Well, Katy Perry fans, you will not be seeing her duet with Elmo on Sesame Street.
Perry recorded a parody version of her song “Hot N Cold” and made a video with Elmo, but Sesame Workshop decided not to air the video on the show after its presence on YouTube sparked complaints from commenters who thought it was too risque — apparently, based on the visible YouTube comments, because it contains too much cleavage…
I made such a remark (something more insightful than “lol bewbs”, thank you very much) on the YouTube video myself, and initially it was clear the majority of us were joking… no doubt some were serious, but this might be a case of a perceived “moral panic” when there really is none.
And the truth is, there’s no grounds for talk of supposed “immorality”, either. There’s simply no way kids would perceive any sexual themes in such a costume (which really DOES resemble how an 8-year-old would play dress-up, after all), in the same way that they’d make nothing of the song’s original lyric “you PMS like a b****”. But they changed that, and I guess it’s just an extension of playing it safe that they’re changing the video too.
SUPER IRONY - my comment on the NPR website was originally rejected because I directly quoted a song with swearing! How offensive!!!!
