You mean in the "Crispin Glover" photo? I'm pretty sure we all did and were playing along with the joke.

• phew*
• unstaples hand from forehead*

I just watched Night of the Comet. That was pretty fun. You can't go wrong with girls with machine guns.

When I hear the Joss quote,

The first thing I ever thought of when I thought of "Buffy: The Movie" was the little...blonde girl who goes into a dark alley and gets killed, in every horror movie. The idea of "Buffy" was to subvert that idea, that image, and create someone who was a hero where she had always been a victim.

I always wonder if he got the idea of Buffy from NotC, because NotC has that alley scene.

I just watched Night of the Comet. That was pretty fun. You can't go wrong with girls with machine guns.

That was a fun movie. I love the scene where the sisters are practising with their machine guns, and one of them says, with perfect petulance:

"Daddy would have gotten us Uzis."

Night of the Comet is one of my guilty pleasures.

I was telling a co worker (who has grandkids) about the adult rating on Sesame Street, expecting her to think it was shocking. But no, she said she always had problems with the show and all the "negative"attitudes and meanness on the show. She pointed out Oscar the Grouch and something else. So she never really let her kids watch it because she didn't want them to be exposed to that.

Outwardly I was saying "I can understand" and instead I was @@ forever.

Y'know, as a parent of a toddler who owns both the classic and the modern versions on DVD, I have to say that there are some things in the classic that I don't find appropriate for the kid. Sesame Street is great, and the almost 40 year old episodes are pretty damn progressive *for their time*, but there are still aspects that reflect said time.

Just because I love it and think it's awesome, doesn't mean that it's perfect or 100% appropriate for someone who's still developing her critical thinking skills and forming her concepts of what's what. I look at it in the same way that I look at some of the children's books I loved as a kid, which I look at now and wince at the unexamined prejudices and gendered expectations revealed within. Still fun, but not for the kid until she's older.

Also, I must point out that Elmo's nowhere near as annoying as I was expecting (Elmo's World reminds me of an irony-free, sincere version of Pee Wee's Playhouse, and the Parade sketch does a good job of showing what inclusive language is like), and that he really clicks with the toddler set.

Hensen always wrote for grownups, really. Or for the kid in grownups.

I'm sure a lot of what I'm nostalgic for is filtered through my adult sensibilities.

My kids watched Mr. Rogers to come down after The Electric Company, and I got eyerolls when I praised Mr. Rogers. The truth was that after all that exciting stimulation, the little guys needed some soothing, calm and non-judgmental familiarity. Maybe Elmo's World is providing that for Lillian's generation.

I wouldn't call Elmo's World soothing--it's bright and shiny and weird and kind of loud. But it is friendly!

As much as I love Sesame Street, and I do, a lot, every change that they've made over the years has made sense to me. They've made me a little sad, yes, but they were always reasonable and arguably necessary.

Yeah, Elmo's World is pretty boppy. It was actually created as a response to the popularity of Blue's Clues.

But it gets away from the original mandate for Sesame Street which was to structure the educational bits basically like commercials. Short and snappy and to the point. Mostly I dislike how formulaic Elmo's World is. That's what seems antithetical to the constant invention, and multiple points of view I was used to on Sesame Street.

I always wonder if he got the idea of Buffy from NotC, because NotC has that alley scene.

NotC was one of Joss's influences for Buffy. I know I've heard him say that, but I can't remember where.