Two Years of Parents and Kids Share Together: A word from Madeline Fretz

Aside from Sprout (of course), Yo Gabba Gabba! is one of my other main obsessions. Picture from 2020, the year I started this blog.

Madeline Fretz - Dear friends, two years ago today, I created a blog. Not just any old blog, one where you could share your pictures, videos, stories, memories, and whatnot of PBS Kids Sprout (now Universal Kids), the only 24-hour preschool channel that parents and kids share together for shows, activities, and adventure. I used the blog as a tool to link the children's television from when I was little to the children's television nowadays. Fast-forward to two years later. More than 300 posts. I've been spending almost every day of my life writing about a channel I was once scared of as a little girl, but am a superfan of nowadays.

As you found out in my Top Ten Moments post, a huge inspiration in starting my blog was the Sesame Place blog Big Bird Bridge, founded by theme park historian Guy Hutchinson. Sesame Place is a theme park in Langhorne, Pennsylvania based on Sesame Street. At first, I stole, copied and pasted from Big Bird Bridge (my first post was even a rip-off of Hutchinson's first post), as well as other websites, but rarely do so nowadays. In fact, some of my posts were direct rip-offs, I deleted them from my blog, with some exceptions. Even though Groundbreaking is a copy of the first Big Bird Bridge post, it's too special, that I don't want to delete it, and "Caillou Leaves PBS Kids," while a rip-off of a Dora the Explorer update from a Nick Jr. petition, is also too memorable to delete. Enough said. Sure, as a Muppet fan, I take inspiration from ToughPigs and The Muppet Mindset with series like "My Week" and "Weekly Character Wednesdays," but write them in my own words.

As I said earlier, there are more than 300 posts on this blog, and I have a few favorites I like to read over and over again (the likes of My Life as a Sprout Fan (obviously), CBeebies and Sprout, and even Overthinking It: Where are Star's parents? come to mind, amongst others). In one memorable blog post I've written this year, I discussed possibilities for Sprout's future. I feel like NBCUniversal doesn't do anything with the Sprout name nowadays, so I wrote about what they could do with the name in the future. These ideas may not happen, but, as I always say, "never say never."  Oh, and one more thing. Remember when I said I was said there should be a Sprout movie? Well, as I said in both my end of Arthur post and Top Ten Moments post, I contacted NBCUniversal and several people who worked at Sprout, so it could happen for real. If it does happen, I hope it's more Follow That Bird/Dora and the Lost City of Gold and less The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland/Barney's Great Adventure - have it be more of a family film and less of a kiddie film, have it be like The Muppets (2011) and throw in some references to the past for longtime fans. Another thing: if it does happen, as I said in previous posts, make the plot identical to my Sprout fic - have it be about the Sprout gang going around in essence "getting the band back together," a plot of many, many movies. Now, we don't allow or promote fanfic at Parents and Kids Share Together (as with other fansites), but still, I write about my fanfic to keep people in the know.

Being a Sprout fan, if not the world's biggest, I've experienced some of the best things in my life, such as that one holiday video message (thanks a lot, Steven), writing my fanfic and finishing my coloring book to critical acclaim(?), getting likes from my Sprout heroes on Instagram and my long-gone Twitter, them following me on Insty, and becoming friends with them on Facebook. I'm quite a lucky girl!

Lastly, I'd like to thank some people who made this blog a huge success. Special thanks to…

• Steven Binnig. Without him, the Sprout gang wouldn't know I exist.
• Everyone on the Sprout Discord server (I'm known on there as cbeebiesfan) - especially P09 Tech Guru Guy, Boomer (who thinks he's a bigger Sprout fan than me), Rolex, JaysonCarney, approximateostrich, and Peanut. They're all nice people who share and uncover their Sprout secrets and memories, and I'm lucky to have known them. Thanks a lot!
• PBS Kids Sprout TV Wiki for containing everything you need to know about Sprout. I'm quite happy I'm an admin on there now, inheriting the site from founder NeptuneID13 and eventually making the most edits on there. I also run the wiki's social media pages.
• Alison Clarke and James Fletcher, for taking inspiration from me and following me throughout almost my whole Sprout fan career.
• Jack (Rare Noggin Stuff) for uncovering rare Sprout stuff I wrote about here
• Julie Engel (ajskippytoes) for being as big a Sprout fan as I am, sharing her Sprout memories, and I even got to inherit her "Sprout-vent Calendar" on Instagram.
• Lillian Alexia, amongst other fans, for participating in my recurring series The Great Sprout Survey and When I Was a Sproutlet.
• Matthew Hiltner (Jumpman256) and Agent0042 for inspiring me to find the Sprout History Video (I haven't found it yet, but I'm going to one day)
• The cast of Sprout, my heroes, my idols. Kevin Yamada, Melanie Martinez, Stacia Newcomb, Noel MacNeal, Michele Lepe, Milton Barnes, Ali Eisner, Kelly Vrooman, Forrest Harding, Sean Roach, Brendan Gawel, Dennisha Pratt, Liz Filios, Catherine Missal, Carly Ciarrocchi, Darryl Williams, Tim Kubart, Kaitlin Becker, Emily Borromeo, Chris Palmieri, Donnell Smith, the list goes on and on. You people are amazing! Keep it up and keep reading this blog!
• Oh, and one more, you! You're the reason why I started this blog - for fans to share their Sprout memories and rare stuff. Thanks again for all your help.

