One! One new YouTube channel. Bwahahahahaha.

On Friday, Sesame Street welcomed a new resident to its online neighborhood: Sesame Studios. The YouTube channel is a hip addition to the block, taking classic elements from Sesame Street’s 46-year history and modernizing them with an Internet slant.

The most striking difference to the look of Sesame Studios is the absence of the Muppets characters. (Although, somewhere in a metal trashcan, Oscar the Grouch is probably relieved for peace, quiet and no YouTube commenters.)

Instead of the familiar fuzzy faces of Sesame Street, viewers can expect a new gang of characters, including the channel’s host, Marvie, a gumdrop-shaped, fuchsia-haired digital puppet with a fondness for dancing and a bedroom that doubles as a discotheque. Her creators crafted her not with needles, thread and felt, but with a bit of computer programming and a PlayStation controller.

Sesame Workshop began development for the Studios project in May 2015 as part of Sesame Street’s ongoing efforts to deliver content to kids where they live. And in 2016, kids live on mobile devices connected to the Internet.

Sesame Street’s main YouTube channel currently boasts 2 million subscribers and 2.7 billion views, and a full one-third of its total views came just in 2015.

“One of the things that led us to the creation of [Sesame Studios] was that YouTube has had a huge growth in content being consumed by preschoolers,” Jenny Gioia, Vice President of Programming at Sesame Workshop, says in an interview with Mashable. “We had this hugely successful year with our Sesame Street YouTube channel and we started thinking about using the YouTube platform to expand our offerings and go beyond the Sesame Street characters and start thinking about new characters and new stories.”

Adults who grew up butts-glued-to-carpet in front of boxy tube televisions watching Sesame Street in the 1970s and ‘80s will recognize the aesthetic and educational themes in Sesame Studios’ videos. The videos produced for the channel’s animated milestone series evoke the psychedelic educational lessons of Sesame classics like “The Pinball Song” or “Circles.”

Image: Denver Post via Getty Images Image: ASSOCIATED PRESS

“When we started thinking about Sesame Studios, we did a lot of thinking about when Joan Ganz Cooney started Sesame Street,” Kay Wilson-Stallings, SVP of Creative Development at Sesame Workshop, explains. “We were really inspired by the experimental nature and it felt like there was such a parallel between 1969 TV show and what we want to do with Sesame Studios."

One of Sesame Studios’ most standout videos is “Party Mouth,” a delightfully surreal toothbrushing tutorial that moves to a beat best described as Skrillex as a kindergarten teacher. Oh, and the visuals include a booty-bumping tube of toothpaste and an arms-flailing toothbrush.

“[The creators of ‘Party Mouth’] watched Sesame Street as kids and were inspired by the shorts of the ‘60s and ‘70s that were cutting edge in their look and feel,” Gioia says.

“Party Mouth” is just one fabric in Sesame Studios’ highly textured lineup of videos. The channel also features live-action nursery rhymes, playful word lessons with googly eyed puffballs and a zoo’s worth of wild animals.

The YouTube platform and a refocus on creating Internet-friendly programming pushed Sesame Studios towards collaborations, including working with YouTube star Todrick Hall for the channel’s launch video.

Sesame Studios trusted Hall with crafting a music video to set the tone for the channel. The high-energy song maintains the anthemic catchiness of traditional kids’ songs with a rap verse and choreographed dance moves added for a modern feel.

The collaboration with Hall is just one of many Sesame Studios hopes to cultivate in the coming year as it tests new forms of digital storytelling crafted specifically for, and inspired by, a YouTube audience. Familiar formats like cute animal videos and tutorials will be Sesame’d for a preschool audience with educational lessons.

Studios is even grabbing its own whiteboard and erasable marker for a dive into the popular Draw My Life-style video, but with a few tweaks.

“It’s called ‘Scribble Tales’ and we’re doing popular nursery rhymes,” Gioia says. “So for example, we’re doing the Scribble Tales version a la Draw My Life of Cinderella, but from her perspective and also the prince’s perspective and then we’re twisting the stories up. In our version, Cinderella and the prince don’t get married because they want to finish school first. And they both have a love of riding horses and nachos, so they’re eating nachos as they ride horses into the sunset.”

In short: no Elmo, but a career-minded princess with a soft spot for melted cheese.

The short production time and immediate feedback of Internet content gives Sesame Studios a flexibility not possessed before. The Todrick Hall video, for example, underwent final script approval on a Friday and was shot in two hours the next Tuesday, a turnaround time unimaginable for Sesame Street’s television productions.

“There’s much more of a freedom [to YouTube]. I think definitely the difference between the show and YouTube is the freedom to explore and experiment and then to quickly change,” Wilson-Stallings says.

For Sesame Studios, C is not only for change, but for community and rolling out original stories molded with the Internet in mind.

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