Ernie and the Pumpkin Seed Candy Salesman (1970 Sesame Street sketch)

"Ernie and the Pumpkin Seed Candy Salesman" (usually shortened to "Ernie and the Candy Salesman") is a sketch that originally aired during Sesame Street episode 0264 (during Season 2) on May 13, 1971 (exactly a day after the Tales from Muppetland special "The Frog Prince" premiered).

In this sketch, a salesman tries to sell Ernie a piece of pumpkin seed candy for a nickel. Ernie doesn't like pumpkin seed candy, so the salesman offers him a deal: a smaller piece of pumpkin seed candy is better because it will not disgust Ernie as much, and he can have that one for a nickel, too. This continues, until he succeeds in selling Ernie a piece of pumpkin seed candy so small that Ernie cannot even see it.

There are no video copies of this sketch available online, but the German-dubbed version from a Sesamstraße episode that used to be uploaded to YouTube several years ago had been deleted in 2014. Only a couple of screenshots both taken from the deleted German dub (albeit the first screenshot is in bad quality) have been found. A user has listed the segment as one of the rare/lost Ernie and Bert sketches on a MuppetCentral forum thread. The clip was left ignored until 2016 when a YouTuber by the name of BigPumpkinJFriend86 (known as BigRedMonster86) posted a thread on Scratchpad about wanting to gather enough Sesame Street 1969-71 Muppet segments to post online so that other fans can watch them. He stated that "Ernie and the Candy Salesman" was one of the rarest clips of the show that he wanted to find, and later posted a video on YouTube about the issue with the clip in order to get help from other Sesame Street fan uploaders with putting the actual video of the sketch back up online, but no help has been put forward.

As of March 2017, it is currently unknown if this clip will ever resurface back online (especially in English), or if any YouTube users appear to have the German dub of this clip backed up on their computers before it was deleted from YouTube in 2014. There's a very small chance anyone will ever get to see this clip (and any other rare Classic Sesame Street clips that are currently not available online, especially "Windy") again since the only copy of it in German is now removed off of the Internet, and there's a VERY high chance anyone who doesn't work for Sesame Workshop can get caught (resulting in serious legal trouble) if they make even one single attempt to hack Sesame Workshop's vault to leak the clip back onto the Internet.

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