Sesame Street Pitch Reel

In 1968, a promotional pitch reel was produced for the series that would become Sesame Street, starring the Muppets. The reel was intended as a sample to be shown to station representatives at NET (later to become PBS), as well as parents and teachers, and included some of the earliest cartoon and film inserts (the street scenes concept had yet to be developed or filmed).

When the film was produced, the Children's Television Workshop staff were still deciding on a name for the show, and this difficult process was spoofed by the Muppets. The film features Rowlf describing what the new show will be like to Kermit. Interspersed between the explanatory scenes are board room sequences, in which various Muppets (including chairman Grump, Scoop, Gleep, Beautiful Day Monster, Conrad Love, an Anything Muppet and the Spook) try to come up with a name for the show. The reel is also marked by extensive use of the word "groovy" and phrases like "I'm hip."

The following year, an updated version of the reel was produced, with a beginning and ending featuring Joan Ganz Cooney encouraging stations to pick up the new program. And since the show's name had finally been decided on at that point, this second version also has a brand-new ending, in which Kermit suggests the name Sesame Street.

Credits

 * Executive Producer: David Connell
 * Writer: Jon Stone
 * Muppet Performers: Jim Henson (Kermit, Rowlf, Grump, Conrad Love, others), Frank Oz (Scoop, Beautiful Day Monster)

Television/Home Video Releases
Several documentaries have used clips from the film: Sesame Street Unpaved, A&E Biography: Sesame Street, The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson, and The World According to Sesame Street.

The second version of the pitch reel was included as a bonus feature on the DVD release Old School: Volume 1 in 2006.