Sesame Street’s Asian Muppets

Google helped bring attention this week to Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary by publishing Google doodles with various characters from Sesame Street. For those of us in the U.S. we saw Cookie Monster, Big Bird and other familiar muppets integrated with the iconic Google logo. But in other international markets, Google came up with special doodles that featured local Sesame Street characters, like the one shown here for India featuring Boombah and Chamki – India’s stars on Gali Gali Sim Sim (India’s Sesame Street). Boombah is a vegetarian cat who loves to dance. Chamki is an wondering schoolgirl who loves to learn and knows karate.

It turns out there are local Muppet characters developed for almost every international location that Sesame Street has a broadcast. In addition to the Indian characters, there’s the ones for the Chinese market, Hu Hu Zhu and Xiao Mei Zi, the Bangladeshi market, Shiku and Tuktuki, the Filipino market, Kiko Matsing and Pong Pagong, the Japanese market, Meg, Teena and Mojabo, among others.

With my upcoming trip to Taiwan with my daughter, and this new found discovery of local Sesame Street productions, I’m going to keep an eye out for an airing of Sesame Street in Chinese, so she can watch and I can see her reaction, especially since Elmo has always been one of her favorite Sesame Street characters. Maybe she’ll find a local Asian one to adore as well.