The 40th anniversary of Sesame Street was so widely publicized that it was impossible to go anywhere without hearing about it. Google even changed their logo for a whole week leading up to the anniversary date. Apparently the staff celebrated the anniversary with a custom cake from Carlo's Bakery of Cake Boss fame. The episode featured no other cakes (they typically feature 2 or 3 custom cakes per episode) as it was an extremely large cake. For inspiration, the staff of Carlo's Bakery visited the Sesame Street set, complete with active puppets. Then they delivered the cake with the entire staff present: watch here.

I have watched a fair amount of Sesame Street in the past four months, and as an adult, I certainly have a different perspective. I can't help but notice how expertly the puppets are manipulated. They are extremely lifelike and I wonder every day how they do it. These are excellent puppeteers to say the least. Sometimes it seems that it would take more than two people to run one of these puppets, especially when there are facial expressions and arm movement involved (for instance, Elmo squishes up his face and goes cross-eyed when he is about to sneeze). Murray is a large orange puppet that goes out on the streets and performs human-like tasks, like playing a real drum set or breaking a board with a karate chop. When Buddy and his crew visited the set of Sesame Street, I was hoping for some "behind the scenes" footage of the puppets being operated, but there was none. Searching around on the internet did not reveal much, but here is a pretty good one:

I really couldn't find much more footage than that. There is some behind the scenes footage of the Kobe Bryant sketch, which I just recently saw, but it's of a different nature. More like getting a chance to interview Kobe Bryant, and they didn't care about the Sesame Street aspect of it.

Also, here is a funny parody called Preschool Musical.