The Grand Finale! Oscar’s Can Area. I’m not sure of that’s the official name of that section of the street but it will have to do. Palisades wasn’t happy with the overly colourful version of the early prototype seen at Toyfair so they got Eddie Wires to paint it up a little more realistically. It’s amazing what a new coat of paint can do.

So that is all for my sob story of lost potential. Hopefully one day I’ll get over it, but for now I’ll just try and look to the future. It is Toy Fair from February 12th - 15th after all! My prediction is that I’ll be posting a lot about G.I. Joe and Masters of the Universe Classics in the next couple weeks.

Some Miscellaneous Sesame Street prototypes. I know I’ve shown Ernie and Oscar before, but these shots show off the detail beautifully, especially Ernie’s knit sweater. The fur texture on Elmo and Cookie Monster are also exceptional. 

Big Bird! Unproduced Palisades Toys Sesame Street sculpt.

This was another sign the line was hitting problems before it even stared. Due to his size Big Bird was bound to be expensive. To reduce the price point and make him more desirable for retailers to carry the chose not to include arm articulation. They may have been planning it at some point right arm, but the left was going to remain static. While somewhat disappointing, the insanely beautiful sculpt kind of made up for it my eyes. He would have also come with Little Bird!

Count Von Count! Palisades Toys unreleased figure sculpt. I believe most of these were sculpted by Bill Mancuso. 

Bert! Unreleased Sesame Street figure sculpt by Palisades Toys.

Loose and packaged shots of the Sesame Street prototypes by Palisades. This is as far as Series 1 got. There are a few of these samples floating around in peoples collections, but that’s it. When they went up on ebay 6 years ago the price was a bit too much for me. If they went up again I’d probably consider it.

As you can see by this point they abandoned the idea of including street pieces and went with more accessories, a letter (which would eventually complete the alphabet) and small diorama pieces. While I desperately wanted the street, this was a great compromise.

The last picture is of Super Grover who did make it out as a Comic Con exclusive! The cover art is by Alex Ross of Kingdom Come fame. 

These are Sesame Street protos from Toy Fair 2004 or 2005. They show Series 1 in it’s entirety without accessories. The original plan was to have each figure come with a piece of Sesame Street until the whole neighborhood was built. The idea was scrapped before they (almost) went into production. It was said the playset pieces were going to be distributed through mail order or other means. Arghhhh! *tear*

Unmade Sesame

One of my favorite toy lines of all time is The Muppets by the late great Palisades Toys. When that line was cancelled due to lack of retailer support they tried their damdest to start a Sesame Street line to compliment it. Well, it didn’t happen and that stands as the most disappointing moment in all my years of toy collecting. That was back in 2005-2006 and I still haven’t let it go. There was so much potential for awesome and the prototypes looked so good, that I still have a bit of hope in the back of head that one day a brave company will find the protoypes and continue the line. A handful of Series 1 package samples are out there somewhere (Ken Lilly sold them through ebay). They are my holy grail.

      

Ken Lilly, the product manager for Palisades released a lot of pictures of the work in progress on the line. Over the next week I’ll be posting what I managed to save. I know it’s not good to focus on the past and what could have been, but with this I just can’t help it. I hope one day I hope I’m a good enough sculptor to make them myself.

The planned line up was as follows:

Series 1

Ernie with Rubber Duckie

Oscar the Grouch with Slimey

Guy Smiley

Two-Headed Monster

Series 2

Elmo

Grover

Bert

Count von Count

Big Bird with Little Bird

123 Sesame Street playset

Unknown Dates

Cookie Monster

Roosevelt Franklin

Yip-Yip Martians