BS: Cookie Monster almost 60 years old

Subject: BS: Cookie Monster almost 60 years old
From: keberoxu
Date: 29 Nov 23 - 12:46 PM

I can't link to the New York Times article today.
It's actually about the cookies more than the Cookie Monster;
there's an interview with the people who bake the cookies,
which combine instant coffee with Grape Nuts and pancake flour.

The article does say, however, that almost 60 years ago,
Jim Henson the puppeteer created the Cookie Monster
for a client, General Foods Canada, for their advertisements.

From there, the Cookie Monster graduated to Sesame Street,
and the rest is television history.
And a lot of cookie crumbs.

Subject: RE: BS: Cookie Monster almost 60 years old
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 29 Nov 23 - 05:52 PM

Nom Nom Nom. What’s the Deal With Cookie Monster’s Cookies?
If you have ever wondered what the “Sesame Street” Muppet is really eating, we have the answer.

Years ago, a reader wrote probing for details on a mystery that had vexed him: What’s the deal with the cookies that Cookie Monster eats?

The email said nothing else. I chuckled and filed the note in the cupboard of my brain where such things go. Until I realized something: Me want cookies. And me want answers.

Cookie Monster, for those of you who skipped childhood, is a classic Muppet on “Sesame Street.” He is a scraggly, blue fellow with bulging eyeballs, who has for decades been singularly obsessed with chaotically chowing down on cookies. The crumbs end up almost everywhere except his mouth, an effect that looks like a high-speed blender without a top.

The character was created in the 1960s by Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets, for a General Foods Canada commercial. Cookie eventually moved to “Sesame Street,” where he presumably found a good rent-stabilized apartment.

It turns out the cookies are real — sort of.

They are baked at the home of Lara MacLean, who has been a “puppet wrangler” for the Jim Henson Company for almost three decades. MacLean started as an intern for Sesame Workshop in 1992 and has been working for the team ever since.

The recipe, roughly: Pancake mix, puffed rice, Grape-Nuts and instant coffee, with water in the mixture. The chocolate chips are made using hot glue sticks — essentially colored gobs of glue.

The cookies do not have oils, fats or sugars. Those would stain Cookie Monster. They’re edible, but barely.

“Kind of like a dog treat,” MacLean said in an interview.

Before MacLean reinvented the recipe in the 2000s, the creative team behind “Sesame Street” used versions of rice crackers and foams to make the cookies. The challenge was that the rice crackers would make more of a mess and get stuck in Cookie’s fur. And the foams didn’t look like cookies once they broke apart.

The rest is at the link.

Subject: RE: BS: Cookie Monster almost 60 years old
From: Donuel
Date: 30 Nov 23 - 11:52 AM

Notice that Cookie Monster has no teeth.