Cut out the sarcasm.
Back off, troll.
In all honesty, I feel sorry for Margaret Hamilton. Imagine how she felt when she heard about the backlash that Sesame Street episode received. Just goes to show she was TOO good an actress for any form of media to handle.
However, around the same time, she appeared on Mister Rogers, and nobody had a problem with that. In fact, her episodes are among the more popular of the older shows. I think it had to do with: 1) Ms. Hamilton appeared as herself first in Mr. Rogers' house before she became Margaret H. Witch in the Neighborhood of Make Believe, and 2) the performances on Mister Rogers were very lowkey. The atmosphere, the characters, it was all very lowkey. Sesame Street, on the other hand, was full of over-the-top acting, mostly because the actors' co-stars were puppets. My guess is they told Margaret to overact as much as possible, which could be why the little kids in the audience were so on edge. Here's this woman who does an all-too-convincing portrayal of a wicked witch, and she's laying it on heavy. Now, I wasn't around in the '70s, I've never seen the episode in question, but if I had to guess why it had the impact it did, that would have to be it. Remember, the earlier Sesame Streets were CHOCK FULL of frightening imagines and bizarre cartoons that people today have comprised lists of the things from this show that scared us as kids. So if kids in 1976 could tolerate all that, but be scared away from SS over Margaret Hamilton's witch... it must have been REALLY over-the-top.
So the producers' "brilliant" idea of how to deal with the episode was to gather a test group of children and their parents, and upon this viewing, they weren't as scared, maybe because their parents were with them. Well, shouldn't it have been that way at home? Wasn't the idea for parents to watch these shows with their kids? It's not Ms. Hamilton's fault these parents weren't keeping an eye on their kids.
Despite all the publicity of kids getting scared by her portrayal of the Wicked Witch, I still admire Ms. Hamilton for embracing her Wizard of Oz character and never shying away from it, as opposed to Jack Haley who always saying, "yeah, I was the Tin Man. What of it?"
As for the other videos on that list, I doubt most of them even exist anymore, or if some EVER existed (i.e. Steve Irwin's death video, surveillance at Sandy Hook, etc.) Hell, the short-sighted producers at CTW probably destroyed the Margaret Hamilton episode after what happened. What a waste of a brilliant performance.
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