Posted in: BBC, TV | Tagged: doctor who, sesame street

Doctor Who Had a Secret Spinoff All Along – It's Sesame Street!

On the anniversary of Sesame Street, we wish to remind everyone that the series has always been an unofficial American spinoff of Doctor Who.

We're celebrating the anniversary of Sesame Street, which is as much an institution to Americans as Doctor Who is to the British, and guess what? The two series are linked in ways we – or their creators – never realized. Sesame Street is pretty much an unofficial US spinoff of Doctor Who ever since it became! After all, it's already Science Fiction, featuring a street in upper New York City where strange but cute aliens live peacefully alongside humans, and nobody bats an eyelash in a series that's a slice-of-life sitcom sketch series that teaches children the alphabet and how to count. You don't get more Science Fiction than that. And while there's no origin story for how Sesame Street came to be, it makes sense as a splinter from Doctor Who, and the key is Oscar the Grouch!

Oscar the Grouch – Time Lord?

It should have been obvious all along. Oscar the Grouch is a Time Lord. Of course, he's a Time Lord. He's irascible, eccentric, and dances entirely to his own tune and doesn't care what people think of him. The trashcan he lives in is his TARDIS. Instead of hanging around a junkyard out of the eyes of the locals like the Doctor (William Hartnell) did, Oscar simply parked his TARDIS – sorry, trashcan – on the side of a brownstone on a street in the Bronx in New York City and just settled there. And Oscar is probably the reason there are muppets living on Sesame Street in New York City.

Here's what happened: Oscar took the muppets from their home planet to Earth and just decided that Sesame Street would be their place to live on. New York City is known for having immigrant communities that have taken up entire neighbourhoods in its history, so Sesame Street is where they decided to live. The trashcan, being a TARDIS, has a perception filter, so all the humans in the neighborhood just treat Oscar, his trashcan, and the muppets as fellow residents and neighbours. Oscar has been the secret glue that kept the community together. He draws everyone's attention with his "get off my lawn!" grouchiness – only he doesn't have a lawn, not on the street anyway. He probably has a lawn inside his trashcan.

Sesame Street established that he has a swimming pool in his trashcan, just like the Doctor does in their TARDIS. The trashcan's perception filter might be why government agents or social workers never show up to ask what the deal with the muppets is. And the big, unique muppets like Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus might have been from warrior races who now keep the peace in Sesame Street, which explains why there's no crime there. Anyone who showed up looking for trouble was either scared away or eaten by The Cookie Monster. And do you really want to know what The Count does to invaders or intruders when he counts them? The perception filter and the safe neighbourhood is why none of the cops from Blue Bloods ever show up in Sesame Street.

Doctor Who has a long history, since the series began in the 1960s, of Time Lords who run away from Gallifrey with their own TARDIS to set up shop somewhere. The Monk, The Master, The Corsair, The Rani, and several others. All Time Lords are crazy or eccentric, but not all of them who run away are megalomaniacs who want to take over or destroy the universe. Some of them run away just to live a quiet life like Professor Chronotis in "Shada," the story written by then script editor Douglas Adams. And we don't know what Oscar gets up to when no one's looking. Oscar has even regenerated – offscreen – from his original orange fur to the green fur we all know today. Who's to say he didn't take off in his trashcan to have Science Fiction timey-wimey adventures of his own, then come back to his corner outside the brownstone without anyone the wiser? And hey, the muppets get a lift to go back in time to fix things all the time! Like below. This is canon, yo!

Sesame Street: The Doctor Who Spinoff for Kids

Never mind Torchwood or The War Between the Land and the Sea. Those are Doctor Who spinoffs for adults or designed to appeal to an older audience, though kids can watch the latter. Sesame Street is, like The Sarah Jane Adventures, the spinoff aimed at kids, and like the original brief of Doctor Who sets out to educate and entertain children. The muppets are very nice people with a sense of civic duty who teach children the alphabet, how to count, and how to be nice to everyone. Kermit the Frog was already a journalist and correspondent filing reports from Sesame Street. Oscar the Grouch probably gives him a ride in the trashcan to London, where he could host The Muppet Show every week in the 1970s. That's how the Muppetverse ties into Doctor Who. There's always a twist at the end, and this one was there all along, even before, and more than anything was Agatha All Along. So, if you miss Doctor Who right now, just watch Sesame Street.

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