Muppets Take Moscow!

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Car bombings, assassinations and a military takeover: these are just some of the things American TV producer Natasha Lance Rogoff and her team faced when trying to bring The Muppets to the former USSR in the 1990s.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russia that emerged was a chaotic, sometimes violent free-for-all for western investors and oligarchs, swooping in to buy up businesses, natural resources and really anything they could. For regular Russians, they had to navigate a new, more free society and Natasha, a fluent speaker with experience in Russian TV, was drafted in to introduce The Muppets as the ambassadors to show children how to do that.

An exercise in trying to introduce western values but also establish international relations with a former enemy, almost every aspect of the Russian Sesame Street- Uliza Sezam - was coloured by cultural clashes. Both nationalities had to learn to work together and better understand one another. What was created was a wholly Russian show, with new characters founded in traditional folklore and music informed by Russia’s rich cultural history. The show was a huge success, beloved by children across the entire USSR and ran for 10 years into Putin’s reign of power.

Natasha joins Dan to tell this extraordinary story as they delve into the societal pressures faced by Russia after the Soviet Union and its relationship with the west which is still so relevant today.

Her new book is called ‘Muppets in Moscow.’

Archive of Sesame Street and Uliza Sezam courtesy of Sesame Workshop.

Produced by Mariana Des Forges and mixed by Dougal Patmore.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's history. Today we're going to be talking Muppets.
0:04.6	When he's talking the Muppets in Moscow. It's not a here think. It's the actual Muppets,
0:10.5	not like Ernie and Bert and Big Bird and everybody. The actual Muppets would take him to Russia.
0:15.3	This was a huge plan, a publicly funded plan to take the hit US TV show that modeled good behavior for young people,
0:35.2	turning them into citizens of liberal democracies,
0:38.2	eulogizing, reading, collaboration, citizenship, all the things that you would need as citizens of this bright new democratic Russia in the 1990s.
0:47.6	The Muppets went to Moscow and I'm going to talk to the woman who took them there. She is Natasha Lantz Rogoff and she was a young filmmaker.
0:57.0	She worked in Russia in the 1980s. She spoke some Russian, so she was selected to try and launch the Muppets into the former Soviet Union.
1:05.5	It's an astonishing story because over the next few years she would experience car bombings, assassinations, military intervention, and gigantic commercial success for the Muppets.
1:17.1	The Muppets took Russia by storm in the 1990s and were only cancelled by Vladimir Putin who thought they were two western.
1:25.5	This is a story about the recent history of Russia through the eyes of the Muppets and it is fascinating.
1:31.6	You can love it. Natasha and Lantz Rogoff has just written a book called The Muppets in Moscow and she has come on the podcast to tell me all about it. Enjoy!
1:39.7	She might have heard.
1:42.3	The Tommy Tom, Tom Tom, you know she started to gaze the king.
1:46.3	No black point unity until there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another in a game.
1:52.9	And the stuff and the subtle has cleared the power.
1:56.5	Natasha, thanks for coming on the show.
1:59.2	My pleasure. Glad to be here.
2:01.2	Tell me what were your qualifications for this super elite mission into the heart of the former enemy's empire?
2:08.2	When you say mission with an accent.
2:12.4	Oh my god, it makes it sound so much more glamorous than it actually is.
2:17.5	I had zero qualifications to be executive producing a children's television show at the time I was hired by Sesame Street.
	...

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