Click here to read this post and weep on the Parents and Kids Share Together forum!

My Week with 2016: Floogals

 

Madeline Fretz - Floogals was a British-American children's show from Jellyfish Pictures and Zodiak Kkds about three tiny aliens discovering the human world.

One of Sprout's original series, the show premiered on the channel on January 23rd, 2016. The show continued to air on Universal Kids even after Sprout closed.

The show stopped airing on Universal Kids in 2020, although its page is still up on the channel's website.

Posts You'll Never Read

 Madeline Fretz - I started Parents and Kids Share Together in 2020, and, with 352 posts and counting, it's still going strong. This blog is mainly a way to share photos, videos, stories, and memories of Sprout, and I have posted countless Sprout-related news, commentaries, and silly things, amongst others. Lemme tell ya, it's not easy being a Sprout fan with a blog - sometimes I run out of ideas, and sometimes I come up with new ways to talk about my childhood.

Image from 2020

Now, If you know me, you know that I'm largely hated by fellow children's television fans - I draw characters with stick arms and legs, I add false information to wikis, I constantly repeat my hatred for things, some of which have garnered critical acclaim, I pretend to hate things I'm secretly a fan of, and, most importantly, I rip things off, even from things I hate. Don't worry, I'm working on mostly all of those things now. In fact, when this blog started, I copied from other people. A lot of carbon copies if they were, that some of them I DELETED from this blog. Without further ado, here are some Parents and Kids Share Together posts you'll never read!

Has Sprout Been Gentrified?

In 2019, Tad Suiter wrote a post on both Current.org and his own blog about Sesame Street's history and, sadly, how "gentrified" the titular location was, compared the street to where he lives, and talked about how he shows classic seasons to his daughter. I liked the article so much, and seemed to miss the Sprout name so much, that I wrote an essay in middle school that was basically Suiter's article except more Sprout. I eventually adapted the essay as a post on this blog. In the post, I mentioned the fact that I watched Sprout as a little girl, talked about Sprout's history, and suggested that PBS, HiT Entertainment, Sesame Workshop, and Comcast, Sprout's four founders, come back together and form a new children's channel, but it wouldn't be the same one [as Sprout].

Children's shows and the trouble they've gotten into

Kids' shows over the years - they have gotten into quite serious trouble, haven't they? At the start of last year, I wrote about such controversies surrounding our beloved shows - these included not only the pictures you see above, but also things like Barney's hatred in the 90s, the banned episode of Peppa Pig, and Faith Evans' 2014 appearance on The Sunny Side Up Show. Something worth noting: I compared Caillou's constant whining to the likes of Mr. Rogers taking about death and Big Bird from Sesame Street learning that Mr. Hooper had died, and in the Nostalgia Critic's 2019 review of 1998's Barney's Great Adventure, he compared the fact that Barney is always happy, refuses to deal with negative emotions or believe they exist, to moments like the ones I listed above. Now, once I realized I was copying the tail end of my post from the Critic, I deleted the post, never for it to be seen again, although I did talk about Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street's serious issue talk in a recent post on this blog.

Noddy's Apple Car Delight in Welsh

On the worldwide web, there is a Welsh CBeebies website with branding from the 2002 website, and shows such as Bob the Builder and Tweenies. Now, upon first encountering the Welsh CBeebies, I pretended Sprout had a Welsh website as well, and posted a Welsh version of the Noddy's Apple Car delight recipe, which was basically the recipe from SproutOnline.com translated into Welsh. I realized this was fake, as was some of my other stuff, and deleted the post.

