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Now Reading: The Evolution Of Sesame’s Julia
As many of you know I started this blog in 2011 and for a long time I was anonymous.
I came out in September of 2015 in a post called “My Name is Frank. I am Autism Daddy. I work at Sesame Street” In that post I explained that I work at Sesame Street and revealed my true identity because I wanted to promote Sesame Street’s autism initiative which I worked on.
Then on October 21, 2015, on the day of our launch I wrote a post called “Sesame Street & Autism -My 2 Worlds Collide in an Amazing Way” where I explained more about Sesame’s autism initiative and walked you through all the different resources and videos that were available.A day later, on I posted this on my Autism Daddy Facebook page, and I felt it was important for me to re-post and say again
Today I’m going to continue to focus on Sesame Street’s autism campaign #seeamazing that I am proud to say that I had a SMALL hand in developing.
Because I have this amazing Autism Daddy platform with 124k followers I wrote that blog post yesterday to use my pulpit to help promote the crap out of the initiative. And the feedback from y’all has been overwhelmingly positive.
However, I’ve seen some comments and shares that make it seem like I was the one leading & spearheading this whole autism initiative. And nothing could be farther from the truth.
Small is the key word above folks… I had a small hand in it. The hard work & research that went into this initiative dates back 3 years.
And along the way between the tons of folks here at Sesame Workshop from all different departments, to the puppeteers, and writers & composers, and web designers, and artists, and animators, and the amazing filmmakers we hired, and all the kids and families that we featured there were literally HUNDREDS of people who worked on this initiative and played an important role in shaping it.
I worked mainly on the video production side of things, and would give my opinion and feedback as an autism dad on other elements when asked. So I am humbly here to say that I am just a small cog in the wheel.
A small cog that has an audience of 124k people, but still a small cog…:)
So thanks for all the thanks! I will take them all in, and then try to pass them on to the appropriate people…
Ok, so then in March of 2016, I wrote another post called “Sesame Street & Autism: 13 New Videos & an Emmy Nomination” when Sesame premiered some more autism content.
And that brings us to today. Well yesterday actually. Yesterday “60 Minutes” ran a story about Sesame Street and revealed the big news that we employees have been keeping a secret for 10+ months: that the autistic muppet character we introduced in October of 2015 was made into a physical muppet and would be joining the cast next month!!
You see, Julia was introduced to the world back then only as an online digital storybook called “We’re Amazing 123”.
The book was beautifully written by Leslie Kimmelman, herself an autism mom. Go like Leslie’s Facebook page here and checkout her website here.
That Julia episode will air simultaneously on PBS & HBO on April 10th.You can also view it here!!
So that’s it in a nutshell. That’s the evolution of the Julia character. You can see all of the autism content, the new stuff and the stuff from last year at www.sesamestreet.org/autismAs for the Julia muppet, you, the autism community, the autism moms and dads, were a HUGE reason why she graduated from a storybook character to an actual muppet on the show!
Written by
Frank CampagnaI’m a 48 year old neurotypical dad with a 14 year old son with severe, non-verbal autism & epilepsy. I created this blog to rant about autism & epilepsy while celebrating my son who I affectionately call “the king” :-).
I love this! Thanks to all the time and effort Sesame Street has put into this. Thank you for sharing the above clips. Since my sons went to elementary school they and then I stopped watching, so I was glad to be able to see some of it. Keep up the good work!
I love that Sesame Street is doing so much about raising awareness.but I also want to request that they make their rides more sensory friendly! We go to the LangHorne park often- the big bird carousel ride is SO LOUD! The ride itself is not loud but the big bird talking during that ride is really loud. And I think it must be easy for them to reduce the volume of big birds talks ! I had already written to them as a comment , they haven't changed it.
I have to add that u love their disability passes which you can use for 10 rides and go on the priority line! It will be great to see if they can do that small adjustments in the park (especially the prerecorded texts like in the carousel ride) that can greatly help children like mine andto enjoy the park more without anxiety of such LOUd sounds that is not fun for anybody really. And comes in the way of enjoyment for our sensory kids.
Why must it read "Has Autism" instead of "Is Autistic" like Autism is a disease, does that mean it can be cured?… it is not a disease, I think that brings across the wrong impression to people with no concept of ASD. Really need first person accounts too, not talk about, but first person narrative? Maybe some of this has been addressed in the upcoming Sesame street episode… I sure hope so. just seems to come from an Ablest point of view.
Thanks for at least bringing it out for more discussion… is it possible to Monochrome a Spectrum for people ? it took me a minute or so into the first video to go OMG ! I know kids and adults, since it doesn't go away when you become a growd up… that would freak if you invaded their space like that. Loud or abrupt sounds? OOoo sorry to ramble on, but it's so important to so many of us, as I know you are aware.
Cheers from my side 😉
Cool stuff. Very well done Btw- first thing my HF/aspergers 9 yr old and asperger(ish) husband noticed "why did they move ocsar's trash can?" ?