How Elmo ruined Sesame Street

I agree. He's too overrated. Big Bird was a better character.

Even when I was a kid in the mid 90s and still watched it, they still had a lot of skits with the other puppet characters like Cookie Monster, Ernie and Bert (who have always been my favorite), Grover, Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird, Snuffle Upigus, Prairie Dawn, Harry Monster, and the Count. But frankly for me the show went down hill when they started having Ernie and Big Bird instead of Ernie and Bert. And when Oscar kept telling stories of Trash Gordon. And this is all when they also started doing Elmo's world.

As I've said before the last time I watched it I couldn't stand it. I hate the fairy Muppet and that guy that seems to have replaced Oscar the grouch who mixes up a bunch of trash in a pot and eats it. Also when I last watched it Elmo was the main character. He was there at the beginning and middle of the episode with Elmo at a wedding of 2 rocks with Zoey and then if that wasn't enough there was a whole skit towards the end with Elmo climbing a mountain. I didn't mind Elmo when he got as much screentime as all the other puppets I mentioned but now it does seem he's taken over the show. I really don't like it. That has been about 5 years ago when it was still owned by PBS. I don't know if HBO has done things differently since I refuse to pay for cable or satellite.

https://mom.com/baby/27758-grating-ridiculous-and-i-love-him-so-much

"Rarely, if ever, is Elmo's innocence challenged, or is he forced to think about someone's happiness other than his own," wrote Kevin Wong in his well-thought-out takedown of Elmo on Kotaku.com last December. "In fact, he is the de facto leader of his group—the dialogue lowers to Elmo's level, rather than rising to an older character's. And while this is cute and fun, it gets old fast, and it doesn't really go anywhere. Elmo is learning about counting to four and different shapes, but he's not learning a whole lot of life lessons."

Too many people look at "Sesame Street," as well as Elmo, from an adult perspective. Elmo speaks in the third person and is very self-centered, therefore he is annoying. He's not Big Bird, who looks at things from the same vantage point that we were seeing the world at the time, which was about 5 or 6 years old. Elmo isn't as sophisticated as the older characters, like Ernie or Bert, and even makes Cookie Monster look like a Rhodes Scholar.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041025135154/http:/www.knotmag.com/?article=1256

How Elmo Ruined Sesame Street

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQrB2hLClnU

Sesame Street used to be the gold standard for children's television, but it's gone severely downhill in recent years. And it all has to do with Elmo! How did that little furry red monster make the show so much worse?