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So this past week I took my wife and kids down to Calgary to visit my parents for about five days. Whenever me or my siblings visit my folks with our respective children my parents will pull out some of the old toys of ours from when we were kids. My oldest brother is 48 so some of the toys themselves are getting close to fifty years old, maybe more if any of them were bought used when he was a baby or toddler.
Anyway, my 3 year old daughter was playing with these old Sesame Street toys, and I noticed one that I didn’t recognize, namely this purple mother fucker on the far right:
At first I wondered if it was a manufacturing error and that was supposed to be Burt since like the Ernie toy next to him it had the white collar and they just miscoloured him purple instead of yellow. But when I asked my Dad he said no, he remembered that there had been a separate Burt figure that got lost at some point along the way in the 70s or 80s when my siblings and I were little.
After looking into it I found out that was actually supposed to be a figure or a Sesame Street character named Roosevelt Franklin:
I have never even heard of this muppet before, but according to Wikipedia he was on Sesame Street from 1969-1972 before he was essentially canceled as it was believed at the time that he was representative of African Americans and he was always misbehaving and shit so they didn’t want to perpetuate stereotypes that African Americans were unruly so they stopped featuring him after the first three seasons of Sesame Street.
Does anyone remember this muppet? How about some of our more senior posters like @sweetviolenturg or @Ottawaguy ?
Anyway, my 3 year old daughter was playing with these old Sesame Street toys, and I noticed one that I didn’t recognize, namely this purple mother fucker on the far right:
At first I wondered if it was a manufacturing error and that was supposed to be Burt since like the Ernie toy next to him it had the white collar and they just miscoloured him purple instead of yellow. But when I asked my Dad he said no, he remembered that there had been a separate Burt figure that got lost at some point along the way in the 70s or 80s when my siblings and I were little.
After looking into it I found out that was actually supposed to be a figure or a Sesame Street character named Roosevelt Franklin:
I have never even heard of this muppet before, but according to Wikipedia he was on Sesame Street from 1969-1972 before he was essentially canceled as it was believed at the time that he was representative of African Americans and he was always misbehaving and shit so they didn’t want to perpetuate stereotypes that African Americans were unruly so they stopped featuring him after the first three seasons of Sesame Street.
Does anyone remember this muppet? How about some of our more senior posters like @sweetviolenturg or @Ottawaguy ?
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