Sesame Street's Special Lesson In Crowdsourcing

By Whitney Jefferson | November 11, 2011 | 4:10pm

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Instead of celebrating their anniversary when Sesame Street turned 42 years old yesterday, the show instead put a simple plea onto the web: Help us find Gordon. You see, in the years that have passed since the show filmed is original test pilot (seen above), the Sesame Workshop has lost track of who they cast in the show’s first iteration and have nowhere else to turn but the web. In a post on the show’s tumblr blog titled, “We lost Gordon. Can you help us find him? (Seriously.)” they write:

Sesame Street debuted 42 years ago today. But like most other TV shows, we had a test pilot. We created it in the summer of 1969, just a few months before the first episode aired. The actor who played Gordon on the show was replaced by an actor named Matt Robinson (who, by the way, is Holly Robinson Peete’s father).

Two years ago, we put together a huge anthology of our then-40 year history… and realized that we do not know who played Gordon in the test pilot. We’ve asked everyone we could think of – actors, actresses, and puppeteers who have been on the show since its inception; Sesame Workshop’s founder, Joan Ganz Cooney; and of course, dug through seemingly endless boxes of documents and photos.

Any clue would be great, even if it’s seemingly esoteric or mundane. You can email it to us at [email protected] with any clues.

Poor original Gordon! It must have been so hard to keep track of these things before IMDb existed. It seems almost impossible that literally no one at the Sesame Workshop has any recollection of who this man is, but at least they’re trying to set things right. Right?