Sesame Seeds (Episode 16): Bob Johnson

 

Hi everyone, and welcome back to Sesame Seeds, the show where we look at the progression of a Sesame Street character from humble beginnings to the present day.

Today, we’re looking at someone who definitely helps bring the music to the street: Bob Johnson.

Bob is a music teacher who is known for singing many great songs from the Sesame catalog. Bob has been through a lot over the years, so let’s go for a walk and see if we can find out more about this person in our favorite neighborhood.

Bob was the one of the four human characters Joan Ganz Cooney thought up for the first season of the show. An male singer of any race named Bobby who would help with most of the music lessons the show wanted to teach. Around this time, young adult singer Bob McGrath was busy being a hit in Japan, and when his friend told him about the audition, he didn’t want anything to do with the show.

… That is until he actually saw Jim Henson and his muppets at work. Once he got a chance to view the magic that he would be co-starring alongside, he immediately hopped on board.

Bobby’s, now shortened to Bob’s, role on the show was to execute many of the music lessons and songs the show wanted to use. He even got to sing the first draft of the opening theme song.

As the show went on, Bob became one of Oscar’s more frequent targets for pranks and arguments, he also taught music lessons, he sometimes read stories, he got to play dress up quite often (as insects, little girl muppets, grouches and Nickelodeon mascot parodies), and he sang songs. Lots and lots and lots of songs. Here are a few of his most popular hits, below.

He also had a very complicated relationship with Linda. They would frequently be seen hanging out with each other, Bob would often do things to impress her, and they even considered what it would be like to be married to each other during Maria and Luis’ wedding.

But at the same time, they never suggested that they wanted to go any further. The reason for this was because Bob was married and had kids in real life, and that getting into a committed relationship with a character on the show would confuse audiences to no end.

Bob continued to appear all the way up until season 45, and like many of his other co-stars, disappeared afterwards. But he did show up for the 50th Anniversary special, where he would sing a new rendition of “One Of These Things” with Susan, and a 2018 video where he reads Elmo a story called “Goodnight Numbers”.

Nowadays, Bob is just doing his thing, still singing and still having fun. In case you haven’t noticed, this episode is kind of shorter than usual. That’s because unlike the other human characters we’ve gone over in this series, Bob never really had any arc that he went through at any point in the series, he was really just a guy who was pretty content with who he was and where he was.

When I was a kid, the first time I ever found out about Bob was when I was playing a game on the Sesame Street website which featured him singing, and like with most of the human characters, I barely paid any attention to him. Nowadays, while I do think Bob is an enjoyable character and a great singer, he’s not that high on my favorites list, which is nothing against Bob, it’s just that I enjoy watching some of the other humans more.

Despite me not loving Bob, I do think he was important to the show and its format in the early days, because whereas characters like Gordon and Maria acted like parents when dealing with most of the muppet characters, Bob acted more like a teacher/mentor, usually just being there to help them learn general things, and rarely disciplining them, but still managing to be his own person with his own emotions.

Whether he’s singing a song, pretending to be TriangleBob TrianglePants, or getting involved in Oscar’s nonsense, Bob has given us a lot of good times on the street, and I think we can all be pretty grateful for that.

Well, that brings us to the end of another episode, and this time, I think I’d like to leave you with Bob’s latest song.