Six years later, after many stops and starts and intervening books and other projects, the original “labor of love” is complete. Ultimately the task included steep learning curves in many aspects of digital modeling (including diving into the deep waters of “nCloth,” Maya’s system for controlling dynamics that allows the canvas awnings to droop and wrinkle properly). Looking at renders of the completed model, I’m transported back to that day in the early ‘seventies when I was just another child walking across that painted sidewalk under the bright stage lights, gazing up at the false-front buildings and at the bright canary feathers on Big Bird, eyes wide open. In retrospect (and my father has always asserted this) the Harlem “inner-city” locale — with stealth-educational “graffiti” that showed letters and numbers — was a 1970s-utopian cultural conceit (since most viewers of the show were actually well-to-do white kids), and, over time, the street’s grime and disrepair have been downplayed, so that the current version is vastly cleaner and nicer…but, for me, the original, dirty version is the “real” Sesame Street. My father has long since moved on to other things, and Sesame Street has become a worldwide cultural icon (and the precise geographical spot where “Hooper’s Store” stood is now behind the barista counter at a Starbucks), but, at that time, it was just an afternoon’s Upper West Side destination on a little kid’s rainy afternoon, and I’ll never forget that.

via 1970 Sesame Street: My Digital Re-creation | Jordan Orlando.