Sprout's Original Series

At the tail end of 2020, I wrote a post on this blog about original series that have aired on Sprout (Sprout Diner, The Many Adventures of Mr. Mailman, Noodle and Doodle, The Chica Show etc), and gave clever descriptions of each show. I said on the post that to see what a certain series (maybe Mr. Mailman?) was about, "go see for yourself!" Nowadays, I think that's dumb, so I deleted the post.

And there you have it. For reasons I listed above, you'll never get to read these three posts, but you know what I always say - I always come up with new and exciting ways to celebrate the works of my childhood here at Parents and Kids Share Together. Thanks for reading.

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Growth Spurt for Two-Year-Old Sprout

Madeline Fretz - One thing I do from time to time here at Parents and Kids Share Together is write about old articles about Sprout. Since my blog is turning two at the end of this month, I thought now would be a perfect time to write about when Sprout turned two in 2007. And I know just the perfect article to write about!

Written by Multichannel News' Kent Gibbons, this article was published on September 9th, 2007, and is about Sprout's plans to celebrate its second anniversary. I mean, they had a hit when they turned one last year. 

When Sprout turned two, according to then-president Sandy Wax, it signed a distribution agreement with Time Warner Cable, which at the time was the second-biggest U.S. cable distributor with 14.7 million subscribers. Time Warner Cable has added Sprout on Demand in nine million homes. Sprout at the time was available in 34 million(!!!) households, and key affiliates included not only co-owner Comcast, but also the likes of DirecTV and Cox Communications. Wax said in a telephone interview that it was really the "next step" for Sprout. Once Time Warner Cable signed its agreement with Sprout, it didn't carry anything with the name anywhere except for on video-on-demand, as corporate communications director Maureen Huff said they had no launch plans for the 24-hour channel yet.

Sprout was available in over 55 million homes as of 2012. Image from YouTube

The article mentions that, at launch, Sprout was available in about 13 million homes, but as of the article's publication, it was available in at least 22 million. As I said several times on this blog, Sprout was a pretty small channel during the first generation, but grew by and by as time went by. Man, compare their budget back then to the budget they had in, say 2015! Over 20 million homes at the time have committed to add the channel.

The article also mentions something more important than how many homes Sprout was in (at least in my opinion), as it was from the same month The Sunny Side Up Show launched. My original song "2007," is about things important to me that happened in that year, including Sunny's aforementioned launch. Listen to it and weep!

The original set

Now, I know this is something else I've said many times here, but let me say it again for good measure. The set of The Sunny Side Up Show at the time looked like a decorated office - it was cramped and cheap, which was fair because Sprout at the time was, unheard of the first time, a channel with a low budget. I have talked about this set, located in a Haddon Heights studio, several times on this blog. Sprout supposedly moved to the 24th floor of Philadelphia's Comcast Center in early 2008.

Above is a first look at The Sunny Side Up Show that was prior to the block's live premiere on the 26th. The article states that cast and crew rehearsed and recorded background material on set that day.

Now, it wasn't just The Sunny Side Up Show that came to Sprout when the brand turned two, but executives pulled out another programming block, two new shows, and a new season of The Good Night Show. Lemme tell ya about these then-new offerings.

Sprout introduced Musical Mornings with Coo, which ran from 6AM to 9AM ET. Musical Mornings was hosted by a cuckoo bird digital puppet named Coo, who would spring out of her cuckoo clock and sing songs that would teach simple lessons. Bounce host Elizabeth Balzano would sing songs about things like playing in the park. In addition, music videos of songs from Sprout shows would play in between shows. Musical Mornings would continue to air well into 2009, when segments would start airing on Sprout's new morning block, Sprout's Wiggly Waffle.

Bounce, aimed at the autism spectrum, aired during Musical Mornings. When she founded PBS Kids Sprout TV Wiki in 2019, FANDOM's NeptuneID13 refused to believe it did, but according to sources (even Wayback Machine archives of SproutOnline.com and a promo found at the end of a Sesame Street episode), it did. Balzano also appeared on The Sunny Side Up Show several times.

