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Comment by drblast | Hacker News Reader

I never realized the extent to which The Children's Television Workshop must have been fueled by psychedelics.

But now Big Bird is making a whole lot more sense.

I absolutely adored the psychedelic stylings of the pinball number count as a kid and still do. The kids tv stuff from that era even in conservative Ireland was well weird and funky. Check out the into to this mainstay of children’s tv I grew up with:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6hKsyebZUrA

Tell me they weren’t dropping acid when they came up with that!

This style reminds me of the opening animation of Soul Train https://youtu.be/y3FNXkeXhOc and a bit of the Beatles animated movie.

Does that style of animation have a name?

I believe this look traces back to the work of Push Pin Studios[1], an influential graphic design studio founded in the mid-sixties. It is hard to underestimate how much this style dominated the time; as a kid in the seventies these psychedelic stylized chrome reflections were everywhere.

I mostly think of it by association with artists who were well-known for it, such as the Pushpin guys, or Peter Max.

Worth looking at: the catalog from this exhibition of some of Push Pin's work. [2]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_Pin_Studios

2: https://posterhouse.org/exhibition/the-push-pin-legacy/ - hit the 'download' button on the right sidebar for a whole bunch of psychedelic imagery.

Maybe. I never got the impression Jim Henson needed psychedelics though. It was certainly in the zeitgeist of the time if you were counter culture which I think sesame street was certainly trying to be at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcZUPDMXzJ8 Dumbo's dream is from 1941, so it must have been ahead of its time!

And Big Bird's imaginary friend was always high a kite. "Heeeeyyyy Biiirrrrrrrd". At least they didn't make him a pink elephant.

All children’s programming from that era. HR Puffinstuff and New Zoo Revue come to mind.

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