Animating for Sesame Street

Disada Productions had clients in New York City and that took us to
the great city on a fairly regular basis. On one visit I arranged a
meeting with the Children's Television Workshop, who produced the
television shows SESAME STREET and THE ELECTRIC COMPANY.

Both shows were at the apex of their popularity and influence, and
used a lot of animation. Being on PBS and being funded in large part
by government funding, they were not allowed to give contracts to
production companies outside the U.S.A. The only exceptions would be
if that company's work was truly excellent and if the company could do
work that Americans had been unable to do.

Childrens's Television Workshop's short animated films often taught
different letters or combination of letters in a reading exercise.
There were four sets of such letters that studios had tried to
incorporate into their program, but the Workshop didn't like or
approve the concepts for production. I said we'd like to have a try at
coming up with four storyboards featuring new characters that would
promote these letters. This we had to do on our own, on spec without
any compensation, but it was worth it for a crack at working with a
top animation source on a fun project.

Our animation studio did come up with four original storyboards and I
brought them down to New York. They liked and ordered all four!

You can see the two surviving animated shorts for the Children's
Television Network on our YouTube channel.