Surprise! (found "Sesame Street" segment; 1970)

Screenshot from Sesamstraße.

Status: Found

Date found: 22 June 2022

Found by: PoopToobYou

"Surprise!" was a Sesame Street song, written by Jeffrey Moss, that originally aired in episode 0173 of Sesame Street (during the second season), on January 6th, 1971. It was originally sung by a band of Anything Muppet hippies that would evolve into Little Jerry and the Monotones. It talks about the good and bad parts of surprises and how people respond to them. The song appeared as late as Season 8 (1976), but so far, no one has come forward with a VHS recording of the clip, since VHS tapes were not for home use at the time and VHS recording devices were very expensive.

Song

Throughout the song, various characters appear during the sketch in cutaways demonstrating surprises, including Oscar surprising Susan with a snake in a can; Herbert Birdsfoot in a room surprised by Roosevelt Franklin, Roosevelt Franklin's Mother, Herry, Cookie Monster, Prairie Dawn, and Grover; and Herry sneaking up on Bert. After the many clips of various surprises, the backup singers eventually give the lead singer their own surprise for him at the end of the song.

History

Back in 2006, the German dub of the full song, uncut, was uploaded, along with many other German-dubbed clips of the 1969-1971 seasons of Sesame Street taken from Sesamstraße (the German co-production of Sesame Street) that have once been posted on YouTube by a German user. But the user had been a victim of the February 2007 Viacom incident, which targeted and took down more than 400,000 YouTubers. The full-length German dub was later re-uploaded to YouTube by Bim Bam on September 5th, 2021, which was later taken down in November 2021. Fortunately, Star Dragon Dust re-uploaded the German video on September 7th, 2021.

A YouTuber named Clausule uploaded the Dutch dub (which lacked Susan and Oscar's cutaway) in 2007, but his account was suspended in 2009. Clausule returned as user MNAvdb and reuploaded some Sesame Street clips, but for some reason, he did not re-upload the "Surprise!" song in Dutch. The song then resurfaced in Hebrew in a Rechov Sumsum episode the same year in 2009, but that video got taken down in 2011. YouTuber Bahgwan uploaded the song with the source deriving from the Hebrew dub but edited with audio taken from the Sesame Street "Surprise!" album and was not full, but that video got taken down in 2014.

YouTube user BOFI78 used video sources from Bahgwan's edit of the song to dub with incomplete low-quality audio in Mexican-Spanish from Plaza Sésamo, but the video and audio were not matched right, plus the video had a BOFI78-labeled watermark slapped onto the screen that persists through the whole video. The Plaza Sésamo dub, uploaded by BOFI78, was the only video of the song to have still lasted on YouTube today, as all the other uploads of the song were deleted from YouTube.

A 2-hour video "lange sesamstraße nacht" was uploaded to YouTube around February 2017, and another YouTuber named PumpkinJFriend ripped a clip of Surprise (w/bits of Susan and Oscar's cutaway and Herry and Bert's cutaway)] that was on the video and spliced it into the middle of BOFI78's video (dubbed with the audio from the Surprise! album) to make a longer version of the video.

According to a user on the MuppetCentral forums,^[1] The cut-up Hebrew dub of the clip that featured Herry Monster and Bert's cutaway is "long gone" from YouTube, and the only version that still stays up is the fan cut that tried to sync the album version to that footage. The Hebrew-dubbed clip remained lost until YouTube user Rohail Hashmi has re-uploaded a copy of the extended version in Hebrew (despite it having been downloaded in awful quality). It does not include Susan and Oscar's cutaway.

On December 25th, 2017, YouTuber Star Dragon Dust updated his recreation of the song, this time as an almost-complete clip, with a few English audio pieces taken from the album version and video sources taken from the Hebrew dub as well as the German clips.

On February 8th, 2018, YouTube user JFriendsFan96 uploaded another more complete recreation of the song. It combines English audio from the album release, with the splicing of the German and Hebrew dubbed clips and some pieces of Bahgwan's video.

In February 2019, it was announced that over 4,500 episodes of Sesame Street over its 49 seasons would be archived in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. It's likely that the full version of "Surprise!" will be included among the episodes being archived, but this has not been confirmed directly.^[2]

On February 11th, 2022, the Muppet Wiki Twitter account uploaded the full clip of Susan and Oscar's cutaway gag in English.^[3]

On June 20th, 2022, YouTuber PoopToobYou uploaded the full English dub of the segment on his channel. The upload was missing the first verse and Oscar and Susan's cutaway but on June 22nd, 2022 PoopToobYou reuploaded it in full.

Gallery

Videos

The German dub.

The Hebrew dub (sourced from a DVD release of the dubbed show).

Images

Oscar surprises Susan with a snake in a can.
Empty living room.
Now Herbert gets surprised by other Muppets in the living room.
Fat Blue Hippie's speech on surprises.
Herry about to jump up behind Bert.
Herry surprises Bert.
Close-up to Herry Monster, after Bert leaves the room and says, "Don't creep up on me like that, I hate surprises."
Hippies jump up and scream out "SURPRISE!".