Bring back Sam the Robot!

Sam the Robot is a character who appeared on Sesame Street during the '70s. He hasn't been on the show in more than 30 years, but I think Sam (a.k.a. "Super Automated Machine") should be put back on as a recurring character, or at least given a cameo appearance.

This clip is from the Season 4 premiere, Episode 0406, Scene 8, which originally aired on November 27, 1972. Sam meets Gordon (then played by Hal Miller, who was also debuting in the role) and Susan (Loretta Long). Gordon asks Sam what he's doing on Sesame Street, but Sam gets all annoyingly authoritative and insists that he's on Mulberry Street because his programming told him to go there.

Now, for those of you who don't know, Mulberry Street is the hood. It's the ghetto. You hardly ever hear about it because it's so abysmally bad. Think hookers stepping over crack vials. So the very idea that Sam thinks they're all on Mulberry Street really irks Susan and Gordon, a happily married, middle class, African-American couple who work hard and don't appreciate being associated with the wrong side of town. (Is Sam a frickin' racist?) They try to point this out to Sam, who agrees to run his program again just to double-check. But the program (presumably written by Microsoft) comes back with the incorrect answer again that Sam is on Mulberry Street. Susan and Gordon are livid with rage, but they let Sam off with a warning and just smack him around a little bit. They secretly promise, however, to "bust him up royally" if he ever returns to Sesame Street.

This is probably the first time on television (well, on Sesame Street anyway) that the concept of a GPS device could be created and sold to the public. Surely the Garmin owes its very existence to Sam the Robot, defunct Sesame Street character.

Also during this scene, Sam spouts off these gems: "machines are better than people," "machines can do anything," and "machines are perfect," the latter of which throws him into an infinite loop that apparently can only be remedied with a punch in the face. We've always suspected that machines think we are stupid and inferior - at least Sam had the stones to come right out and say so. And remember this was a full 12 years before "The Terminator" came out, when the machines decided to do something about those inferior human beings once and for all. Sam was truly ahead of his time.

So this begs the question: Had Sam not been pulled from Sesame Street back in the mid-'70s, would his celebrity have spawned an entire generation of robot enthusiasts who would grow up to become the scientists that would have put a robot in every home in America by now? Surely the good folks at the Childrens Television Workshop (which ran Sesame Street back then) made a mistake when they pulled the plug on Sam. What did we get in his place? Elmo. You know, the annoying red one who only speaks in the third person.

If you're interested, and I'd be scared if you were, Sam appeared on Sesame Street from Season 4 through Season 7. He's in four books: "The Sesame Street 1, 2, 3 Storybook" (1973), "Oscar-the-Grouch's Alphabet of Trash" (1977), "Big Bird's Busy Book" (1975), and "The Sesame Street Dictionary" (1980 edition). And Sam also appeared in Marvel Comics' Spidey Super Stories #31, a Star Wars parody in which he assumed the role of R2-D2 and met Spider-Man.

And FYI, the Count also made his first appearance on Sesame Street in Episode 0406. Want to see the entire episode on DVD? You can, if you purchase "Sesame Street: Old School, Volume 1," a three-disc set which came out in 2006.

Bring back Sam!

Note: All information courtesy of Muppet Wiki.