In 1999, Sesame Workshop (then called the Children's Television Workshop (CTW)) and Nickelodeon launched NOGGIN (now Nick Jr.), a 24-hour educational channel. Originally, Nickelodeon was going to launch a channel containing of its educational programming called Big Orange, and CTW was to launch a channel containing of its shows other than Sesame Street called New Kid City. Eventually, the two decided to merge their ideas and launch NOGGIN. In 2002, it was announced NOGGIN was to became a preschool channel with a nighttime teen and adult block called The N (later TeenNick), and rebranded on April 1st that year. On that day, NOGGIN revealed a new show from Sesame Workshop (which at the time lost interest in the brand) called Play with Me Sesame, hosted by Sesame Street Muppets Ernie, Bert, Grover, and Prairie Dawn, who would showcase viewers' drawings and play games, often with other Muppets joining in. One thing that made the show special was that it contained Muppet sketches from Sesame Street's "classic" days, which were rarely featured on the main show at the time. 

NOGGIN also aired episodes of the regular Sesame Street in two package series - Sesame Street Unpaved, which contained of memorable episodes from the show's first twenty years, and 123 Sesame Street, which consisted of "newer" episodes from 1993 to 2000. Unpaved was dropped when NOGGIN became a preschool channel, but 123 continued to air as late as 2005. Despite all this, Play with Me continued to air on NOGGIN until September 2007, when the show moved to Sprout. This was several months prior to NOGGIN and The N becoming their own separate channels on Decembe 30th. Play with Me Sesame aired on Sprout during The Sunny Side Up Show and Sprout's Wiggly Waffle, but Prairie Dawn's "Play with Me Art Show" segments were dropped in favor of new framing scenes in which the Sunny Side Up Show hosts would show viewers' drawings. The regular Sesame Street show stopped airing on Sprout shortly after the launch of the third generation due to Sesame Workshop's five-year deal with HBO, but, like NOGGIN, Play with Me Sesame continued to air on the channel until early 2016.

And finally, Season 4 (or 2, if not for Melanie and Leo's tenures) of The Good Night Show premiered that night. This season saw many new changes to its show - Nina's Sproutlet friends were inducted into the Sprout Stretch and sign language segments and a new segment titled "Lucy Light the Way" was introduced, in which Nina and Star would have to guess where Lucy the Firefly was based on silhouettes she has hidden.

The article mentions that Season 4 was the first time real kids were featured on set, but the first season to do so was actually Season 2. You see, once Leo was introduced, Lucy would light the way to segments in which Sproutlets would talk about the night's adventure. How do we know? Well, recently, a tape of a Good Night Show broadcast featuring Leo was uploaded to YouTube, and it contained a real kids segment.

Back to The Sunny Side Up Show. The article mentions that the then-new block was aimed at two to five year olds to get them ready for the day, and also mentions the hosts being Kevin, Kelly, and of course, Chica, the hosts seen in the preview video and in promotional pictures. Sean joined in early 2008, presumably during Colors Week (the week of February 17th), as the description to the above video mentions him being new to the Sunshine Barn.

Image from the Wayback Machine

The article notes that, contrary to popular belief, The Sunny Side Up Show was not Sprout's first experience with live broadcasting. Sprout's first live broadcast was the Hooray for Mother's Day stunt that year. More than seven thousand messages sent in via the internet were shown on air. Wax said that Sprout executives were quite happy with the response - they were small but successful.

As you probably know, Kevin was the host of Sprout's The Birthday Show prior to hosting The Sunny Side Up Show, and was quite excited about reading Sproutlets' birthday cards again, except he was doing it live on air instead of there being a two-month delay for mailed-in cards.

The article states that, at the time, Sprout on Demand has received more than 250 orders, the fact that the service offered fifty hours of programming as well as fifteen of programming in Spanish, and that Sprout received 15.8 million on-demand views in July.

The article mentioned that Sprout had advertising for Grown-Up Sprouts. Sure, they came on on a little kids' channel, but those commercials were not for them. One of Sprout's advertisers at the time was Huggies and Pull-Ups creator Kimberly Clark, which sponsored the channel since it launched. The article also mentions that other sponsors included SeaWorld and Honda Odyssey.

Anyways, this is a neat little article about how big a small channel like Sprout was getting time after time, and a great way to introduce newcomers to The Sunny Side Up Show and other new Sprout content, with their little details.

And I guess I should end this post with the end of this article: "As for distribution, the Time Warner Cable deal gives Wax and other Sprout backers reason to feel sunny about more than just a new morning show."

Click here to crack a smile on the Parents and Kids Share Together forum!

