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  Hi everyone, and 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. Today, we’re looking at a monster who’s not as popular as Elmo, Cookie and Grover, but still an important one nonetheless: Telly. Telly Monster, as most of us know him is an emotional, neurotic, worrying mess. The Chuckie Finster/Piglet/Courage of Sesame Street. But he didn’t start out that way. Telly was conceived in the late 70s, as a monster who loved to watch television. Hence the name. Puppetered by Bob Payne, he would first appear in episode 1257 of season 10, where we would find him parked in the arbor on top of a crate, sitting very close to a TV he plugged in, with big, swirly eyes and long TV antenna sticking out of his head. So as you can see, Telly’s thing was that he was always too busy watching TV to do literally anything else. After filming the episode, the CTW realized: “Hmmm… maybe a monster who does no...

  Greetings everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Sesame Seeds. The series where we look at the progression of a Sesame Street character from humble beginnings to the present day. Today, we’re not just looking at another human, but probably the most popular and well known human cast member Sesame Street ever had: Maria. Maria has shown us how to fix toasters, speak spanish, what love is and many other lessons in the 48 years we’ve known her, and she’s also gone through a significant amount of changes. It all started when season 3 of the show was being created. The team thought it was time add a few new human characters of latin descent to the cast to give kids and families of latin descent someone to look up to, and one person they found happened to be a Bronx raised, puerto rican teenager named Sonia Manzano. Manzano, at the time, was mostly known for playing a role in the musical Godspell. And afterwards, her agent suggested she audition for Sesame Street. For the audi...