Sesame Street co-creator Lloyd Morrisett dead at 93

Lloyd Morrisett, co-creator of the beloved children’s educational TV series Sesame Street, featuring fuzzy monsters like Abby Cadabby, Elmo and Cookie Monster to charm and teach generations around the world, has passed away. He is 93 years old.

Morrisett’s death was announced Tuesday by Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit he founded under the name Children’s Television Workshop. No cause of death was given.

In a statement, Sesame Workshop hailed Morrisett as a “thoughtful, insightful and brilliant leader” who is “constantly thinking of new ways” to teach.

Morrisett and Joan Ganz Cooney worked with Harvard University developmental psychologist Gerald Lesser to build a unique approach to teaching, which has now reached 120 million children. Legendary puppeteer Jim Henson provided the critters.

Sesame Street shown in more than 150 countries, has won 193 Emmys and 10 Grammys and in 2019 received the Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime artistic achievement, the first television program to receive the award.

Born in 1929 in Oklahoma City, Morrisett originally trained as a teacher with a background in psychology. He is an experimental educator, looking for new ways to teach children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Morrisett earned a bachelor’s degree at Oberlin College, graduate work in psychology at UCLA and earned a doctorate in experimental psychology at Yale University. He served as an Oberlin trustee for many years and served as board chairman from 1975 to 1981.

Diversity, goal inclusion

Spark for Sesame Street came during a dinner party in 1966, where he met Cooney.

“I said, ‘Joan, do you think television can be used to teach children?’ His answer was, ‘I don’t know, but I want to talk about it,”’ he recalled to The Guardian in 2004.

The first episode of Sesame Street – sponsored by the letters W, S and E and numbers 2 and 3 – aired in the fall of 1969. It was a turbulent time in America, shaken by the Vietnam War and raw from the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy the year before.

Sesame Street It was designed by educational professionals and child psychologists with one goal: to help low-income and minority students aged two to five overcome some of the disabilities they had when they entered school. Social scientists have long noted that children who are white and from higher-income families are often better prepared.

The show is set on a city street with a multicultural cast. Diversity and inclusion are baked into the show. Giants, humans and animals all live together in peace.

It was the first children’s program to feature people with Down syndrome. It features puppets with HIV and in orphanages, invites children in wheelchairs and deals with topics such as incarcerated parents, homelessness, women’s rights, military families and even girls singing about loving their hair .

It introduced the bilingual Rosita – the first Latina Muppet – in 1991. Julia, a four-year-old Muppet with autism, arrived in 2017 and the show began to offer help to children whose parents suffered from addiction and recovery, and whose children suffered. as a result of the Syrian civil war.

To help the children after 9/11, Elmo is traumatized by the fire at Mr. Hooper’s store, but calmly tells them that the firemen are there to help.

In the 1970s, Morrisett and Cooney, along with writer and actor Paul Dooley, created it Electric Companywhich is generally aimed at children older than Sesame Street demographics.

As with Sesame Street, Electric Company broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service in the US, for six seasons.