Barrio Sésamo

Lore & Background

Barrio Sésamo began as a co-production between TVE and CTW in 1979, with the first season airing from 1979 to 1981. Each episode included 15 minutes of dubbed American footage and 15 minutes of original Spanish footage. The Spanish team created two original Muppets: Caponata, a 2-metre-tall hen voiced by Emma Cohen and operated by puppeteers such as Juanjo Pardo, and Perezgil, a large green snail voiced by Jesús Alcaide (who was the voice actor, not the puppeteer). Human characters included Nisi, Angela, Braulio, Manolo, Carmen, Cuqui, and José. The show had multiple periods: the original run (1979–1981), a revival (1983–1992), and a bilingual Catalan/Spanish version (1996–2000), with continued presence beyond 2000. Note: Duncan Kenworthy did not oversee the American segments; that credit is a misattribution, as Kenworthy was a British producer known for The Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock, not directly involved in Barrio Sésamo.

Reader's Guide

The first season was cancelled in 1981 after a dispute over character rights, but the show returned in 1983 with new Muppets Espinete (a pink hedgehog) and Don Pimpón (a brown monster), designed by CTW. The series ran until 1988, then returned from 1996 to 2000 in Catalan and Spanish. Later Spanish dubs of Sesame Street-related series include Juega conmigo, Sésamo (2006), Las grandes aventuras de Epi y Blas (2008), Monstruos Supersanos (2012), and El Hotel Furchester (2016). The American Sesame Street has aired dubbed on HBO in Spain since 2017.

Did You Know?

• The original Spanish Muppets Caponata and Perezgil were retired after the first season due to co-production changes and rights issues, not a formal ban.
• Espinete, a large pink hedgehog, became famous for sleeping in pajamas despite being 'naked' the rest of the day.
• The show was produced in both Catalan and Spanish from 1996 to 2000.
• Unlike many adaptations, several American characters kept their original names in the Spanish version, including Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and Cookie Monster.

From Dubbed Sketches to a True Co-Production

For four years starting in late 1974, Televisión Española simply licensed and dubbed segments of the American Sesame Street, airing them under the title Ábrete Sésamo within a larger children's program container called Un globo, dos globos, tres globos. This passive arrangement ended in 1978 when TVE and Children's Television Workshop struck a genuine co-production deal. The new format split each episode into two fifteen-minute blocks: one of dubbed American footage and one of freshly shot Spanish material. Duncan Kenworthy oversaw the CTW side, while TVE assigned Enrique Nicanor to direct the Spanish segments and design two entirely new Muppet characters. The title itself shifted from the literal 'calle' (street) to 'barrio' (neighborhood), a small linguistic choice that better captured the show's communal spirit for Spanish-speaking audiences.

A Cancellation Born of Rights Disputes

The first season of Barrio Sésamo met a sudden, bitter end in 1981. TVE pulled the plug after refusing to honor the Spanish designers' right to be credited as creators of their own Muppet characters. The original agreement had granted the station full commercial rights but explicitly preserved the designers' attribution credit and a veto over the use of their characters in advertising for carbonated drinks or other products deemed unhealthy for children—protections that mirrored the rights Jim Henson retained for his own creations. The station's response was to fire the creators and ban Caponata and Perezgil from any future season. For two years, the characters vanished from Spanish television. Yet the story took a dramatic turn in 1983, when a new government brought José María Calviño to the helm of RTVE. The new leadership dismissed those responsible for the cancellation, recalled the original creator, and installed him as head of the Children's Programmes Unit and later as Director of the TVE-2 channel.

The Muppets Who Defined a Neighborhood

The visual identity of Barrio Sésamo shifted dramatically across its runs. The original 1978 season featured two TVE-designed Muppets: Caponata, a red-orange-yellow hen with curly pink hair and the curious, naïve personality of a six-year-old girl, operated by Emma Cohen, and Perezgil, a large green snail with round spectacles who served as the neighborhood's poet, writer, and advice-giver, brought to life by Jesús Alcaide. After the 1981 cancellation, when the show returned in 1983, CTW replaced both with entirely new creations: Espinete, a towering pink hedgehog famous for sleeping in pajamas despite being otherwise 'naked,' voiced by Chelo Vivares, and Don Pimpón, a brown farmer of indeterminate species who had traveled the world, operated by Alfonso Vallejo. By the 1996 revival, the cast expanded further with Bluki, a blue cat-like Muppet, Vera, a yellow monster who spoke in the third person, Bubo the owl, and Gaspar, a red-haired human Muppet.

A Long Tail of Spanish-Language Sesame

Even after the original co-production ended around April 1988—succeeded by TVE's own Los mundos de Yupi, which featured two extraterrestrial characters—the Sesame Street brand continued to find Spanish-language audiences. The 1996 return to TVE was produced in both Catalan and Spanish from a production center in Catalonia, directed by Enrique Nicanor, Antonio Torets, and co-director Jose María Vidal. Beyond that, a steady stream of dubbed American Sesame Workshop properties reached Spanish viewers: Juega conmigo, Sésamo on Antena 3 from 2006, Las grandes aventuras de Epi y Blas on Playhouse Disney from 2008, the short-form health series Monstruos Supersanos from 2012, and El Hotel Furchester on Clan in 2016. Most recently, the American Sesame Street has been part of HBO's programming slate in Spain, with dubbed episodes airing from 2017 onward, ensuring the neighborhood's lessons continue reaching new generations of Spanish-speaking children.