Skip to main content

50 Years of 'Sesame Street' Are Being Added to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting

Daniel Hautzinger
Mr. Hooper with Bert and Ernie. Image: Sesame Workshop
Mr. Hooper with Bert and Ernie. Image: Sesame Workshop

As part of the 50th anniversary of Sesame Street, the American Archive for Public Broadcasting (AAPB) will acquire almost 4,500 episodes from the past 49 seasons of the beloved children's show through a donation from Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit education organization behind the show. The AAPB, a collaboration between the Library of Congress and WGBH Educational Foundation that preserves and digitizes public media from the past 70 years, will incorporate the Sesame Street collection over the next year. It will be available to view on-site at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and by appointment at WGBH in Boston. 

The collection includes iconic episodes, featuring such moments as Ernie singing "Rubber Duckie, You're the One;" Kermit the Frog's "It's Not Easy Being Green;" Big Bird's reckoning with the death of a friend in "Farewell, Mr. Hooper;" and other classics. 

The AAPB is five years old, and contains over 90,000 materials (over 50,000 hours of television and radio programming), including PBS Newshour episodes, the Senate Watergate hearings, and unedited interviews from American Experience documentaries, among other materials. Much of it is available online.