Sesame Seeds (Episode 8): Oscar the Grouch

 

Hey everyone! Welcome back to Sesame Seeds, the series where we look at the progression of a Sesame Street character from humble beginnings to the present day.

I hope all of you are ready for a real grouchy time, because the subject for this episode is the one and only, Oscar the Grouch.

The only spot of negativity in an otherwise purely positive street, Oscar is probably the grouchiest grouch there is. But how did he get this title? Let’s take a dumpster dive and find out.

It all started when Sesame Street had decided to bring the muppets to their New York street setting, and Jim Henson was thinking of new characters he could make for this change. Then one day, he and Sesame Street writer/producer Jon Stone went to a restaurant called Oscar’s Tavern, where they met a waiter who was so rude and grouchy, that inspiration struck for Jim.

He designed a grouchy purple monster, named Oscar, who would live in a manhole on the street, but this had to be dropped, because one, the cameras they were using at the time weren’t equipped to capture the color correctly, and two, there were no trap doors underneath the set that could allow a manhole performing space. So changes were made accordingly, and Don Sahlin transformed Oscar into an orange monster who inhabited a grey trash can just outside of the main apartment building, and his purpose was to represent all of the negative feelings that kids have, and to illustrate that said feelings are natural and not something to shy away from.

All he needed now was a voice, and Jim decided that voice would be none other than his newest recruit, Caroll Spinney.

Unlike Big Bird, Spinney wasn’t really sure what voice he should use for this new character, until one day he took a taxi to his workplace, and the driver said in a very gruff voice:

“Where to, Mac?”

And a spark was lit. So Caroll kept saying that line in that voice in his head until he got to the studio, and this was his final result.

You may notice that Oscar looks kind of awkward here, and that’s because the puppet was built around a right hand glove, but the trash can was built so Caroll could use his left hand. Naturally, the crew realized this and Oscar was given a rebuild, so Spinney could give a much better performance.

Throughout the first season, Oscar would mainly interact with the other humans and kids on the street, unlike them, he would often be very abrasive, argumentative and downright dour. But he would perk up on a few occasions, and even get to sing a song about a certain affinity he has.

But even then, Oscar had one more big change to go through. Jim Henson thought that maybe Oscar shouldn’t be orange, he should be green instead. It would definitely be capture-able on their cameras.

So, in the mid 70s, a new Oscar was made and made two appearances on the Flip Wilson Show, where he would explain that he had gone on vacation to a place called Swamp Mushy Muddy, and he never washed off all the damp slime, mold and moss, which happened to be the color green.

But the puppet you see in the picture above would not be the one they would use for the show. This one down below, however, would.

And being that Oscar was the only other major character Spinney was performing, he and Big Bird were the muppets the street scenes focused the most on. Kids could enjoy watching Big Bird get into funny misadventures, while adults could get more of a chuckle at Oscar creating chaos.

Yeah, I hadn’t mentioned yet, that Oscar was now owning his grouchy persona, hating almost everything his cheery neighbors did for the sheer fact that it wasn’t grouchy. He also gained somewhat of a mischievous streak. As he would often throw insults, start arguments and pull pranks on the human cast. Maria and Bob, in particular.

Oscar lives by a very simple philosophy: If he’s miserable, he’s happy, but he doesn’t like to be happy, so that makes him miserable, but he likes being miserable, so that makes him happy, and so on and so forth.

All of this created a completely different dynamic on the show. Whereas Big Bird was the surrogate kid of the group, so the human grown-ups treated him as such, Oscar was more of an annoyance than anything. As Miss Sonia Manzano so aptly put it.

“With Oscar, you never know if you’re talking to a bratty little kid, or a grumpy old man.”

But despite this, it was made clear that everyone still cared about Oscar and he mattered just as much as they did.

As Oscar continued to appear, we got to learn more about the species of grouches, and got to meet some of the members in Oscar’s family, including his mother, his brother Ernest, and his niece Irvine. And also his many pets, like Slimey the worm, Fluffy the elephant and Preposterous the puppy dog.

As much as Oscar might hate to know this, he was having a huge impact on the kids watching. The CTW was constantly getting letters and feedback from parents, whose kids had either gotten their own trash cans to spend time in or sent in any trash they could find for Oscar to have.

Oscar would continue to make his appearance on and off of the show known. He was present for every outside trip the cast took, he started Big Bird’s conflict of Christmas Eve On Sesame Street by asking him how Santa gets down chimneys, he made cameos in all three original muppet movies, he got to witness broken roman art in Don’t Eat the Pictures, he interacted with his fair share of celebrity guest stars, and he dragged Maria and Telly to some very grouchy locations in Follow That Bird.

Speaking of Telly, starting with season 12, Telly and Oscar would be paired up very frequently, and they had sort of a jerk/naive guy dynamic. (i.e. Ed and Eddy, Garfield and Odie, Master Shake and Meatwad.)

Also, close to this season, he would get a new form of transportation. He already had holes in the bottom of his can, which he could stick his feet out of and walk around. But he would now also have a trashman friend named Bruno who would carry Oscar’s can around to wherever he wanted and/or needed to go. Bruno was a full bodied muppet that Caroll could wear, and since his arms were attached to the trash can, he could also puppeteer Oscar using his actual arms, and kids would be none the wiser.

