Sesame Street and Orange Is the New Black are two show titles you probably never expected to hear in the same sentence. Yet they make a surprisingly entertaining combination.
Sesame Street's Orange Is the New Black parody presents adult humor in a child-friendly form for something the whole family really can enjoy. It first appeared on HBO in January 2016, Food and Wine reports, but Sesame Street put it up on its YouTube channel on Monday, June 5, four days before the OITNB season 5 premiere.
Piper, a puppet with the same hairstyle Taylor Schilling sports on OITNB, starts her first day at Litchfield Academy (a play on the name of the prison Litchfield Penitentiary) and introduces her classmates to oranges — "the new snack." First, they're angry that she's passing up the cookies. Then, they're confused and think it's a ball — except one of them, clearly based on Morello, who thinks it's her boyfriend Christopher. Finally, they come around and take a liking to oranges.
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The parallels go on. The snack monitor's name is Red, like the inmate in charge of the cafeteria in OITNB. Piper has a classmate named Googly Eyes, likely inspired by Crazy Eyes. And the theme song also contains the lyrics "you've got time," though there's a "for snacks" tacked on at the end, and the rest of the lyrics are about cookies.
If you appreciate this form of humor, there's actually a lot more where that came from. Sesame Street has also produced a House of Cards parody based on Three Little Pigs and a Les Mis parody about a character named Jean Bon Bon who won't share cookies. And while it wasn't created by Sesame Street, there's also this video in which Trump's budget cuts cause Elmo to get laid off.
Anyone who thinks Sesame Street is just for kids has obviously not been paying attention.