Windy (found "Sesame Street" segment; 1970)

A screenshot from the video from Sesamstraße.

Status: Found

Date found: 27 May 2020

Found by: HBO Max

Windy is a Sesame Street song that first aired during Sesame Street episode 0074 (during the first season), on February 19th, 1970. It was originally a #1 hit for the Association in 1967, so it is one of the song covers performed during the first season of Sesame Street in 1969. This sketch is also known for being longtime sound engineer Dick Maitland's first sketch on Sesame Street that he worked on.^[1]

Plot

Tony sings about his girlfriend, Windy (played by the Beautiful Day Monster puppet), who can fly across the sky. After Tony's first singing line, Windy sprouts huge black bat wings and then tells Tony that she is about to fly all across the city (hence her legs are unusually seen during the song), and Tony looks in awe as he sees the monster flying. At the end of the song, Windy falls down to the ground with a huge crash, gets cross-eyed and has a bandage on her chest.

Availability

"Windy", dubbed in German from Sesame Street's German co-production Sesamstraße, was once posted on YouTube by an unknown German user back in 2006 (during YouTube's early days),^[2] but the video got deleted as of February 2007, due to the German user who posted many other Classic Sesame Street clips taken from Sesamstraße being suspended from YouTube at the time, likely as a victim of the February 2007 Viacom takedown that pulled 400,000 users from YouTube.

One user LittleJerry92 stated from memory to have seen an alternate take of the song in said dub on YouTube that had a different ending (where Beautiful Day Monster fainted and knocked down the city set, revealing the generic white background), which was reportedly uploaded by the same user as well at the time, but so far, there is no physical evidence that this song had an alternate take.

After the German dub of the clip was pulled from YouTube at the time, the song remained elusive for a long while as this was before mostly anyone knew how to download YouTube videos. However, a Castilian Spanish dub of the sketch is featured in an episode that was included on a Castilian Spanish Barrio Sesamo "Espinete y Don Pimpon" 10-disc set that is only available in Spain. On June 22nd, 2017, YouTuber VINTAGE TV uploaded a Barrio Sésamo episode with the "Windy" song in it (dubbed in Castilian Spanish). YouTuber PumpkinJFriend uploaded a separate video of the short (Spanish dub) that same night, making this the first time "Windy" had resurfaced as a separate clip since the German dub was gone from YouTube a decade ago. As of August 1st, 2017, VINTAGE TV had gotten suspended from YouTube, and the Barrio Sesamo episode that had the clip was gone before being re-uploaded by YouTuber Ferdasyn 80. Luckily, the "Windy" clip itself in Spanish still remained online thanks to various users who had mirrored it on other sites.

On May 27th, 2020, the original English version of "Windy" was finally released, along with several other previously unreleased segments and episodes, with the arrival of the new HBO streaming service HBO Max. The clip is featured in episode 330 (listed as "Season 3 Episode 2: Fix-It Shop Opens") beginning at the 29:10 mark. On August 19, 2022, all episodes from before Season 39 were pulled from HBO Max (with the exceptions of seasons 1, 5, and 7), making episode 330 no longer watchable. However, the English clip of "Windy" and several other rare clips from those HBO Max releases thankfully have been saved by fans.

Also in May 2020, around the same time the English version resurfaced, the German dub also resurfaced from Sesamstrasse's official FaceBook account and has been mirrored onto YouTube by Max Goudiss.