It seems Elmo’s not the only one that is hot and cold towards Katy Perry. Yesterday a clip of the pop songstress and Elmo performing duet on Sesame Street was pulled by the show’s producers, Sesame Workshop, because of concerns and complaints voiced by parents and parenting groups that the pop singer’s ensemble was inappropriate for the children’s show. The clip, which can be viewed on Perry’s Youtube channel, shows Elmo and Katy singing a duet of her “Hot n Cold” single, with revised lyrics. Elmo is running all around Sesame Street with Katy chasing behind him, trying to catch him so they can play dress up.
Stories about this clip hit the web to a mix of comments; most of the ones I have read personally seem to be on the side of not thinking it was that big of a deal. Perry is wearing what is described as a “figure skater” dress that has a flesh colored meshing that goes up to her neck. My biggest problems with the people that are so opposed to this clip are these:
1) It is Katy Perry, they are not going to put her in a potato sack – that’s not her thing.
2) What toddler even thinks in a sexual nature? The only people that see this as sexually inappropriate are adults because that is how our brains work, but the age range this is targeting – one to six year-olds – don’t have the same thought process as we do. They will see Elmo and most likely some cute woman they don’t even know having fun, playing tag and singing a cute song.
3) Stop blaming Katy Perry! She isn’t to blame for the outfit, Sesame Street’s wardrobe people are and if they initially didn’t see anything wrong with it, then clearly it couldn’t be that bad since they have been doing this for years.
4) Children are exposed to worst things every day in real life and just because Perry dresses this way doesn’t mean your kids are going to; you control their wardrobes, not TV show stylists.
I cannot help but think this might be some sort of publicity stunt (and I know that I am not the only one way that feels this way). On Youtube today, Elmo has been added next to their logo. Coincidence? Hardly. In addition to the altered logo, there is a section called “Elmo, on the record” featuring a video interview with the fuzzy red monster answering viewer questions. How convenient that it just so happened the day after almost 1 million people viewed the Perry/puppet duet and numerous sites wrote stories about it. If Sesame Workshop was so worried about negative parental feedback so much so that they pulled the scene from the show, why wouldn’t they disallow the video from being available anywhere on the web? I feel like maybe, Sesame Street was looking for a new way to increase viewership and they might have found just the thing.
Have you seen the video? Did you think it was inappropriate? As a parent, would you allow your young child to watch it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHROHJlU_Ng
