We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

As most write-ups on the career of Al Jarnow will tell you, you are probably more familiar with his work than his name. An early contributor to Sesame Street and 3-2-1 Contact, Jarnow’s animations are sure to strike a familiar note to anyone who was raised in a PBS household, or learned to count along to a TV with knobs on it. Recently, vinyl reissuers and all out crate-diggers The Numero Group revisited Jarnow’s work remastering, color-correcting and compiling over forty of Jarnow’s animated shorts into Celestial Navigations, perhaps the most futuristic thirty five year old work your kid is going to see this year.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that Maurice Sendak wrote and designed this awesome early Sesame Street skit. Who else could seamlessly weave together nine alcoholic pigs, a deceitful rascal named Bumble, and a stern mother who works 29 minutes a day over the course of a whirlwind animated segment? But the best part is hearing Jim Henson’s voice come out of young Bumble at the end! How lovely it is to see the brief convergence of two great artists who were clearly on the same wavelength.

John and Faith Hubley were a husband-wife team of amazing experimental animators who created 22 films together, not to mention the classic “Letterman” segments on Sesame Street with the voices of Gene Wilder and Joan Rivers. One of their many Oscar-nominated short films, Windy Day, used a technique the Hubleys played with on several occasions: creating a vibrant, animated world set to an audio recording of their two young daughters’ meandering, playful conversation. The film beautifully captures the fluidity of a youthful imagination, employing a refined lexicon of visual language to tie together those wayward, impulsive narrative strands that make children’s stories so special.

In case you were curious about where these two girls with such amusing daydreams are today, Georgia went on to form a little band you might have heard of– Yo La Tengo. And her older sister Emily has been carrying on the family legacy, lending her sick animation skills to Nickelodeon and films like Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Graphic designer Johnny Kelly’s animations are rad. The above-pictured stop motion papercraft ode to the life cycle is entitled The Seed and was funded by Adobe. Why is this not on Sesame Street? It seems like just the type of arresting, unusual animation that would provoke a lifetime of unconscious aesthetic influences for children who come across it on PBS.

Also check out his 2007 graduation film from the animation program at the Royal College of Art, “Procrastination.” It’s funny because it’s true– and if you’re watching it, you’re probably procrastinating too!

Before Labyrinth, before The Muppets were making appearances on The Orson Welles Show, before Sesame Street sparked a revolution in children’s entertainment, Jim Henson was just a University of Maryland graduate with a B.S. in Home Economics, experimenting with televised puppeteering in five-minute segments on a local NBC affiliate. But like most of us, he still had to find a way to pay the bills. Hence, some of the weirdest and funniest commercials of the 1960s. While most of the ads on TV in that day were still relying on cardboard representations of the nuclear family grinning with acidic alacrirty while they delivered straightforward salutes to prefabricated post-war aspiration, Henson and his felt creations brought something unexpected into the ad world:

…till then, [advertising] agencies believed that the hard sell was the only way to get their message over on television. We took a very different approach. We tried to sell things by making people laugh.

How is this not an episode of Mad Men, yet? Watch below to see Henson getting away with murder (sometimes literally) thanks to a motley crew of adorably lovable irreverent proto-Muppets. And if you’ve got eight minutes to spare, check out this oddball romp of a metafictional behind-the-scenes film looking into the Muppets, Inc. marketing department.