Google’s Sesame Street Celebration Continues- but isn’t Cookie Monster now Veggie Monster?

Google updated the Google Doodle again today, continuing the celebration of Sesame Street‘s 40th anniversary with a logo featuring Cookie Monster.

The sight of the familiar blue puppet surrounded by his signature flurry of chocolate chip cookie crumbs has piqued the curiousity of many of the Googling masses- didn’t Cookie Monster become Veggie Monster to appease the health-conscious parents of today? The New York Times sums up the way a lot of people over the age of 25 feel about the updated Sesame Street, a kind of quiet distaste about the sanitization of a show conceived originally to reach out to inner city children without access to preschool:

The pedagogy hasn’t changed, but the look and tone of “Sesame Street” has evolved. Forty years on, this is your mother’s “Sesame Street,” only better dressed and gentrified: Sesame Street by way of Park Slope. The opening is no longer a realistic rendition of urban skyline but an animated, candy-colored chalk drawing of a preschool Arcadia, with flowers and butterflies and stars. The famous set, brownstones and garbage bins, has lost the messy graffiti and gritty smudges of city life over the years. Now there are green spaces, tofu and yoga.

But as with many online rumors, the conversion of Cookie Monster into Veggie Monster has been somewhat overstated. Snopes has a page devoted to the controversy, basically explaining that while Cookie Monster has indeed branched out to fruits and vegetables, he still remains devoted to cookies. Below is a clip of Cookie Monster, going on the record with Matt Lauer to discuss how the Cookie Monster/Veggie Monster thing has been “blown out of proportion.”