Director: Ken Kwapis
Cast: Carroll Spinney, Jim Henson, Frank Oz, Dave Thomas
Have I Seen It Before?: That poor VHS copy we had never stood a chance. Smash cut to the 2000s, I find a copy wallowing quite unfairly in the five dollar DVD trough at the local Wal Mart. Watching it again, I was likely emotionally compromised, whether from being at a sensitive age, or having a normal amount of some substance pushing me along in that direction*.
Did I like it?: There is a tendency in children’s entertainment—especially feature films geared towards children—to eschew any sense of an auteur. The puppets of Sesame Street may have originated with Jim Henson, they were further refined by puppeteers like Frank Oz, Carroll Spinney, and Kevin Clash, and the program may have been nurtured through its first several decades by producer Joan Ganz Cooney. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t watch this film now, notice that a number of characters including Big Bird (Spinney) and Miss Finch** (Sally Kellerman) staring at the camera and expressing their frustration and bemusement, and couldn’t help but notice that director Ken Kwapis was forming the skills he would bring to bear twenty years later in the US version of The Office.
That, however, is only what I noticed on this particular viewing of the film. I’m brought back to it because of its pointedly cinematically literate. The film should have made 100 million in the box office, based soley on the notion of everyone’s favorite eight-foot-tall bird in the place of Cary Grant in that most famous sequence from North by Northwest (1959). Alas, it bombed and put the Children’s Television Workshop’s financial life in some jeopardy for the next few years.
It is fast paced—naturally to keep pace with a child’s waning attention, even in the 1980s—but never deigns to skip over real peril or stakes for the characters. The wants and needs of Big Bird that send him through the story are real, and he comes through the process having changed, realizing all the family he really needs or wants are at Sesame Street. At the same time, Sesame Street’s selfless, almost unconscious, collective efforts to jump into action to find him are enough to send this reviewer to a point where faith in humanity may not be the craziest idea in the world.
With human society feeling like it might just possibly crumble or snap, I think we all may need to give this one a whirl in the DVD player again.
*Is this the first piece of writing about Sesame Street that alludes to the use of marijuana? Surely not…
**Every time I hear a mournful wail of that name, I am reminded that such calls became synonymous with “Oh no!” in my house for several years.