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.

A user has listed the segment as one of the rare/lost Ernie and Bert sketches on a Muppet Central forum thread.[2] Another user has emailed Sesame Workshop requesting a copy of this segment, and unfortunately they didn't want this segment in the public. This is, more than likely, because they have a policy to not send out tapes.

Thanks to documents found at the CTW (Children's Television Workshop) Archives, the clip was known to have aired in two episodes on Sesame Street (#264 and #301) during 1971. Other airings of the segment, especially in foreign co-productions, remain unidentified, but the only known international episode to feature the segment in its foreign dub was Folge 2033 of Sesamstraße.[3] It is also rumored that there were other foreign airings of the clip which also had an alternate ending where the candy salesman facepalms and sighs, but so far, no physical evidence of this has been put forward.

Despite most Sesame Street classic footage and episodes being converted to digital format, it is a theory that, other than the 847th episode with the Wicked Witch, this could be another one of the long-unseen footage being kept stored away and never converted to digital format with all the other old shows. For an unknown reason, Sesame Workshop has intended to not release or re-broadcast every classic insert or episode of the show in the public, because these inserts and episodes either lacked an educational concept on the show, are not available at this time in favor of a smaller, more licensee-friendly package, or are being privately kept hidden in storage due to legal issues (especially involving song covers or existing children's books, which got edited out of many home media releases).

There have been multiple search effort issues with this clip. The clip was once posted in German around 2008, but nobody knew the clip was rare and never saved the video, as the video title was in German and would've been hard to find since it was before mostly anyone used Google Translate; The German video lasted on YouTube up until mid-2014, and it was also found in a Sesame Street compilation from 2015-late 2017, but both video links were hard to search for and now got deleted off of YouTube, and the clip itself has not resurfaced since. Rohail Hashmi, who uploaded many Sesame Street full episodes and inserts on YouTube (and sometimes reposted other users' videos), claimed to have saved the deleted German dub of the clip on a harddrive and promised to re-upload it sometime in mid-2017, but some users were unable to approve this because the clip has NEVER turned back up online after it was deleted since nobody knew/heard about this skit ever since. Other fans and/or collectors have messaged multiple online users of whom may have copies of any long-unseen clips (including this). However, it is more than likely that this segment is now forever unwatchable due to people who claimed to have the clip trashing their old videotapes that had it on there.

As of August 2017, no one has come forward with any backups of the clip, not especially from that now deleted Sesame Street compilation, and it is unknown if anyone will ever come forward with a bootleg master tape of the clip from Sesame Workshop's storage.

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