Barrio Sésamo

Barrio Sésamo
Country of origin	Spain
Original language(s)	Spanish
No. of seasons	7
Production company(s)	Televisión Española Children's Television Workshop
Release
Original release	1979 – 2000
Chronology
Related shows	Sesame Street

Barrio Sésamo (English: Sesame Neighborhood) is the Spanish version of the popular U.S. children's program Sesame Street produced by Televisión Española and Children's Television Workshop from 1979 to 2000. It was formed by locally produced segments alternated with a dubbed version of segments of the American program, in which all characters had Spanish names.

Segments of the American Sesame Street dubbed into Spanish were broadcast as Ábrete Sésamo in the Televisión Española children's program Un globo, dos globos, tres globos from November 3, 1975 to March 29, 1978.

In December 1978, Televisión Española and Children's Television Workshop produced the local version of the show and created their own characters for real life segments — Caponata, an orange, purple and yellow bird with curly pink hair (a full-body Muppet and counterpart to Big Bird), portrayed by actress Emma Cohen, and Perezgil, a green snail with glasses (this character is permanently set on a wall) — while retaining the American characters (Bert and Ernie as Epi y Blas, Kermit the Frog as La rana Gustavo, Grover as Coco, Cookie Monster as Triqui, el monstruo de las galletas, etc.) for inserts from the American version dubbed into Spanish. This first season wasn't successful, and it was cancelled in May 1980.

From 1981 to 1983, a different Televisión Española children's program, La Cometa Blanca, included some sketches from Sesame Street. This program was directed by Muppet fan Lolo Rico and featured some actors who would later appear in Barrio Sésamo, mainly Mari Luz Olier, Alfonso Vallejo and the child-actress Ruth Gabriel (then known as Ruth Abellán).

The Sesame Street sketches in La Cometa Blanca were so successful with their young audience that the Spanish-version was given another chance in 1983. Only José Riesgo as Julián returned from the first season. Caponata and Perezjil were replaced by two new Muppets. The main character was Espinete, a large pink hedgehog that replaced Caponata. Like Caponata, Espinete was a full-body Muppet and was the most important character on the show, played by Chelo Vivares. He became famous for sleeping in pajamas in spite of being "naked" the rest of the day. Some of the friends of Espinete were:

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