Iftah Ya Simsim

Iftah Ya Simsim (Arabic: افتح يا سمسم‎‎; meaning "Open Sesame") is the first international co-production of the American children's television series Sesame Street created in the Arab world. It premiered in Kuwait in 1979 and was broadcast in 22 Arabic-speaking countries, running until 1990. The program continued to be well-known decades after it went off the air. In 1978, educators, mass media officers, and social planners agreed to adopt Sesame Street as a feasible and economical solution for the low attendance in preschools and illiteracy that plagued the region. They approached the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), the producers of the American show, and purchased the rights to create an Arab version for US$2.5 million.

A few months after its premiere, Iftah Ya Simsim became one of the most popular and successful programs for children in many Arab states. Critics called it "one of the most successful pan-Arab collaborations of educators, creators, writers and artists from the Middle East". The show inspired many studies, which demonstrated that children benefited from watching it. In 2010, efforts began to revive the show for a new generation of young viewers in the Arab world. In late 2013, fifteen writers and producers from Bidaya Media attended training about its educational methodology and production techniques from the staff of the American show in New York. Iftah Ya Simsim was in pre-production in March 2014, and the first phase of auditions took place in April 2014. The new series debuted on September 1, 2015.

The present show is a collaboration between the Abu Dhabi Education Council, Twofour54, Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States and Bidaya Media.

A few months after the 1969 debut of Sesame Street on PBS in the US, producers from several countries all around the world approached the Children's Television Workshop (CTW, later the Sesame Workshop, or "the Workshop"), the organization responsible for the show's production, to create and produce versions of Sesame Street in their countries. Co-creator Joan Ganz Cooney was approached by German public television officials about a year after the US version debuted. Many years later, Cooney recalled, "To be frank, I was really surprised, because we thought we were creating the quintessential American show. We thought the Muppets were quintessentially American, and it turns out they're the most international characters ever created". She hired former CBS executive Mike Dann, who left commercial television to become her assistant, as a CTW vice-president. One of Dann's tasks was to field offers to produce versions of Sesame Street in other countries. By summer 1970, he had made the first international agreements for what the CTW came to call "co-productions".

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