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	Movie Minutiae - Alas, Cookie Monster, We Hardly Knew Ye... By Laslo Hollyfeld, Guest Correspondent Well, it's finally happened. Forget war, famine, pestilence, plague, and Pauly Shore. The ultimate sign of the apocalypse has occurred. I'm talking here about the decision made by the powers that be over at the Children's Television Workshop to "rethink" the beloved character of Cookie Monster. In the wake of rising rates of childhood obesity, Cookie Monster will now become an advocate of nutrition and exercise, proclaiming that cookies, once the staple of his diet and indeed, his raison d'etre, are now "a sometimes food." Am I the only one horrified at this? Most kids today don't even really have a concept of just how important Cookie Monster was to those of us who grew up watching Sesame Street in the 70s. It wasn't just that he had blue fur, googly eyes, a great laugh, and an insatiable appetite. It was the legacy left behind by this sage. Scoffers will point out that Cookie Monster was a classic hedonist. Did he embody unbridled hedonism? Surely, but those who believe that was the summum bonum of Cookie Monster miss the larger point. I argue that what Cookie Monster represents in the larger context is the search for the simplistic, the need to find joy in the little things. In this sense, Cookie Monster is a beacon for all of us who are still unsatisfied with our own lives. To each of us, Cookie Monster taught this basic, undeniable truth: "C" is for "cookie," and that's good enough for me! If it was good enough for him, why can't it be good enough for us? Why do we, as a society, dismiss this idea in favor of less satisfying notions of greed and avarice? What if Cookie Monster was right all along? What if there really is more joy and happiness to be found in a box of Chips Ahoy! Chunkies than in all the corporate boardrooms combined? Unfortunately, this may already be lost on the rising generation. It is obvious, even to the casual observer, that Sesame Street effectively jumped the shark when Elmo appeared. (I personally find it ironic that the star of a show promoting literacy cannot grasp the concept of pronouns, but that's a subject for another rant.) In the final analysis, all the so-called "enlightened" thinking of today cannot replace what has been lost. I wish we could take the kids of today back thirty years and let them see what we grew up with. We saw the coyote hit the bottom of the canyon, and we aren't mass murderers. We weren't bothered by the drug references in Scooby Doo or the homoerotic overtones of Johnny Quest. We saw it all, and we turned out just fine. "C" was for "cookie," and that was good enough for us.	RETURN TO HOME PAGE Journey to the Center of the Earth Hancock Get Smart The Incredible Hulk The Strangers Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Young at Heart Iron Man Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed The Forbidden Kingdom Weekend Results: 1. Hancock($62,603,879) 2. Wall-E($32,509,203) 3. Wanted($20,050,070) 4. Get Smart($11,109,408) 5. Kung Fu Panda($7,318,635)

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