The Wicked Witch on Sesame Street

Oscar the Grouch and Margaret Hamilton

It was fifty years ago today, on February 10, 1976, that Margaret Hamilton guest starred in character as the Wicked Witch of the West form The Wizard of Oz on episode 847 of Sesame Street. The episode caused such an uproar among parents of young children that it was removed form rebroadcast and not seen again for decades. For that reason, episode 847 remains one of the most famous episodes of Sesame Street.

Episode 847 begins with David (Northern Calloway) catching a broom that falls out of the sky as he is walking out of Hooper's Store. The owner of the broom, the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton in full regalia, right down to the green make-up), soon shows up and want her broom back. The Wicked Witch then makes repeated attempts to get her broom back, creating all sorts of problems on Sesame Street.

Episode 847 was written by Joseph A. Bailey, Judy Freudberg, and Emily Kingsley, all staff writers on Sesame Street. According to a February 8, 1976 article in the Chronicle-Telegraph, the episode was meant to teach children how to deal with fear, as well as "...the value of planning, by creating and implementing methods..." of retrieving the Witch's broom. 

At the time, Margaret Hamilton still had a very active career, appearing in movies such as Angel in My Pocket (1969) and Brewster McCloud (1970) and on TV shows such as Sigmund and the Sea Monsters and The Partridge Family. She also appeared in Maxwell House commercials at the time, which led to a bit of an in-joke in her appearance on Sesame Street. David offers the Witch coffee and she turns it down, saying, "I cant' stand the stuff." When episode 847 aired, Margaret Hamilton had recently appeared on another children's show as the Witch. She appeared on an episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in 1975 as both herself and the Witch. In the episode she explained how children should not be scared of an imaginary character. She would return to Mister Rogers Neighborhood later in February 1976 and in October 1976 appeared as the Witch on The Paul Lynde Halloween Special. In one of these appearances did she wear the classic green makeup, which is the one thing that sets Sesame Street episode 847 apart from her other appearances as the Witch in the mid-Seventies. 

Despite the fact that The Wizard of Oz (1939) was a yearly event on broadcast television and the fact that Margaret Hamilton had appeared elsewhere as the Wicked Witch (although without the green makeup), Sesame Street episode 847 resulted in a large amount of negative mail from angry parents who claimed that their children were so frightened by the episode that they now refused to watch the show. The Children's Television Workshop (now Sesame Workshop), the company that produced Sesame Street, conducted test screenings of Episode 847 in March 1976 to determine if it was truly frightening to young children. It was noted that children were more attentive while the Wicked Witch of the West was on screen, the Children's Television Workshop were unable to determine if they were actually scared of her. It was then decided to pull the episode out of rotation. 

Sesame Street episode 847 would remain unseen for literally decades. In 2019 portions of the episode were shown at the event Sesame Street Lost and Found at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. The episode has also been archived with the Library of Congress and is available for viewing there. It was in 2022 that a Muppet archivist leaked the complete episode to Reddit and later YouTube. Copies of the complete episode can currently be seen on YouTube, Reddit, and the Internet Archive.