NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Smokey Bear taught kids the importance of preventing wildfires. McGruff the Crime Dog warned them not to talk to strangers. And in 1972, Big Bird lined up on “Sesame Street” to receive a measles vaccine as part of a campaign to get more youngsters inoculated against the disease.
But when that same iconic, 8-foot-tall children’s character tweeted last weekend that he had been vaccinated against COVID-19, conservative politicians immediately pushed back.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, grilled Big Bird for what he called “government propaganda.” Fox News contributor Lisa Boothe described it as “brainwashing children” and “twisted.”
“My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy,” Big Bird tweeted.
“Sesame Street” has long faced grumbles from conservatives unhappy with its connections to U.S. public broadcasting, which receives federal funding. Yet this latest fallout marked a new contentious flashpoint that has plagued previous rollouts of the vaccine, just as the shot becomes available to children between the ages of 5 and 11.
Nearly 50 years ago, when the show was in its third season, “Sesame Street” encouraged kids to get the measles vaccine by showing Big Bird and other children getting the injection. The move was similar to other public service campaigns that used beloved characters to help teach children life lessons, including discouraging littering, wearing seatbelts and looking both ways before crossing the street.
“What Big Bird is doing is part of a long tradition. But what’s different now, of course, is that everything is political and everything is contentious,” said Thomas Doherty, an American studies professor at Brandeis University. “Something that we all wanted a year ago, the vaccine, is now this matter of great contention.”
Controversy at the intersection of TV and politics has popped up here and there for decades. In 1952, “I Love Lucy” didn’t use the word pregnant once in an episode that focused on the title character, Lucy Ricardo, having a baby after executives determined that doing so would be too scandalous.
The 1970s TV series “Maude,” a spinoff show of “All in the Family,” which explored all manner of political and racial issues in the household of a bigoted man from the New York City borough of Queens, showed the character Maude opting to get an abortion. The storyline was aired a year before the U.S. Supreme Court made Roe vs. Wade the law of the land. Multiple affiliates refused to air reruns of the episode.
In the early 1990s, the sitcom “Murphy Brown” found itself in a high-profile tiff during the 1992 presidential campaign when Dan Quayle, vice president to George H.W. Bush, lambasted the unmarried Murphy’s pregnancy as a mockery of fatherhood and American morality.
In “The Puppy Episode” of “Ellen” that aired in 1997, Ellen DeGeneres made history as the first prime-time lead on network TV to come out as gay. It was a huge cultural moment, but it also sparked attacks from religious groups. ABC later placed a warning about “adult content” when DeGeneres’ character kissed another woman in a separate episode.
Nearly 15 years ago, PBS was denounced by the nation’s education secretary after it spent money on a cartoon with lesbian characters. The episode of “Postcards From Buster” featured two lesbian couples while the title character, an animated bunny, was on a trip to Vermont — a state at the time that was known for recognizing same-sex civil unions when many others did not. PBS later decided not to distribute the episode to its stations.
