Category: Blog Posts

In part one of this series, we discuss the creation of one of Thinkwell’s very first projects, Sesame Street Presents: The Body. Now, we’re exploring what it took to take the street on the road and the successes and challenges that came along the way as it toured the nation for a decade. Created in partnership with the Sesame Workshop, The Body was a touring exhibit for science museums that delivered a playful, learning experience for a young audience of emerging readers.

Sesame Street Presents: The Body went from concept to creation in just nine months, with every element designed as separate modules that could ship easily and fit into a variety of spaces at the various museums it would tour. Each of the exhibits had to be made durable enough to withstand the onslaught of the young target audience, of course, but the pieces were also built to maximize the efficiency of set up, strike, and transportation to the next venue. 

In spite of the careful planning, testing, and adjusting, life on tour was always full of unexpected surprises, but the nimble road team of Thinkwellians Jen Miller, Courtney Kleinman, Gene Rogers, and Amy Raymond (among others) were up to the task, facing each new challenge with ingenuity and humor, and making sure Sesame Street Presents: The Body would arrive safely at its next destination. 

Each venue on the tour had its own unique quirks, and loading in and out of each often posed a new challenge. In many cases, the team’s quick thinking resulted in simple modifications and workarounds that made the subsequent moves more efficient. Amy Raymond joined the road team early in the run, replacing the original Technical Director Gene Rogers. During Amy’s initial training, Gene pointed to a tiny hatch on one kiosk. “One of us has to climb in there to plug in the lighting, way back there…” Rogers said to Amy. “Have fun!” After a few minutes squeezed inside the kiosk, Amy got the lights working. Once she managed to back her way out of the box, she devised a more practical way to make the connection… from the outside, a solution she put into action at the very next stop.  

All of the museums the exhibition toured provided some support staff during load-in, but their skill set wasn’t always predictable. At some venues the crew was part of the museum staff, at others they were local high school students volunteering for service credits, and in still others, they were parolees on work release programs. 

In Seattle, Amy heard the overeager crew counting down to three and turned just in time to see them all shove the comparatively tall “Your Legs and Feet” unit through a set of double doors… and right through the gallery’s drop ceiling.  “In hindsight, not a great way to go,” the crew lead told her.  Still, after that incident, Amy modified the kiosk so that it could break down into two parts, making it far easier to move, thus preventing any similar occurrences in the future. Thankfully, the Museum Director was enormously understanding of the gouge in the ceiling. “It’s not world peace,” she said to Raymond, a phrase she has since adopted as her own.  

At the Museum of Science in Buffalo, New York, the old freight elevator was slightly too small to accommodate the signature Sesame Street “123” building facade.  The on-site Technical Director, Tom Fortado (who was also a skilled finish carpenter,) insisted that he could disassemble the facade and then rebuild it in the final location with no lingering damage. This iconic element functioned as the main entrance to the exhibit and Amy and Project Manager Jen Miller knew that leaving it on the truck was not an option, so they reluctantly agreed. The facade, with its heavy corbels and moulding, was also a particularly top-heavy and difficult piece to set up, but as Fortado reassembled the facade, he made those elements detachable by adding new hardware. Not only did it fit into the elevator and onto the show floor, it was also far easier to strike, move, and set up for the rest of the tour. 

Meanwhile, in Calgary, Amy received a call that young visitors had pried open the cases and made off with some of the props. The Hooper’s Store exhibit featured a display filled with realistic faux “sometimes” foods: pastries, cakes, cookies, and doughnuts.  “Canada consumes more doughnuts than any other country in the world,” Amy Raymond explained, and while the pastry pilfering occurred more than once during the tour, it was only the doughnuts that went missing, and only at stops in Canada. Whether they were consumed or simply kept as souvenirs still remains a mystery. 

Canada had another surprise for Amy as the tour was making its way back to the US for its next stop. She was awakened in the middle of the night by a call from a Homeland Security official at the border. “Can you explain to me what ‘The Brain’ is?” the officer asked. “It’s giving off a fairly high level of radioactivity.” The Brain exhibit had been created with midcentury surplus military and aerospace switches from a salvage yard in Los Angeles — switches that, unbeknownst to the design team at the time, contained traces of radioactive radium. Eventually, the TSA team wrapped the device in caution tape and allowed it across the border for its final stop on the tour before it was pulled from future shows. 

Over the years, the team braved rain and snow and dark of night, ever vigilant in their task of bringing Sesame Street to a new and eager audience. A snowfall in Buffalo was so severe that the high school student volunteers had to return home. In Omaha, tornadoes forced the team to shelter in place in the museum hall. In Columbus, Hurricane Ike shut the venue (and, in fact, the whole city) down for days. 

