Ernie and the Pumpkin Seed Candy Salesman (found "Sesame Street" sketch; 1971)

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Ernie&Salesman.jpg

Screenshot from Sesamstraße

Status: Lost


"Ernie and the Pumpkin Seed Candy Salesman" (usually shortened to "Ernie and the Candy Salesman") is a sketch that originally aired during Sesame Street episode 0264 (during Season 2) on May 13, 1971 (exactly a day after the Tales from Muppetland special "The Frog Prince" premiered).[1]

In this sketch, a candy salesman comes up to Ernie and sells him some pumpkin seed candy. Ernie tells the salesman that he doesn't really like pumpkin seed candy, perhaps because it is icky. He keeps selling him the sizes of pumpkin seed candy until he sells him the tiniest piece of pumpkin seed candy that he even can't see it as if it was invisible. It almost looks like Ernie is looking at the camera in a closeup shot of the tiniest piece of pumpkin seed candy.

There are no video copies of this sketch available online, but the German-dubbed version from a Sesamstraße episode that used to be uploaded to YouTube several years ago had been deleted in 2014. As a result, mostly no one has the German-dubbed clip saved to their hard drives, and it has sadly not resurfaced since. As the clip is believed to be lost from Sesame Workshop's vault, only two poor-quality stills of this segment have survived and are provided below. A MuppetCentral forum user, SesameMike, has listed the segment as one of the rare/lost Ernie and Bert sketches.[2] The only two known episodes to have this clip were Episodes 264 and 301. In foreign co-productions, Folge 2033[3] of the German co-production Sesamstraße was the only known international episode to have the sketch. The sketch was also claimed to have aired in the (lost) Italian co-production Sesamo Apriti.

As of May 16, 2017, a Lost Media Archive user by the name "Stingy aka Lostmedia1998" claimed to have had the German dub of this segment on a VHS tape but unbelievably trashed it. As of June 2017, no person on the internet appears to have the German dub of this clip backed up on their computer before it was deleted from YouTube in 2014, and it is still completely unknown if any upcoming YouTube uploads of full episodes for foreign co-productions (i.e. Barrio Sésamo, Rechov Sumsum, etc.), besides Sesamstraße, will ever have this extremely-scarce clip included by surprise. For a time, it was rumored that Sesame Workshop held a copy, but this is simply false; a user has emailed Sesame Workshop, and they said that the clips he requested (one of them being this scarce Ernie sketch he sought) were not available. Judging by this, the user has confirmed that the video footage of the skit is not known to still exist and also can't be accessed on the official Sesame Street website[4] -- not even as a Throwback Thursday classic clip on Sesame Street's official YouTube channel[5].

There's a very small chance anyone will ever get to see this clip especially since the only copy of it in German is now removed off of the Internet, many fans have trashed their VHS recordings of the clip, and Sesame Workshop has no intention of releasing this segment (along with other rare, long-unseen segments) at all, perhaps due to the following reasons: either these segments are believed (by fans) to be lost from Sesame Workshop's archive for making room for more newly-produced episodes during 1974-1975, or there are certain legal issues keeping the majority of classic segments privately stored away.

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