The Crack Monster: The Mystery Behind Sesame Street’s Creepiest Cartoon

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2019

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the mid-1970s, Jon Armond was traumatized by something he saw on Sesame Street. It was a cartoon about a little girl who encounters creatures formed by the cracks on her bedroom wall — including a horrifying, screaming face who called himself “The Crack Master.”

Decades later, Armond wasn’t sure if the cartoon actually existed… until he discovered a subculture of obsessives who remembered the exact same thing. Armond details the bizarre rabbit hole he fell into trying to track it down. Plus, Sesame Street Executive Producer Ben Lehmann talks about the cartoon’s disappearance and uncovers some of its elusive mysteries.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From PRX.
0:07.0	This is Studio 360.
0:08.8	I'm Kurti Anderson.
0:12.8	When the children's television workshop was developing their first educational show,
0:17.8	they borrowed from a pretty unlikely source,
0:21.5	1960s Madison Avenue.
0:23.6	Fast action, humor, and animation have become established means of attracting children's attention to television.
0:30.9	That's creator Joan Gans Cooney, pitching the idea in 1969.
0:34.8	You'll note in the animated cartoon sequences that the short, simple, 60-second form used by
0:41.0	TV advertisers is used here to teach numbers and letters.
0:45.3	That show, of course, became Sesame Street.
0:47.6	It premiered 50 years ago this fall.
0:50.1	Its format broke the live action segments on Sesame Street with cartoons.
0:59.0	CTW, as it was called, commissioned animators from all over the world to come up with the show's shorts.
1:08.2	Most were straightforward and didactic.
1:15.6	Others were abstract and surreal and sometimes even a little unsettling.
1:24.0	I think I'm lost. I don't like it here.
1:28.4	But one viewer remembers a Sesame Street cartoon that wasn't just strange.
1:35.1	It was terrifying.
1:37.0	And it's still shrouded in mystery.
1:40.2	Studio 360s Sam Kim has the story.
1:43.7	When he was about six years old, John Armand was traumatized by something he saw on Sesame Street.
	...

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