Still, nature cannot match the destructive force of a five-year-old child. The team witnessed one young guest methodically tipping the “Use Your Head” exhibit back and forth until it finally pulled free of its base. Another spun a military-grade, steel submarine valve wheel in Oscar’s Digestion exhibit so hard that it too broke free, while another lever snapped off so often that it was ultimately replaced with an industrial-grade button. At the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, the specially-invited preview audience numbered in the thousands, and the sight of the chaotic crowd of delighted learners converging on the exhibit drove Gene straight out of the venue. “They were having fun, I just couldn’t watch the destruction!” he said.

Not every unexpected surprise was unpleasant, however. It was assumed, for example,  that Hooper’s store and its color-coded produce section would require a lot of end-of-day clean-up, but more often than not, the young make-believe shopkeepers neatly sorted all of the fruits and vegetables as part of their pretend play. Nearby, Elmo’s World included cozy bean bag chairs where kids could rest and recharge, but they became popular spots for caregivers as well, who would often sit with their child, reading stories and relaxing together. Most delightful of all was that older siblings, who might have regarded Sesame Street as “too young” for them, explored the exhibits with the same joyful abandon as the younger target audience. 

The Clay Center’s Avampato Discovery Museum in Charleston, West Virginia, was a surprise all its own. “I have never seen a scrappier, more nimble institution,” Cynthia Sharpe said. “They went above and beyond to raise funds, working with Federal agencies, the local PBS station, and Sesame Workshop to bring the exhibit to their venue. Their sponsors were so numerous, their marketing materials looked like a Nascar team.” Their tenacity and creativity have remained a benchmark for how smaller market facilities can succeed. 

Ultimately, the five-year run continued for twice as long, and came to an end after ten years on the road, having reached over two million visitors. Amy Raymond was so intrigued by watching visitors learn through play, in fact, that she went on to earn her Masters in Arts and Education at Harvard. 

Sesame Street Presents: The Body gave emerging readers a chance to learn all about themselves, but it also provided an invaluable education to every member of Thinkwell’s project team.  The exhibit not only brought families together through playful collaboration, it also forged familial bonds between the project team, connected Thinkwell with the broader museum community, established new friendships, and initiated collaborative client relationships that continue to this day.  

Come and play! Everything’s a-okay!

In honor of Thinkwell’s 20th anniversary, we reflect on some of the milestone projects that we have developed over the years. One of the very first was Sesame Street Presents: The Body, a touring exhibit for science museums created in partnership with Sesame Workshop that delivered a playful, science-based learning experience for a young audience of emerging readers. More than that, Sesame Street Presents: The Body also proved to be a formative educational experience for everyone who was involved with its creation and operation, providing lessons that we still bring to our projects and our lives, to this day. 

Thinkwell’s CEO Joe Zenas first met Sesame Workshop’s Vice President of Themed Entertainment Peter Van Roden while he was producing a parade for Universal Studios Japan that featured a significant Sesame Street component. Peter, who had just recently joined Sesame Workshop, provided oversight and final approvals for the Universal project.  Once the parade in Japan was on its feet, the two met again back in the United States.  “Joe came into my office, sat down on the sofa, and said, ‘We just started a new company called Thinkwell. What have you got for us?’” Van Roden said.  

At the time, Sesame Workshop was in the midst of addressing a national child obesity crisis and was launching a new initiative called “Healthy Habits for Life,” encouraging young people to stay healthy and active, eat right, and learn about how their bodies work. Sesame Workshop had an idea of creating a touring exhibit in support of this new program, and Peter agreed to give Thinkwell the opportunity of bringing it to life. 

Sesame Street Presents: The Body was a science fair of sorts, created by the Muppets themselves and staged in and around the iconic neighborhood from the TV show.  The collection of hands-on, science-based activities were arranged into subcategories: Your Insides, “Your Outsides, Staying Healthy, and How You Work. Guests entered the exhibit through the familiar facades of Sesame Street, which were festooned with colorful banners and posters. The excited voices of the main characters could be heard coming from the windows, apartment intercoms, oversized birds nests, and of course, inside a familiar banged up, metal garbage can.

Thinkwell worked closely with the Sesame Workshop’s education team throughout the development of the exhibit, pushing the limits of how The Muppet characters might interact with visitors. Having The Muppets present the science-based content was a critical bridge to an audience of emerging readers, but how those Muppets might be depicted was often the subject of interesting debate. After all, do Muppets have insides like ours, or would an X-ray of Kermit, for example, simply reveal a human arm skeleton? During this discussion, one of the Sesame Workshop’s education team was adamant that Muppets would never be seen as x-rays as it would be too unsettling for a young audience. Ironically, Thinkwell’s education expert Cynthia Sharpe’s young son was at that moment watching the latest episode of Sesame Street. Right on cue, Cookie Monster appeared on screen and then stood behind an x-ray machine– excitedly revealing his insides, showing a simplified digestive system with cookies crumbled in his stomach.