The Top Ten Moments of: Parents and Kids Share Together

 

The logo you're all familiar with

Alternate logo

Madeline Fretz - Parents and Kids Share Together is turning two at the end of this month, so I thought I'd do several posts on this blog commemorating the occasion. Now, I know we don't turn two until the 28th, but, like Sprout's first anniversary, the celebration starts much early. This post will be the first of a series of anniversary articles. Alright, Sprout fans, sit back, relax, and enjoy as I count down the top ten moments of Parents and Kids Share Together!

Please note that I tried doing a "Top Ten Songs" series on this blog, starting with songs from The Sunny Side Up Show, but abandoned it after that one post, probably because I'm not a pro at doing top ten (or similar) lists. I'm going to try my best with this post.

10. CBeebies and Sprout

Before I started this blog and became an admin on PBS Kids Sprout TV Wiki, I was an American CBeebies fan with a fake wiki. Given that CBeebies and Sprout have aired the same shows and are very similar to one another, I wrote a post comparing the two brands to commemorate the former's 20th anniversary in the UK, and noticed how different they are. Differences aside, at the end of the day, CBeebies and Sprout have completed their mission - to do good things for kids. Isn't that the most important thing?

9. Which is Better?: Sprout's Signature Blocks

Sprout has had seven programming blocks over the years, and the two longest-running (as well as the only two blocks that aired during the third generation) were The Good Night Show and The Sunny Side Up Show. Now, you may be wondering which one is better. For those of you who wonder too, read this post and find out. In the post, I compare the two blocks' hosts, characters, openings and closings, shows aired, themes, and, of course, premises. Which one is better, and which one do you like better? Read ahead!

8. Sprout Fan Confessions

My post about my life as a Sprout fan (more on that later) was so popular, that I made two "sequel" posts on this blog, but this time about Sprout fan memories and confessions. The confessions one, this is the second of these posts, and is about how I was scared of The Sunny Side Up Show, how I confused two male hosts, and how Sprout inspired me to host inspired children's shows at a young age, amongst other things. You may have shared my thoughts in this post with me.

7. Sprout Memories

Being a lifelong Sprout fan, I remember several things from watching the channel and surfing the internet a few years ago, and wrote about my memories in a post. In fact, some of my memories are super rare, that I, for one, have been begging to find them. Some of my memories may sound familiar, and some may seem, obviously, pretty rare and obscure. If you have any of the things I mentioned in the post, please DM or email me. Thank you.

6. My Life as a Sprout Fan

Now, you know me as a big Sprout fan and all-around aficionado, but do you know the true story? This post, which I wrote the day before I started high school and constantly updated, is about my history as a Sprout fan - from my childhood Sunny Side Up Show-phobia to a historian with a fan blog. This is probably your story too. You'll love it, I swear!

5. So…What Now?

As you probably know, the people at NBCUniversal have not acknowledged the Sprout name at all since 2018, and us fans (especially myself) have been waiting and begging for something new. Just this month, I wrote about possible ways for a new, official Sprout project in the future - could it be a reunion, app (looking at you, Noggin!), movie, new show? I wrote a similar post on the same blog earlier, but this time about possibilities to celebrate 15 years of The Sunny Side Up Show. Come on, NBCUni, do you even read this blog? Or anyone I know who used to work at Sprout for that matter? Well, I contacted NBCUniversal in several ways as well as Sprout people about possibly making a Sprout movie with the same plot as my fanfic (more on that later in this post, I promise), so we may be getting a live-action theatrical film sometime in the future. I know some of my ideas will never happen, but, as I always say, "never say never." What do you hope will happen with the Sprout name in the future?

4. Why It's Called That

If you know me, you know that, before Parents and Kids Share Together, I started another Sprout fan blog called Let's Grow, after an old fan YouTuber. I started this blog in February 2020, and named it after an obscure slogan that debuted way back in 2007. You wanna know what it is? And why the blog goes by that name? Read the post and find out!

3. One Sleep to Go

I've always wanted to publish a book about Sprout's history, something I've been working on since 2020 (AKA the year I started this blog). Until the day the book finally gets published (which will probably happen by the time I'm an adult), my Sprout fanfic, appropriately(inappropriately?) titled, you guessed it, Sprout, is my biggest Sprout project yet (well, I did make a Sprout coloring book, does that count as the biggest?). You see, my favorite movie is Jason Segel's The Muppets (2011), which is about The Muppets getting back together to save their old studio from being demolished by an evil oil baron, and I've always wanted both to make a Sprout version of the story and Apple TV+ to bring back the Sprout brand (and you probably know why), so I tweaked Segel's script and wrote about how myself, Muno from Yo Gabba Gabba!, and my mom reunited the Sprout gang for a telethon to, instead of saving their old studio from an evil oil baron, bring back their shows on Apple TV+. As crazy as it may seem, I did it, and published the fic online on November 23rd for all to see, Sprout fan or not. The day before it was published, I wrote about my new story on the blog. Parents and Kids Share Together is not a place for fanfiction, never has, but still, I wanted to grab fans' attention.

