Ernie and the Pumpkin Seed Candy Salesman (found 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 have been found. A user has listed the segment as one of the rare/lost Ernie and Bert sketches on a MuppetCentral forum thread.

As of March 2017, no YouTube users appear to have the German dub of this clip backed up on their computers before it was deleted from YouTube in 2014 and it is still completely unknown if anymore upcoming YouTube uploads of full episodes for foreign co-productions (i.e. Barrio Sésamo, Rechov Sumsum, etc.), besides Sesamstraße, will ever have this extremely-scarce clip included by surprise. There's a very small chance anyone will ever get to see this clip especially, since the only copy of it in German is now removed off of the Internet, and that Sesame Workshop has no intention of releasing this segment (along with other rare, long-unseen segments) at all, perhaps due to the following reasons: either these segments are simply not available to the public at this time in favor of a smaller, more licensee-friendly package, or there are certain legal issues keeping the majority of classic clips stored away.

References