The Muppets, it was decided, would be presenting their discoveries about the human body at a sort of Muppet science fair, with each character putting their own unique spin on how humans work. Ernie and Rubber Duckie would showcase keeping clean, of course, in the interactive Rub-a-Dub Tub game, Grover would put bodies to work exercising at a disco dance party and Super Grover’s Obstacle Course, The Count had a field day counting bones and organs, and Oscar would naturally focus on the disgusting, ooey-gooey stuff like mucus and digestion. All of the major characters were found here, including Prairie Dawn, Big Bird, and the wildly popular, fuzzy, red monster Elmo, among many others.

During the design phase, the team found solutions for making a giant nose sneeze on cue, for teaching kids how to wash their hands without needing any real water, and how to depict an apple as it is munched in a giant mouth, was broken down in a churning stomach, and finally exited the body as carefully art directed poo.

One of the most challenging aspects of the exhibit was The Brain, and the team debated how it might take form and how deep the content might go. Do kids need to know about the right and left hemispheres? About the primitive brain and the frontal lobes? About synapses and the electrical pipeline of the Corpus Callosum? Finally, Art Director Gwen Ballantyne asked Cynthia Sharpe for her advice. “What does this audience need to know about the brain?” Cynthia paused for a nanosecond, and then counted on her fingers, “You have a brain. It’s in your head. It controls everything you do.”  The final design included a dimensional brain outlined by a 2D human head, both of which were set above a multifaceted kiosk with controls linked to all of the other parts of the exhibit.

“The stuff Thinkwell was coming up with was so good that I just sort of trusted the process,” said Van Roden, “I was brand new at Sesame and still on my honeymoon, but Sesame Workshop was equally impressed by the quality and the attention to detail that the team brought to the design, so they sort of let me run with it.”  In fact, the exhibit enjoyed the unwavering support of the entire Sesame Workshop team, including the education and curriculum group, who helped shape the content, the marketing team, who provided style guides and final approvals, and even the Sesame Street Muppeteers who passionately lent their talents to custom-created media elements.

Led by Joey Mazzarino, the lead Muppeteer for the television series, the cast went above and beyond to make The Body a success. Jerry Nelson, the original voice of The Count, recorded musical ditties about the pancreas, the liver, the bladder and more for The Count’s Organ Organ. Eric Jacobson reprised his roles as Ernie and Grover and was particularly excited to help revive the career of America’s favorite game show host, Guy Smiley for an interactive quiz show titled Use Your Head. Joey and his team, meanwhile, shot all new footage of Grover, an elephant, and crowds of Anything Muppets for various elements throughout the tour.  Thinkwell co-owner and Chief Creative Officer Craig Hanna even had the privilege of directing Grover for a promotional video for the exhibit. “It was a surreal and hilarious experience,” Hanna noted. “One of the highlights of my career.”

Even Sesame Street’s founder Joan Gantz Cooney was delighted to make a rare public appearance at the grand opening at the Arizona Science Center in Phoenix, which terrified Peter Van Roden. “She rarely travelled and I was brand new. Not only that, she had brought along her teenage granddaughter and I was terrified that she would consider the whole exhibit too young for her and be bored to death.”  Happily, when Peter asked the granddaughter if she wanted to go explore, the young lady smiled, nodded vigorously, and ran off, much to the delight of her grandmother (and the relief of Van Roden). 

Just before the exhibit went on tour, the team, led by project manager Cynthia Blackstone, monitored play testing at a temporary site in Burbank.  The test audience included scout troops, local school kids, and many of the Thinkwell staff’s own children. The event provided an opportunity to test and adjust the exhibit to ensure that it was intuitive, scaled properly, and durable enough to withstand the oncoming audience, but the educational goals were also measured through pre and post visit questionnaires and the results were remarkable. After their visit, kids could correctly name more body parts and explain their function and give examples of healthy choices they could make regarding food, rest, and movement. 

More than that, on-going studies throughout the tour revealed lasting behavioral changes by the young audience weeks after visiting Sesame Street Presents: The Body. Longitudinal testing by the Morey Group revealed that kids were putting The Muppets’ message to work in their own lives by washing their hands and brushing their teeth more consistently, resting, recharging and engaging in physical activity with an understanding that it was good for their bodies, and choosing weather-appropriate clothing all on their own. Behavioral change in the home involves repetition over time to build healthy habits for life- and a trip to the Sesame Street Presents: The Body exhibit not only jump-started that process for kids, it also jump-started Thinkwell’s reputation as an exhibit designer for museums. 

At the time of the Burbank playtesting, our young ones were pre-schoolers and emerging readers in the sweet spot of the target demographic. Today, some of them are heading off to college, others are graduating, and still others have started families of their own. Ultimately, Sesame Street Presents: The Body would touch the hearts of over two million visitors, but none so profoundly as our own.