2. Guess What?

I've been a Sprout fan for as long as I can remember. In fact, I can't remember a time when the brand hasn't been a part of my life. As the world's biggest fan, I'm quite lucky. I have several Sprout people liking my tweets on my old Twitter account (which is no longer up), following me on Instagram, and becoming friends with me on Facebook. Speaking of Facebook, I have started and am a member of several Sprout fan groups. One of those fan groups is "I Love Universal Kids Sprout," started in 2008, and many Sprout employees are members. You see, one day, I wrote on that group about a Sunny Side Up Show dream I had - Emily and Chica were linking into The Good Night Show at 6PM after The Sprout Sharing Show ended. The dream was like a Sprout time continuum - Emily joined The Sunny Side Up Show in June 2014, and The Sharing Show dissolved a month earlier. Steven "Toaster Steve" Binnig, someone who worked on Sprout and The Sunny Side Up Show, saw my post and commented on it, complimenting me for knowing a lot about Sprout, and I quickly became friends with him, as well as a few other former Sprout employees, such as Brianne O'Neill, Tara Murphy, and Nafeeza Hassan. It was 2021. That Christmas, the Fretz family received suitcases and headphones and learned we were going to NYC on an airplane. Also on Christmas Day, Mom received an email from Steven that had a video on Drive - just for me. The video contained the old gang, all names I already knew at the time, wishing me merry Christmas, even knowing my name and that I was their biggest fan. It was amazing. It took my Sprout fandom to the next level. Before the video, I wanted to go on a cross-country trip to get everyone back together so bad, and, well, Steven and I did it - and we didn't need to drive cross country. It was all we could talk about for days end. I sang about the video in an original song of mine about Sprout, "Childhood."

Before we move on to our number one pick, here are a few honorable mentions (WatchMojo, eat your heart out!):

• The History of Star
• Overthinking It: Where are Star's parents?
• Knee-Deep in the Hoopla
• Sprout Might-Have Beens
• Sprout History Lessons
• The Last of Arthur
• Sesame Street: Should It End?

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for, my number one pick!

DRUMROLL PLEASE!

1. Groundbreaking

Ha! I'm sure you knew this was coming at one time or another. Why? Well, I founded the Parents and Kids Share Together blog on February 28th, 2020, a day I'll never forget, and this was the very first post I published. The post explains why I started this blog - in reality, I adored Guy Hutchinson's Big Bird Bridge, a fan blog dedicated to Sesame Place in Langhorne, but given Sprout's quite small fanbase, I found myself unable to find any Sprout fan blogs or fansites in general on the worldwide web, so I decided to do the next best thing and start my own fan blog, and the rest is history. Please note that this post is a direct (carbon?) copy of the first post on Big Bird Bridge, as, at the time, I mainly copied from other people's sites and blogs. Nowadays, I rarely do that. Wow, I'm being original! Anyways, the very first pictures on this blog were from the Sprout launch party in 2005, as I felt those pictures would be an appropriate way to kick off the blog. Just this month, I found a rare photo of the launch party not on Flickr and posted about it here.

Anyways, that's my personal top ten moments on this blog. I hope you enjoyed! What are your favorite moments?

Click here to look back on two years of posts on the Parents and Kids Share Together forum!

Sprouterrific Playdate

Image from Facebook

Madeline Fretz - Back in 2008, Sprout was available in over fifty million homes and cable providers such as Time Warner Cable were begging for it, but was still a small channel with a pretty low budget. Compare it to the larger budget they had in later years. To promote the channel, Sprout Please was launched, encouraging families to request Sprout in their areas. But that's another story.

Also in 2008, Sprout launched the Sprout Mall Tour, probably also to promote the channel to viewers who were either (or both?) new to the name or to get them to request the channel in their areas.

Pictures and videos of the Mall Tour are still up on sites like YouTube and Facebook, so give me a favor and go check them out for yourselves! A few of these pictures (if not all?) are from a Facebook page from 2010.

Image from Facebook

 Here, kids could get their picture taken with Barney the Dinosaur, a regular of Sprout programming, in front of an inflatable background featuring the Sprout logo and a link to SproutOnline.com, and upload their photos to a website called SproutMallTour.com. Please note that the above picture says SproutOnline.com instead of SproutMallTour.com.

