This is Platea Sesamu, the Darunian co-production of Sesame Street. Darunian preschoolers and their families have enjoyed more than 30 years of Platea Sesamu. The show, which launched on Canale 5 (Channel Five) in 1975, is among the top four favorite children’s television programs in Daruny. Platea Sesamu focuses on the importance of creative play, the value of respecting self and others, and appreciating different environments. Like its American counterpart Sesame Street, the show intertwines animation, live action films, studio segments and original music videos that teach basic literacy and numeracy and help children gain a better understanding of the world around them. Three generations of Darunian children have grown up with the innovative and educationally sound programming of Platea Sesamu.
Big Bird (Ave grande), Bert (Betu), Ernie (Enesu), Elmo (Lemu), and Cookie Monster (Monsu Totita) are all on this show, along with Oscar the Grouch's cousin Claudiu, Grover's cousin Melaniu (to Darunians, the name is inextricably associated with him, just like Grover is to us), the Count (Contu; the pun translates into Darunian because contare means "to count"), and many other characters we know and love. A few characters have been added to suit the needs of Darunian children. For example, missing from the picture above is Mariu/Maria, a yellow-green child with orange-red hair who is undecided about what gender he/she wants to be.
The puppet on the left is used when he is Mariu; the puppet on the right is used when she is Maria. This character spends half the time as Mariu and the other half as Maria, thus taking the concept of childhood as a time for gender exploration to an extreme.
(If you haven't read The Darunian Gender System, you're probably not going to understand why Mariu/Maria and all these other extra characters are on the show.)
The Anything People fit right in with this concept, so they've been included in the Darunian version. (For those of you who haven't seen the early seasons, the Anything People were faceless muppets who could be anything they wanted; human actors would help them turn into different characters.)
And, of course, there's a character designed to educate children about people from other cultures. Just as Rosita of Sesame Street immigrated from Plaza Sesamo (the Mexican version of the show) in 1993, Finchen, the snail from Sesamstrasse (the German version), immigrated to Daruny from Germany around the same time. It is thought that this was done in part to follow the lead of the American version. Also, because of World War II, even the most politically correct can get away with insulting Germans; the producers felt that this made it even more fitting to choose a character from the German version of the show.
The Darunian version makes her reason for leaving clear. On Sesamstrasse, she was inexplicably changed from a boy to a girl. (Yes, this really happened, according to Muppet Wiki.) The explanation given on Platea Sesamu is that she announced that she was a girl, but no one in her home country accepted this--which is basically the reason many (not all, just many) immigrants to Daruny left home. (Because she is still a child, a few ultra-conservative people think her existence on the show encourages children to disobey their parents and leave home. These are the same people who dislike Oscar's rudeness and Cookie Monster's unhealthy eating habits. They're not too crazy about her being German, either.) She speaks Darunian with a German accent; she also knows German and English, but only speaks them when teaching the Foreign Word of the Day. On the Darunian version, her name is spelled "Fincen" and pronounced "feen-shen."
It may interest you to know that one of the regular human characters, known only as Camila (played by Camila Blancu), is cross-sexed. She lives on Platea Sesamu, and children on the show visit her regularly. Finchen is especially drawn to her, for obvious reasons.
Only in Daruny could she be on a children's show.
Like most international co-productions of Sesame Street, 50% of each episode consists of dubbed American material.
For some real-world examples of what Sesame Street does around the world, click here. Also check out the Wikipedia article.