The Surprising Thing ‘Sesame Street’s Creators Hated About the Show

Can you imagine Sesame Street by any other name? Say, 1-2-3 Avenue B? Or even, heaven forfend, Fun Street? The seminal children’s show — which debuted on November 10, 1969 — could have easily gone by another title, considering how much co-creator Joan Ganz Cooney and her colleagues didn’t like its eventual moniker.

That’s just one anecdote in the storied history of Sesame Street, which was “truly an experiment in teaching children using the new medium of television,” as Ellen Crafts, a producer of the documentary Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street, told The Guardian in 2021. “These incredible people came together and were responding to a shared social consciousness, and were going to use television and creativity to ultimately try to change the world.”