Remember this? I was an avid viewer of Sesame Street growing up. I came across this blog which is full of common nostalgia growing up in the eighties. It is hilarious! The posts are few and far between but they are entertaining enough to keep me coming back for more.
Here what he has to say about the animated orange:
"That Goddam Orange"
Every so often, Sesame Street would offer up segments designed to expand our cultural horizons, which is a polite way of saying they were trying to turn us queer. Rarely, if ever, did these clips accomplish their goals. For example, I vividly recall a series of songs featuring jazz legend Cab Calloway, who had since become a decrepit old man. As I watched in horror as the 73-year-old Calloway hit sour notes and shuffled around the stage in what I would later learn was a sad attempt at his trademark dance moves. It was at that moment in time, at the tender age of four years old, that I first began to harbor my undying hatred of jazz music. But perhaps even more disturbing was the stop-motion clip where an orange springs to life and sings "Habanera" from Bizet's classic opera Carmen. OK, that's not entirely true, the orange doesn't just suddenly spring to life. No, it starts off by rolling around, attaching common kitchen items to itself in order to become more human - a walnut for a nose, an elastic for a mouth, flower petals for eyelashes, a feather duster for hair, and bottle caps for earrings. Oh, and a set of googly eyes, because normal people always have those lying around their kitchen for no apparent reason. Stop-motion animation has an inherent creepiness to it, and that creepiness increases exponentially when it's used to make fruit come alive and sing in foreign languages, especially when no further explanation is ever given. Instead we are left to wonder why someone would ever make something like this, how it ended up on Sesame Street despite lacking any educational or entertainment value, and why it got such heavy rotation on the show.
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