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Sesame Street: A Transnational History tells the story of how the American TV show became a global brand. Based on archival research across seven countries, the book demonstrates how
Sesame Street, from the very beginning, was a commodity assertively marketed all over the world. Author Helle Strandgaard Jensen deftly examines the sophisticated sales strategies crafted to promote the show-and why they did not always work. Seeing the sales from the perspective of both the vendor and potential vendees, the book lays bare a cultural clash of international proportions rooted in divergent approaches to childhood, education, and television production that are still around today.
List of contents
- Preface
- INTRODUCTION
- Culture-Free TV?
- CHAPTER 1
- Domestic Origins: The Workshop's Business Model
- CHAPTER 2
- Ensuring Early Success: Strategies to Conquer the International Market
- CHAPTER 3
- Ban and Bother: The Workshop's troubles in the UK
- CHAPTER 4
- Negotiating Local Needs: Sesame Street in West Germany
- CHAPTER 5
- Other Childhoods: Sesame Street in Scandinavia
- CONCLUSION
- Narrow Vision: Looking Back at a Global Success
- Consulted Archival Material
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Helle Strandgaard Jensen is Associate Professor in the Department of History and Classical Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the author of From Superman to Social Realism: Children's Media and Scandinavian Childhood. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and has been a visiting fellow at universities in the UK, the US, Norway, and Sweden. Her work has appeared in Media History; Journal of Children and Media; Media, Culture & Society; Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth; The Programming Historian, and elsewhere. She holds a shared directorship at the Center for Digital History Aarhus. She lives in Åbyhøj, Denmark, and her favorite time is spent cooking, reading, and playing video games with her family.
Summary
In Sesame Street: A Transnational History, author Helle Strandgaard Jensen tells the story of how the American television show became a global brand. Jensen argues that because the show's domestic production was not financially viable from the beginning, Sesame Street became a commodity that its producers assertively marketed all over the world. Sesame Street: A Transnational History combines archival research from seven countries, bolstering an insightful analysis of how local reception and rejection of the show related to the global sales strategies and American ideals it was built upon.
Contrary to the producers' oft-publicized claims of Sesame Street's universality, the show was heavily shaped by a fixed set of assumptions about childhood, education, and commercial entertainment. This made sales difficult as Sesame Street met both skepticism and direct hostility from foreign television producers who did not share these ideals. Drawing on insights from new histories about childhood, education, and transnational media, the book lays bare a cultural clash of international proportions rooted in divergent approaches to children's television. In doing so, it provides a reflective backdrop to the many ongoing debates about children's media.
In contrasting the positive receptions and renunciations of Sesame Street, Jensen demonstrates that it was only after a substantial rethinking of Sesame Street's aims and business model that this program ended up on numerous broadcasting schedules by the mid-1970s. Along the way, this rethinking and the constant negotiations with potential international buyers created and shaped the business and corporate brand that paved the way for the Sesame Street we know today.
Additional text
The comparative approach puts the interaction between local and global, region and regions to the forefront, and illustrates the differences in the Workshop's strategies and attempts between different regions in the transnational expansion of Sesame Street [...] Through these case studies and archival materials, Jensen not only illustrates that children's media is not a 'culturally free' product but demonstrates the culturally different views of childhood, education, and television, enriching the cultural dimension of transnational history.
