This is an article from several years ago. It's not an interview with Frank Oz. He's barely quoted in the piece and used as title clickbait. The piece is mostly

This is an article from several years ago. It's not an interview with Frank Oz. He's barely quoted in the piece and used as title clickbait. The piece is mostly parental anecdotes and whinging. Oz's longer rant [1] was about Disney, who don't want Oz touching their Muppets. His Sesame street quote was a minor aside. And neither this op ed nor Oz's SXSW comments talk about why the Muppets, and especially Sesame Street, are the way they are. CTW turned Sesame Street into a well-honed marketing/child psychology machine. Everything they did, well before Disney's involvement, involved so much testing and measuring and manipulation that . . . Ok, so for context in software terms, who here remembers the news about Google choosing a shade of blue? [2] It's like that but for how to introduce tough subjects to kids. And market the show and associated products to them. Unlike when the show started in the 60s, toddlers are now a market! Well before the early 2000s when Disney took over, Sesame Street turned into the data-driven committee-ruled kind of place that might make "jazz" but only suitable for elevators. Or toddlers who didn't know better. Committees don't make art. They do make Disney assets, though, so that was a good match. [1] https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/sxsw/2019-03-13/sxsw-panel-recap-frank-oz/ https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/sxsw/2019-03-13/sxsw-p... [2] https://bharathbalasubramanian.medium.com/data-driven-decisions-googles-50-shades-of-blue-experiment-996f01819a97 https://bharathbalasubramanian.medium.com/data-driven-decisi...