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Sesame Street Meet The Sad Lonely Ghost Of A Murdered Boy
Don’t Eat The Pictures is a 1983 PBS special that involved the Sesame Street cast spending the night in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They find themselves locked in for the night because they were searching for Big Bird, who was in turn searching for his friend Snuffalupagus. This premise gives the gang excuse to split up and engage more directly and personally with the museum displays.
This sort of engagement is mostly filled out through musical numbers. The film itself is named for a song in which Cookie Monster has to remind himself that paintings aren’t real and you can’t eat them, so they weren’t exactly going for Encyclopedia Britannica level education. In one segment, Grover finds an empty suit of Maxmillion armor and tries to befriend it, believing it’s name is Max. In another, Oscar The Grouch sings a poignant song about being desired after rejection that would be a bit more touching if it didn’t look so much like Oscar was just leering at Classical Statue titty the whole time.
As the rest of a gang try to make the most of their experience by commenting on the museum displays, Big Bird eventually reunites with his imaginary furry elephant friend and the desperately lonely ghost of an Egyptian child king.
While it’s not explicitly stated, the fictional Egyptian Prince Sahu is modeled closely after Tutankhamen, whose tomb relics had been on display at the same museum in the late 1970s. While Tut is most folks go-to reference for Egyptian culture, he’s also know for nearly a century of urban legends about curses involving the excavation of his tomb. In an eerie twist of fate, the actor that played Sahu tragically died shortly after the age of 18 himself, not unlike Tutankhamen.
It should go without saying that ancient “child kings” always lived tumultuous lives; the fact a departing monarch didn’t live long enough to have an adult heir can attest to that. Tutankhamen was the son of Akhenaten, whose reign was…
