Sesame Street - Merchandising and Endorsement

Sesame Street is known for its extensive merchandising, which includes many books, magazines, video/audio media, and toys. A percentage of the money from any Sesame Workshop product goes to help fund Sesame Street or its international co-productions.

Current licensors include Fisher-Price, Nakajima USA, Build-A-Bear Workshop (Build-An-Elmo and Build-A-Cookie Monster), Hasbro (Sesame Street Monopoly), Wooly Willy, Betty Crocker (Elmo Fruit Snacks), C&D Visionary (air fresheners) and Children's Apparel Network. Former liscencees include Nintendo, Applause, Child Dimension, Gibson Greetings, Gorham Fine China, Ideal Toys, Milton Bradley Company, Palisades Toys, Questor, Radio Shack, Tyco, and the Western Publishing Company. Creative Wonders (a partnership between ABC and Electronic Arts) produced Sesame Street software for the PC, since at least 1996; Atari produced Sesame Street games in 1983. Before going bankrupt, Palisades Toys was to release a line of deluxe series action figures, for adults, as part of Sesame Workshop's push to expand into retro products for teens and adults.

Tickle Me Elmo was one of the fastest selling toys of the 1996 season. Elmo starred in a Christmas special that year, in which he wished every day of the year was Christmas.

Its fiction books are published on five continents, primarily by Random House in North America. Over 18 million Sesame Street books and magazines were purchased in 2005. The books often mention that children do not have to watch the show to benefit from its publications.

Live touring show Sesame Street Live presents costumed actors and dancers as characters from the series, in original plots. In recent years, VEE has had four touring casts, each performing a unique multi-million dollar budget show. Each season, the tours reach 160 different cities across North America, reaching 2 million people annually. Since the first production of Sesame Street Live on September 17, 1980, 48 million children and their parents have seen the show performed, across the world.

Langhorne, Pennsylvania, United States is the longtime home to Sesame Street theme park Sesame Place. New to the park for summer 2006 are three new rides themed to the popular Elmo's World segments. Another theme park, Parque Plaza Sesamo, exists in Monterrey, Mexico, and Universal Studios Japan includes a three-dimensional movie based on the show.

The Sesame Beginnings line, launched in mid-2005, consists of apparel, health and body, home, and seasonal products. The products in this line are designed to accentuate the natural interactivity between infants and their parents. Most of the line is exclusive to a family of Canadian retailers that includes Loblaws, Fortinos, and Zehrs.

Although Sesame Street characters occasionally endorse non-educational products, they rarely appear in their puppet form, to limit the suggestion to children that the characters are formally endorsing the product. The Muppets do appear in puppet form to endorse select causes. Big Bird has promoted safe seating practices and the wearing of seatbelts, for the Ford Motor Company, while Grover promoted a new course on children's informal learning, created by Harvard University with Sesame Workshop. Elmo has appeared before the US Education Appropriations Subcommittee to urge more spending on music in schools.

We hope you found this interesting and would like to read more about Sesame Street. Click here for the fourteenth section in this Sesame Street series. Or, you can use the link below to return to our Reading Selections II page. You can look there for other reading that interests you. If you are unable to find anything there, we suggest you set out out on the great information highway, the Internet, and search for something that does interest you.

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