street corner in New York City with an orange grouch and a giant yellow bird who doesn't quite know his own name yet.
To explore this further, seek out the documentary Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street. It provides the behind-the-scenes footage of the 1969 tapings that were omitted from the final broadcast, including the friction between the animators and the traditional educators who thought the show was too "loud." Understanding those conflicts makes the success of the first episode even more impressive.