Madeline Fretz -Sesame Workshop was founded in the 60s as the Children's Television Workshop (CTW). You see, at a dinner party held in the New York apartment of television executive Joan Ganz Cooney, guest Lloyd Morrisett admitted to Cooney that his daughter watched test patterns and jingles while waiting for her favorite shows to come on. Cooney suggested they use those jingles to educate kids, so they spent several years founding the Workshop and working on an educational show called Sesame Street, and the rest is history. The Children's Television Workshop became Sesame Workshop in 2000 to show they offered more than just children's shows.
Aside from "the Street," the Workshop has made other children's shows, mostly for PBS. These include The Electric Company, 3-2-1 Contact, Square One TV, Ghostwriter, Cro, Dragon Tales, Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, Tiny Planets, Pinky Dinky Doo, Esme and Roy, and Helpsters. None of them lasted as long as Sesame Street. In the 90s, CTW announced plans to launch a children's channel called "New Kid City." New Kid City was to offer their shows other than Sesame Street. Little did they know, executives at Nickelodeon were creating their own channel called "Big Orange," which consisted of the network's educational programming. Eventually, CTW and Nickelodeon decided to join forces, combine their concepts, and form what would become NOGGIN.
I feel like this blog is slowly becoming a NOGGIN fan blog!
NOGGIN, which launched on February 2nd, 1999, was originally a 24-hour educational network aimed at kids of all ages, with preschool shows in the morning and a retro block for adults at nighttime. As time went by, NOGGIN started producing its own original programming, which included Oobi, Sponk!, and The Phred on Your Head Show. Eventually, the Jim Henson Company sold its interest in the Sesame Street Muppets to the newly reformed Sesame Workshop, which lost the rights to NOGGIN not long after. NOGGIN became Nick Jr. when Nickelodeon rebranded on September 28th, 2009, with the NOGGIN branding being removed on March 1st, 2012, but the name returned in mobile app form in 2015.
When NOGGIN launched, many people saw it as a threat to PBS with its educational programming. Speaking of PBS, in order to compete with NOGGIN, PBS introduced a 24-hour channel known as PBS Kids, which launched on September 6th, 1999 with the new show Dragon Tales. Previously, in 1993, PBS introduced PTV Park and the P-Pals. With the new PBS Kids channel, new mascots were introduced in Dash and Dot. PBS Kids had almost all of PBS' children's programming at the time, except Sesame Street, which aired on NOGGIN in two forms - 123 Sesame Street for 90s episodes and Sesame Street Unpaved for classic episodes. 123 stayed on the network when NOGGIN rebranded, but Unpaved stopped airing since it didn't suit the demographics of either NOGGIN or The N.
The PBS Kids channel was unsuccessful, though it was revived in early 2017. In response, PBS, along with the Workshop, HiT Entertainment (which made and distributed some of its programming), and Comcast, started working on a 24-hour preschool channel. The channel was first announced in October 2004.
In 2005, Comcast announced the channel's name to be PBS Kids Sprout, with Primal Screen designing the familiar logo. PBS Kids Sprout launched on Comcast on Demand in April 2005. If you're a Sprout fan, you know this. If you’re not or a newcomer, I just wanted to let you know.
PBS Kids Sprout on Demand consisted of 55 hours of beloved shows from not only Sesame Workshop, but also PBS and HiT Entertainment, plus a few hours in Spanish. Lesser-known shows were part of a category known as "Children's Favorites," and eventually got their own categories.
After months of preparation, PBS Kids Sprout launched as a channel on September 26th, 2005. Again, something every Sprout fan knows. The new cable channel replaced the 24-hour PBS Kids channel, and some PBS stations even shut down their kids' programming and redirected to Sprout.
Sure, Sesame Workshop was one of Sprout's four founders, but only three of its programs aired on the new channel when it launched, and all three aired on PBS. The company's flagship show, Sesame Street, aired on the channel for its first ten years, and, as one of Sprout's most popular shows, received tons of promotions and countless airtimes, Dragon Tales, which launched when the original PBS Kids channel did, aired on Sprout from 2005 to 2010 on The Let's Go Show and The Good Night Show, and also received tons of promotions in the early years, and the lesser known Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, based on a 90s novel by author Amy Tan, aired on Sprout from 2005 to 2009 during The Good Night Show. All three series also received their own Sprout Diner snacks, Birthday Show activities, and Good Night Show stretches.
But that’s not all! Sprout also aired other Sesame Workshop programs over the years. And they all had to do with the Sesame Street characters!
NOGGIN rebranded as a preschool channel with a nighttime adult block called The N (now TeenNick) on April 1st, 2002. The new NOGGIN, which ran from 6AM to 6PM ET, introducing new preschool-like interstitial segments, a new animated host/mascot in Feetface (later Moose and Zee), and a new Sesame Street spin-off known as Play with Me Sesame. Play with Me stopped airing on NOGGIN in September 2007, shortly before the channel was to split with The N on December 30th, and moved to Sprout. The show aired during The Sunny Side Up Show and later Sprout's Wiggly Waffle. The Play with Me Art Show segments were replaced by new framing segments consisting of the Sunny Side Up Show hosts showing Sproutlets' artwork. I discussed the show's run on Sprout in a previous post on this blog.
Panwapa was a Sesame Workshop miniseries that featured new puppet characters under the names of Azibo Monster, Tungar the Tiger, Baabra Sheep, Koko the Penguin, Athena the Owl, and Bill the Bug, and they were all played by Sesame Street Muppet performers. I remember seeing the characters at the end of a Sesame Street coloring book I had as a toddler. The show debuted on Sprout in 2008, aired on The Let's Go Show, and was one of the shows on the Summer Fun Fridays block. Despite the show's removal in 2009, its page remained up on SproutOnline.com.
The Furchester Hotel was a British co-production of Sesame Street, premiering on CBeebies in 2014. The series is about Elmo and Cookie Monster working in an English hotel run by the former's aunt, uncle, and cousin. The show premiered on Sprout on September 26th, 2016 (its eleventh anniversary) as part of Back to New, the same day several second generation shows stopped airing. To promote its arrival, Elmo and Cookie Monster made an appearance on Sunny Side Up. The show continued to air on Universal Kids until 2019. Wow, what an impressive run!
And those were all the shows that aired on the linear channel.
Several Workshop shows were also on Sprout on Demand. Sesame English, a co-production of Sesame Street aimed at ESL, was a part of Time Warner Cable exclusive ¡Hola Sproutitos!, and the Spanish Sesame Street co-production Plaza Sésamo, which premiered in the 70s, was part of the Spanish programming on Sprout on Demand.
Second generation
Third generation
It was around the 2010s that Sprout began to lose its memory and change. In 2011, Comcast acquired NBCUniversal, which itself acquired all things Comcast as time went by, including Sprout, causing operations of the channel to move to New York's 30 Rockefeller Center from Philadelphia's Comcast Center in 2014, the UK's Apax Funds and America's Mattel (owners of Barbie and Hot Wheels) acquired HiT Entertainment, Sesame Workshop sold its interest in Sprout to Comcast, and PBS lost the rights to Sprout, causing the "PBS Kids" branding to be removed from the channel's name in November 2013.
Despite Sesame Workshop losing the rights to Sprout as it did with NOGGIN, both Sesame Street and Play with Me Sesame continued to air on Sprout. The former aired during the third generation when it launched, but stopped airing in November 2015, as HBO signed a deal with Sesame Workshop to air the next five seasons of Sesame Street earlier that year. However, Play with Me Sesame continued to air until at least 2016.
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