Tickle Me Elmo came out I think in 8th grade for me. It was the year’s hottest gift and all the teenage girls had one. Tickle Me Elmo was the doll that went on to sell a billion Rabbit Vibrators. It was the sexual training wheels of Britney Spears fans in saddle shoes everywhere that Christmas. “OH BOY!” this Chinese-propaganda-lookin’ demonic crimson cyborg new-kid-on-the-block-ass muppet imp would exclaim breathlessly in a toddler’s voice performed by a child molester to these developing hormonal adolescent girls… and… well, you know the rest. “HE’S SO MUCH BETTER THAN MY HAIRBRUSH!” wrote Susan Johnson of Des Moins, Iowa in a note she passed to her friend Chandra B. in homeroom the morning after her new robotic awakening during an episode of Dawson’s Creek. Two days later she was going by “Suzie,” and all the boys were lining up at her locker trying to play Pacey. It was the 90s, I guess.
I don’t watch Sesame Street because I don’t have children and I’m not a creep but sometimes I think about how I miss Telly Monster on Sesame Street, because I remember and think it’s sad they put him out to pasture I suppose because his name stood for television, and I guess it became obvious television is bad for kids, but it’s what they’re watching, so you have to do something to ensure the termination of any rise in cognitive dissonance in a developing mind or the minds of their parents if you’re going to keep on making shows about weird psychedelic monsters acting like children to teach them to read or whatever it is they claim to do there. I shudder to think what his moth-chewed corpse must look like in the Muppet Graveyard, and you know there is one, and you know it must be one of the most haunted and viscerally unsettling places on Planet Earth. Just half a coffee-stained Big Bird that stinks like old meat with one eye barely hanging on by a wire and a broken jaw. A single dingy Kermit flipper with a cigarette burn. What’s left of a grizzled Ernie waiting to be stripped for spare parts of the rest of his former dignity. Where’s Telly, Bird? Where’s Telly? I guess it’s fine, since kids don’t watch television anymore, and there are no lessons to be learned about it.
-BJG