The Sesame Street Episode Banned For Being Too Scary, Watch It Here
The legendary Sesame Street television series is known for exploring many sensitive topics over the decades, such as death, homelessness, autism, divorce, racial and cultural diversity, and so on. But very few episodes were as controversial as the one PBS broadcast—and subsequently pulled—in 1976. The reason behind such action was that the episode was far too scary for kids, and for decades, it has been difficult to find. However, you can now watch the Sesame Street banned episode on YouTube.
What made the Sesame Street banned episode so scary was Margaret Hamilton‘s reprisal of the Wicked Witch of the West, nearly four decades after The Wizard of Oz premiered.
What made the Sesame Street banned episode so scary was Margaret Hamilton‘s reprisal of the Wicked Witch of the West, nearly four decades after The Wizard of Oz premiered. In the episode, however, the infamous witch loses her broomstick, threatens to turn Big Bird into a feather duster, and charms Oscar the Grouch.
Admittedly, while this feels pretty tame, PBS was bombarded with complaints by the parents, as the characters of the episode apparently traumatized preschool children. Ironically, the episode was meant to teach kids to overcome their fears.
The re-emergence of the banned Sesame Street episode only proves the point that we still haven’t found a way to preserve intellectual goods.
Whatever the case may be, PBS eventually gave in to the parental backlash, and the banned episode of Sesame Street was forever pulled from syndication after airing only once. It was later categorized as lost media, but it wasn’t actually truly lost. Just like the Super Mario theme song, the episode was archived at the Library of Congress, so it wasn’t all that impossible to view—you just had to jump through the fiery hoops of bureaucracy.
Sure, there were many videos of the banned episode of Sesame Street, but the video was mostly grainy and of poor quality. Homemade VHS-to-digital format conversions can’t go very far when it comes to upscaling a video.
However, the recently updated video is of notably higher quality, so if anyone growing up in the ’70s has been searching for the lost footage, this video is probably the closest thing we got to the original. Sure, the image quality still isn’t great, but you have to remember that it was filmed for NTSC standard TVs, with a resolution of 480p.
Admittedly, while this feels pretty tame, PBS was bombarded with complaints by the parents, as the characters of the episode apparently traumatized preschool children.
It’s also important to note that this isn’t the first time a copy of the banned episode of Sesame Street was found. Bits and pieces of the episode were shown in 2019, and just last year, the episode was leaked onto Reddit by an anonymous user who didn’t clarify how the episode was obtained.
This led some to believe that the episode was obtained illegally as part of some data breach, which attracted the attention of several news sites that began reporting on the episode a couple of days later.
Copyright protection aside, the re-emergence of the banned Sesame Street episode only proves the point that we still haven’t found a way to preserve intellectual goods. We previously reported that more than 80 percent of video games ever made were lost to oblivion, several Doctor Who episodes are also lost in the vortices of time, and now, people are debating whether or not someone stole the episode that was broadcast nearly 50 years ago—which isn’t actually the case with the video we attached at the beginning of this article.