Oscar would also play a significant role in the Maria and Luis love saga. He was present at their wedding, when Maria was pregnant, he drove the couple to the hospital in his Sloppy Jalopy, he had an existential crisis in the very next episode, but after said crisis, he gives Maria a call to see how her baby is doing, and a few episodes later when Gabi comes back, he thinks she might be a grouch.

In the 90s, Oscar, like his other co-stars, was appearing less, to make room for the new guys, though, among them, would appear the most. He was the subject of the many fun and happy ideas the young monsters came up with. He also opened his own newsstand right next to the subway around the corner, and was the one most affected when his pet worm was sent to space.

He was also the one who kicked off the true conflict of the Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland, where he catches Elmo’s blanket, sneezes in it, and throws it in his can, causing Elmo to jump in and get it, only to stumble into the portal that leads into Grouchland.

When the 2000s came into existence, Oscar’s presence on the show was more or less the same, he mostly appeared in street scenes and was still very grouchy. He got to celebrate his birthday, was the unfortunate target of Mary Mary’s garden, saved enough money to buy a P.U.-gelhorn, with help from his friends, took an online grouch school and painted a picture, using nothing but splatters of paint.

He even got a chance to audition for Kamunrah’s army in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, along with Darth Vader, due to them being actual props on display at the Smithsonian institution.

Of his two characters, Caroll was doing Oscar more than he did Big Bird in this time period, but come 2015, he had to stop physically performing him, and Eric Jacobson became his understudy, performing Oscar to already recorded vocals and sometimes performing him with his own interpretation of his voice, which was pretty spot on.

The next year, when the series moved to HBO, Oscar relocated his trash can to the other side of 123, right below Elmo’s apartment. He was now located in a dumpster area, complete with a recycling bin. To add to that, Oscar now had the ability to pop up out of any other waste disposal units that were littered around the street. He was also one of the core characters the show wanted to focus more on.

And I think you all remember that Caroll Spinney retired in 2018 and died in 2019, which left Eric Jacobson to take over for Oscar full time. Just in time for him to make this video to promote a website maker called Squarespace.

Oscar has actually been frequently present these last two years. During the midst of the pandemic, he starred in a few videos where he informed us about the importance of social distancing, mask wearing and voting.

All of this ties back to Spinney’s belief that while Oscar was grouchy and mean most of the time, underneath it all lay a heart of gold. Jon Stone, on the other hand, didn’t seem to agree with that notion, so it was something the two were at odds on.

Now, I personally think Oscar is both a jerk and a nice guy, and I’ll explain that as I give my final thoughts on him.

When I was little, Oscar was like Bert to me, in the fact that I didn’t get his purpose on the show, but now that I’ve grown, I get it now.

In a show like this, or basically any show, you don’t want every character to be happy-go-lucky, no matter what. And while the main Sesame characters each have their share of negative moments, they mostly remain positive and excited about whatever comes their way. Oscar is the opposite. He hates sunshine, happiness, affection and everything else nice in this world, which makes for fun interactions when he’s paired up with someone like Elmo, Bob or Grover.

Being the only mostly negative character also gives Oscar the ability to say certain things and make certain jokes the other characters can’t. No way could Luis or Gordon call Maria “Skinny” or Grover or Bert call Big Bird an oversized turkey, but because Oscar is the way that he is, he can hurl as many insults as he wants. (As long as they’re all G-rated, of course.)

Oscar is very similar to Bert, in the fact that he, in his own way, teaches kids about acceptance. Like Bert, he has very weird and eccentric interests and hobbies, but those interests and hobbies are tied to his species, which is grouches. I see people constantly making the joke that Oscar is grouchy, because he lives in a trash can. And I’m here to say that just because it was funny when Dave Chappelle did it, doesn’t mean it’s true. If Oscar actually did have a nice house like most of us do, he’d absolutely hate it. Oscar, like all grouches, loves trash and a trash can is the perfect place where he can receive trash, so he chose to live there.

And the other characters know who Oscar is, and while they get annoyed with him frequently, they would never want to actually change him or how he lives life, because his life matters just as much as theirs.

And because Oscar has surrounded himself with such loving and caring individuals, he helps them bring out their negative emotions they need to experience every now and then, while they in turn, help Oscar to show more compassion. Throughout the series we see that for every insult and prank he’s thrown his neighbors way, he really does care for them, and they really care about him, which helps to make him more endearing to the audience.

Above all else, Oscar exists to show us grouchy feelings and emotions are not something to be ashamed of. We all feel grouchy at some point in our lives. Sometimes all we wanna do is be alone without anyone to bother us, other times we may just wanna vent about something that annoys us, and there are even times where we wanna be as messy as possible, and not care what other people say about it. Whatever the reason, Oscar illustrates that grouchiness is necessary for the world to function.

In conclusion, to quote a song from the 21st season: Oscar is our grouch and we’re stuck with him, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Well, this brings us to the end of another episode. So why don’t I give you all a bad send off with the bad old Grouch Anthem? Don’t enjoy!