Ryan's Smashing Life
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2018–2022
6:48 · 13M views · Apr 4, 2007
Stevie Wonder performs 'Superstition' on Sesame Street in 1973, with kids dancing along. It is a feel-good live music performance.
Recommended in Sesame Street and children's TV threads as a favorite example of the show's funkier past.
4 comments from Hacker News
Sesame Street is like a fossil record or tree cross section for attention span in television. Some of the older Sesame Street clips like the one about milk, are trippy long format art pieces. Very very different than the quick cuts / short segments that happen today. Whether that’s good or bad is up to you. I suspect the old style simply wouldn’t compete for viewers today. A bonus: Stevie Wonder playing Superstition on Sesame Street might be my favorite “music video” of all time. this video
We received two PBS stations at the farmhouse where we lived in the early '70s, so obviously I watched Sesame Street twice a day. If you haven't seen Stevie Wonder's performance of Superstition on the show in 1973, I highly recommend it: this video
How could they include that and not this? this video Edit: Youtube commenter claims the kid rocking out on the stairs is "my cousin Lenny Kravitz". Plausible. Am I being naive?
Sesame street was considerably funkier, psychedelic and kind of gritty. Elmo was a herald of a much cleaner and sort of infantilized Sesame Street. The massive commercial success of the Elmo toys especially made it feel like it had become very commercial and a lot less grassroots. this video [LINK]