Sesamstraße

Sesamstraße (Sesame Street in English) is the German-language version of Sesame Street, a children's television series. It airs primarily in Germany and the surrounding German-speaking countries. The show premièred on 8 January 1973, Sesamstraße has been running on Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) since 1973; it's currently in its 42nd season. Sesamstraße is also broadcast on Das Erste and KiKa.

After a short test run of a few original, undubbed Sesame Street episodes from August 1972 onward, the German version of the show premiered on January 8, 1973. The first three seasons, or 250 episodes of Sesamstraße consisted of the original American episodes dubbed to German in Hamburg. Merely the opening and closing songs and sequences were changed, featuring new lyrics written by Volker Ludwig and tunes by Ingfried Hoffmann. The title of the German theme song is Der, die, das (wer, wie, was – wieso, weshalb, warum – wer nicht fragt, bleibt dumm!), almost literally translating to "this, this and that (who, how, what – why, why and why – those who don't ask stay dumb!)".

In Bavaria, Bayerischer Rundfunk felt that the Sesame Street set was too gritty to suit German children, and consequently had to develop its own children's programme called Das feuerrote Spielmobil (The fire-red Play-mobile). Variety shows like Peter Alexander präsentiert Spezialitäten in 1975 promoted the show by visiting the original United States set and taping special footage. From 1976 through 1977, the street scenes were dropped, due in part to a constant onslaught of protesting parents that were unhappy with the "controversial" character of Oscar the Grouch. Instead, a new framing story was created, following the antics of a boy named Bumfidel and his mother. Since these stories did not take place on a street, the show's title was temporarily rendered incomprehensible. The most controversial moment of this early period was a film showing the unconcealed birth of a human baby.

In 1977, a German street set was built at Studio Hamburg for German framing stories. Samson, a bear (1978–2009, and since 2013) and Tiffy the bird (1978–2005) replaced Big Bird (Bibo) and Oscar the Grouch (Oskar der Griesgram) as main characters, and the new version debuted on January 2, 1978. The early puppets were built by Kermit Love; nowadays, Sesame Workshop builds the puppets for Sesamstraße. Each episode featured the new puppets interacting with a pair of human characters; consistently one male, one female. The individual sketches of Sesame Street's original American inhabitants remained the dubbed main part of the show, but some were edited due to intros that exhibited English words (such as The Adventures of Super Grover or the Sesame Street News Flash skits).

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