Cookie Monster, Elmo and Abby Cadabby are
utterly transformed in a new “Sesame Street”
show. You might even say they’re Transformers.
The trio of furry monsters wear cool metal suits
bursting with gizmos and soar through the
air in their new CGI-animated show “Mecha
Builders,” adding some science and technology
lessons along with their adventures.
“These are characters that are beloved and that
our audience loves. So it’s just like expanding
on these characters and who they can become,”
says Kay Wilson Stallings, executive vice
president of creative and production at Sesame
Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind
“Sesame Street.”
Each 11-minute episode begins with a problem
— a runaway train, a hurtling Earth-bound
asteroid, a melting ice slide, a broken movie
screen or a wayward boulder — and the trio try
a series of fixes, refining their ideas until they
find an answer. The lesson is to always plan, test
and solve.
For the busted movie screen, the Mecha
Builders first use a giant wooden sculpture
and then some window glass as a
replacement before coming across the
answer: a repainted billboard. Along the
way, they learned that round or see-though
objects don’t work well for projecting
images onto.
“That’s how kids learn, right? You’re not
going to get it right the first time. And what
we like to model is what these characters
are doing: They’re really heroes in training
and so there’s a lot of trial and error,” says
Wilson Stallings. “You just have to have