A popular part of this Mall Tour was that kids could get to meet Chica and a Sunny Side Up Show host in front of an inflatable replica of the Sunshine Barn and tell the weather. Families could also upload videos of their weather reports to SproutMallTour.com.

Now for something I may have talked about in a previous post on this blog, and I'm deeply sorry if I did. In 2008 and 2009, Sprout held a Preschool Weather Reporter contest in which they would select a lucky kid who took part in the Mall Tour Weather Reports and have them tell the weather live on The Sunny Side Up Show. The winners ended up being Tampa's Mikey Letts in 2009 and St. Louis' Maddyx Poulin in 2010, but I'm pretty sure Daniel, the boy with Liz and Chica in one of the pictures, was the winner of another Weather Reporter Contest in 2011.

While kids waited to meet their favorite characters, they were treated to a variety of characters. In addition, there was a television screen that played clips from Sprout shows such as Wiggly Waffle.

The Mall Tour kept going, touring different cities across the US, until at least 2010 or 2011.

Anyways, this was a pretty nice way to promote the Sprout brand to newcomers. They should've kept this up and done similar things!

Click here to tour different cities on the Parents and Kids Share Together forum!

Sesame Street: Should It End?

Madeline Fretz - With the ends of Muppet Babies and Arthur this month, it's both amazing and surprising to know that a certain Muppet/Henson-related PBS series has outlived both shows … Sesame Street. The show has premiered on November 10th, 1969 and is still going strong, running for 52 seasons and counting.

Now, I don't want to start up a fight about this, but with several animated series ending recently, should Sesame Street end? A recent thread on the ToughPigs forum has inspired me to write this post. From what I've read on Muppet Central and Facebook, many people (some of whom have been with the series since the beginning), it is too iconic to end, should keep going for new generations to enjoy. Bill Cosby, the host of the 20 and Still Counting special from 1989, once spoke of why Sesame should keep going: "There's always something new to learn and someone new to teach it to."

However, I have mixed feelings about today's show. Let's focus on the "bad things" first. The show has never gone bad, in my opinion, but recently they spend too much time on the same characters over and over again and have gotten too "babyish" - doing things like releasing Cocomelon-esque videos on their YouTube channel (they used to release classic segments, but sporadically do nowadays), repetitive season curriculums, forgettable plots. I know they do these things to make little kids happy, but these changes are not for us fans. We all know that. On the bright side, I'm always excited to see what the new plots are (babyish or not) and whom the guest stars will be (even if they're ones I don't know).

So should the show end? I can't decide. The show has been on for more than fifty years, coming up with new, exciting ways to educate and entertain. Meanwhile, many fans have complained about how "dumbed down" the show has gotten nowadays and over the years. Unheard of the first time, although many fans are on the disagreeing sign, will Sesame Street come to an end anytime soon?

It's up to the producers and nice people at Sesame Workshop.

If the show does end (which will probably never happen), they should go out with a bang and have a big series finale, starting with a big marathon of almost every episode (ala Arthur). If not, something similar. That way, the cast, puppeteers, and crew can move on to other things. Plus, like Arthur, there can always be new content like online videos starring the Muppets.

On the plus side, we'd have 55(?) solid years of fun and learning (HBO Max has picked up five seasons, up to 55, in 2019). On the downside, I think Sesame is the only Sprout show still running (the original Thomas & Friends recently ended), so cancelling "the street" may leave no Sprout shows still making new episodes.

Here's the silly thing - since I didn't like how babyish the show became, I started an online petition to cancel the show. As previously mentioned in this post, many people said that the show shouldn't get cancelled, so I abandoned the petition. 

So, in the meantime, let me ask a question that has been asked a million times before. Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

Click here to share your thoughts on the Parents and Kids Share Together forum!

The Last of Arthur

 

(Two things - 1. I know I'm copying from my "Caillou Leaves PBS Kids"  post from a year ago, about another animated CINAR show that aired on PBS, and 2. Arthur never aired on Sprout, but still, there’s a bit of Sprout in there. Despite these statements, please enjoy)

Madeline Fretz - Dear friends, today is the day kids of the 90s and 2000s cry. For a show they have watched and cherished for years is ending its almost unstoppable 25 year run, and all the memories it created are fading away. Arthur Read, a lovable bespectacled aardvark, and his family and friends, brought us on their many adventures in the all-anthropomorphic animal community of Elwood City, learning about such serious topics such as death, cancer, and asthma.

