Who better than a harmless, anthropomorphic shag rug like Cookie Monster to allay our suspicions? Cookie Monster’s cameos signal more than just the spooled inside jokes of tech culture. Since the 1960s, corporate marketers have persuaded the public to adopt new technology by softening the hard-edge treachery that clings to our perceptions of machinery, from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times to the umpteenth iteration of Terminator. Cookie Monster helps us account for how gadgets like laptops and cell phones have wheedled their way into our lives-and why we accept the known coercions of Big Tech in exchange for the latest appendage.

Lined up in a row, however, they begin to tell a bigger story about the history of consumer technology. These appearances straddle product endorsements and tech-geek lore and have no single author or defining logic. Like a felted Forrest Gump, Cookie Monster has a knack for popping up at the scene of new technology. The IBM film marks Cookie Monster’s first engagement with computers, but certainly not his last. Cookie Monster originated in this marketing context, channelling an unleashed id for the technologically perplexed. IBM established an internal ad division to help mediate between their abstruse technology and the uninitiated masses, including members of their own staff. Screened during breaks at long meetings and training sessions, the film delivered precious minutes of Hensonian levity before the next battery of tutorials on the Selectric typewriter or some other newfangled product.

Coffee Break Machine would have landed especially well with its audience of IBM sales teams and other non-technical corporate departments. The monster ’s gleeful misappropriation of this cutting-edge technology reveals that the machine, not its googly-eyed predator, is silly and ineffectual. Intoning from inside a cavernous stomach, the swallowed-up machine announces it will self-destruct, and the scene reaches its finale in the tradition of so much cartoon slapstick, “KABOOM!”. The beverage dispenser blathers about each shiny feature -imagine if the fussiest Keurig could introduce itself -just as the monster shovels them down his fuzzy maw. Titled Coffee Break Machine, the 2.5-minute clip introduces a toothier beta version of Cookie Monster, who slavers at the gadgets on a computer-driven, talking coffeemaker voiced by a monotone Henson. In 1967, two years before Sesame Street hit the PBS airwaves, the woolly blue slouch debuted in a corporate film Jim Henson directed for IBM. Untitled Apple commercial for television (2016)īefore he trained his appetite to edible fare, Cookie Monster devoured computers.

Cookie monster's kitchen game start