Sometimes I just love writing research papers. I have discovered I am one of those scary people who adores researching, and I love to tell everyone else about my research, and I love to write all my research down... I can even write a decent paper, if it needn't be particuarly organised. I'm more from the flow of conciousness because I get excited school of paper writing.
My exciting find this time around was for my You're a Good Man Charlie Brown paper. Big Bird has a teddy bear named Radar. As a kid, I always knew this was because Radar on M*A*S*H had a teddy bear, but now I think there is a deeper meaning. Radar was played by Gary Burghoff. Before Burghoff was in M*A*S*H, he played Charlie Brown in the original off-off Broadway version of the musical, and he was also one of the producers. The writer for Good Man was Clark Gesner. Clark Gesner was originally one of the writers for Captain Kangaroo. Most of the Captain Kangaroo writers went on to work on devising an educational kid's show... Sesame Street. Gesner brought the music to the show, and was later a writer for the show. Who must've chosen to name Big Bird's teddy bear after Radar?
I have no idea how on earth I work that in, but it just makes me happy. Ultimately, Clark Gesner is generally credited as being part of Sesame Street, Captain KangarooM and The Electric Company, but the biggest addition he made was suggesting the addition of music to SS.
Along those same lines, it was Joe Raposo who helped write the Charlie Brown music and helped to arrange the orchestrations. Joe Raposo (I've mentioned before) penned such SS favourites as "Little Things" and "It's Not Easy Being Green". He died in 1989, a year before Jim Henson. In my opinion, their deaths mark the end of the Golden Age of Sesame Street.
And with that note, it's bedtime.