Origins of Oscar the Grouch (Information: Muppet Wiki)
According to Sesame Street Unpaved, “The character of Oscar was inspired by a nasty waiter from a restaurant called Oscar’s Tavern in Manhattan. Jim Henson and Jon Stone were waited on by a man who was so rude and grouchy that he surpassed annoying and started to actually amuse both Jim and Jon. They were so entertained that going to Oscar’s Tavern became a sort of masochistic form of luncheon entertainment for them, and their waiter forever became immortalized as the world’s most famous Grouch.” In the Ask Henson.com web column, Jim Henson Company Archivist Karen Falk said that the restaurant was named Oscar’s Salt of the Sea – and went on to say, “Some of the designs that we have in the Archives were done by Jim Henson on Oscar’s paper placemats!”
Caroll Spinney says that he based Oscar’s voice on another New York resident – a Bronx taxi driver who drove him to work on his first day performing the character. When Spinney got into the cab, the driver snapped, “Where to, Mac?”
While Jim Henson’s first Oscar sketches were colored purple, the original Oscar puppet was orange (Henson later said in an interview that this change was made because the early cameras weren’t good enough to capture the color right). In chapter nine of the book The Wisdom of Big Bird, Caroll Spinney states that the Oscar puppet was rebuilt about a month after Sesame Street had started taping. Jim tore apart the original puppet, and a new puppet was built. An early version of the green Oscar debuted on The Flip Wilson Show in 1970 and Oscar’s explanation for that was that he had vacationed at Swamp Mushy Muddy, where the dampness had turned him green overnight. In a 2003 appearance, Oscar stated that while his time in Swamp Mushy Muddy made him appear green, he is still in fact orange underneath all the slime and mold. (With an exception, he’s just never taken a bath).
In his introduction to the book Sesame Street: A Celebration - 40 Years of Life on the Street (which also contained his lunch from yesterday, grape juice, and something unidentifiable), he explains how he ended up on Sesame Street, saying he was a normal when Joan Ganz Cooney and Jon Stone decided to create the show, they hired Jim Henson, who bugged him until he agreed to be on the show for the first episode only. He headed off to Swamp Mushy Muddy after the production wrapped, disgusted, but discovered that his agent, Bernie, had signed a contract to have him on the entire run of Sesame Street. Oscar became so mad he that he turned green (a fictous explanation around how he became green), but figured the show wouldn’t run for more than six months anyway (obviously disappointed).
Oscar explained his family roots and fur color again in a Life Magazine article in 2009, “Most of the family was orange. But I had a lovely vacation in Swamp Mushy Muddy resort. It was so dark and dreary I kind of turned green. It’s mostly moss. I like it — it goes with my eyes. I accidentally took a bath once, turned orange again and washed all the moss off, so I went right back to Swamp Mushy Muddy, and here I am.”
Oscar’s first line on Sesame Street, in episode 0001, was “Don’t bang on my can! Go away.” This sums up his personality as it would remain for over 40 years.
The Dixie Challenger was always my favorite Hot Wheels car when I was a kid. I don’t really know why. I guess looking back, it’s kind of a bootleg General Lee, but I never really thought about that back then. I guess I just liked the paint job.
I thought that Hot Wheels may have inadvertently avoided controversy by not including the confederate flag like the General Lee had, but I guess some variants had one on the roof.
I’d like to get my hands on the 2008 40 Years of Hot Wheels edition with the chrome paint job!
Anyway, it wasn’t until very recently that I learned that the Dixie Challenger and many of my other favorite Hot Wheels from childhood were included with a McDonald’s Happy Meal in 1983. That’s probably where I got them. At the risk of sounding like the old fart that I am, they sure don’t make Happy Meal toys like this anymore.
Getting the sticker right was really important. It required a patience and a precision that didn’t come easily to my nine-year-old hands. But the flag had to be perfect. It had to be exact. And I didn’t have a protractor – nor would I have known how to use it. I was nine, after all.
But when you’re putting a flag on the roof of a car, it needed to be just right, or it was all wrong. And you didn’t have a lot of time to mess around: Once you dipped the sticker in the water, you had seconds to make sure that it was where you wanted it, before it was stuck forever.
Luckily, I got it right. And that Confederate Flag was affixed to the roof of the General Lee exactly how I wanted it. I was so proud.
—-
There was a discipline to building models that I responded to in a big way. I liked following directions. I liked the process of making something that, in truth, didn’t require any artistic talent to produce. I was never a good artist, but I could trace the shit out of superheroes from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. (Maybe I traced more female heroes than male ones. No way to know for sure.) I even figured out how, thanks to a rudimentary grid system, to blow them up into my own posters.
Laying out the pieces, twisting the plastic forms free, sanding away the rough spots, using just the right amount of glue, holding it fast, getting the multiple coats of paint mirror-smooth, affixing the decals… It was like my own little zen toy garden.
If you screwed up, it didn’t look right. The doors wouldn’t close. The hood wouldn’t lay flush. You were penalized for imperfection.
(I would later indulge those same tendencies with baking, the most exacting of cooking. There is no room for “eyeballing” amounts when baking a cake – that shit is chemistry, and if you get it wrong, you’ll taste the mistake. The building blocks of being a fat child.)
—-
There was no way for me, a black kid growing up in the Bronx, to understand exactly what was happening in The Dukes of Hazzard. All I knew was that I loved it. I loved the Duke boys, and the way they shot dynamite arrows and blew up randomly placed piles of tires or barrels. I loved Roscoe P. Coltrane – who I thought was named “Roscoe Peco Train” – for the silly way that he talked. I loved Cooter because his name was Cooter and Uncle Jesse because he seemed to know everything, like a backwoods Obi-Wan Kenobi.
I wasn’t sure at the time why I loved Daisy Duke, but it would eventually become evident.
But most of all, I loved the car. That screaming orange 1969 Dodge Charger with the doors welded shut could outrun anything, anytime. It could fly over ravines and barricades. It kicked up rooster tails of dirt even when it was rolling on pavement.
It was, like so many cars of the late ‘70s/early ‘80s – KITT, the Trans Am from Smokey and the Bandit, whatever the hell it was that Starsky and Hutch drove, Bullitt’s Mustang Fastback – an item of lust, and I wanted it.
So I built it. And I loved it.
—-
It never occurred to me, until very recently, what my parents must have thought of this. My father, an immigrant from the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, and my mother, who was a girl coming of age during the Civil Rights struggle – they must’ve been appalled that their young black son was infatuated with this show that glorified the very symbol of southern aggression and oppression. That he was playing, every day, with the a toy emblazoned with a flag that had been co-opted as a banner of hate.
And that he loved it.
But they never said anything. Never a word of discouragement, never a hint of disapproval. They just let me play, knowing that, in time, The Dukes of Hazzard would dim in my estimation, to be replaced by something else just as temporary. And that, someday, I’d learn who General Robert E. Lee was, what the Civil War was, and why the Dixie flag is such a firestarter.
They never said anything. The strength it must’ve taken to remain silent, when what I was doing must have bristled against the very core of their being…. They didn’t teach hate even though it’d be perfectly understandable if they did.
Only a parent can understand that sacrifice in the service of making a better world for their children. A better world that takes root in each small mind.