Now, I have heard of the show and the books beforehand, but it was when I was five years old(?) when I became a fan of the series. How? Well, one day, I was searching for "tooth fairy"-related videos on YouTube when I came across the episode "Attack of the Turbo Tibbles/D.W. Tricks the Tooth Fairy," and decided to watch it. As time went by, I started watching more episodes, both on YouTube and on PBS, and read the books more. Needless to say, I was hooked. It was also the place where I first heard of one of my favorite shows and another WGBH-produced PBS show - ZOOM. You see, stars Caroline Botelho and Kenny Yates from the third season gave a behind-the-scenes tour of their show in one episode. And while we're at it, please check out my ZOOMBlog, which I haven't posted on for months, but still.

As time went by, I abandoned Elwood City and moved on to these guys.

I entered first grade later that year and still admired the show. However, as time went by, I discovered an episode of the original Muppet Babies, leading to my obsession with the regular Muppets from The Muppet Show, and I rarely watched or read Arthur again. This was perfect timing, since it was around the time The Muppets released their eighth movie, Muppets Most Wanted.

But this post isn’t about The Muppets, so let’s move forward (or should I say, movin' right along?).

In 2019, back when I was in a CBeebies and Yo Gabba Gabba!-heavy phase, I decided to watch episodes of the show. In fact, I watched a lot of episodes and went on the wiki a lot, I felt like I was five again. I regularly quoted episodes, and even declared "Crazy Bus" as my favorite song.

I'm no longer obsessed with Arthur as I was back then, but I still occasionally check the series out. My favorite episode is "The Last of Mary Moo Cow" from Season 5. In that episode, D.W. starts a petition to bring back her favorite show when it gets taken off the air, she gets to visit its old studio, and it starts airing again in rerun form. Now, Sprout is to me what Mary is to D.W., so I'm sure a few people who used to work at Sprout have noticed my many petitions, will invite me to Comcast Center and/or Rockefeller, and bring back the channel or at least the brand. I talked about ways to make Sprout relevant again in a previous post. I'm working on a Sprout movie and have already contacted NBCUniversal as well as a few former Sprout employees, so it could actually happen.

To promote the 25th and final season, PBS Kids went out with a bang and aired a marathon of almost every episode ever of the series, leading up to four new episodes. Fear not. According to sources, new content outside of the main show featuring the characters will still be produced, so that will probably make old fans, some of whom have been with the show since the beginning, happy.

And I say hey, it's always a wonderful kind of day, thanks to Arthur and his friends. Where you can learn to walk and play, and get along with each other. Isn't it all that really matters?

Click here to have an original point of view on the Parents and Kids Share Together forum!

Online Games on Sproutletsgrow.com

 

This is one of the few images on this blog I don't know where it's from. It was in part one of my history video from 2020 though.

Madeline Fretz - Sproutletsgrow.com, later known as SproutOnline.com, launched in 2005 when Comcast launched its Sprout on Demand service in April. The website gave a brief description of the VOD service and available shows, such as Sesame Street, Barney & Friends, Thomas & Friends, Bob the Builder, Caillou, and the shows in the "Children's Favorites" section. These shows were eventually put into their own categories.

After months of preparation, PBS Kids Sprout launched as a cable channel on September 26th, 2005, and that's when everything changed. 

Atlanta-based Primal Screen, who also made the iconic logo and on-demand idents, was hired to create Sprout's idents, which were modeled after classic children's storybook illustrations, while New York-based company Funny Garbage was hired to make the Flash menu of the new Sproutletsgrow.com, which used elements from the Primal Screen TV idents - such as the alphabet trees and circus acrobats.

Funny Garbage also made three original games for the website, all three of which are in the above video, which I used in my post about Sproutletsgrow.com from a few months ago.

And there you have it - a robot cake!

Make a Cake was a game in which you could make your own cake out of strange, sometimes non-food things - not only eggs, ice cream, and milk, but also bugs and clocks.

Magic Seeds was a game in which you could plant seeds from things like shoes and vases and see what grows - a violin, piano, and harp, drums, or trumpets.

Connect the Dots was a game in which you could connect the dots to reveal things like a car and … whatever the thing in the above picture is.

Anyways, all three games survived the 2007 and 2011 site refreshes, but were probably removed with the 2013 site refresh.

Click here to play fun games like these on the Parents and Kids Share Together forum!