The Five Coolest 'Sesame Strest' Guest Stars

With all the talk about an artistic renaissance throughout parts of Brooklyn, Sesame Street remains the venerable New York borough's hippest stretch of brownstone-lined roads, neighborhood shops and culturally diverse inhabitants. Granted, said residents are predominantly made of fur and feathers rather than flesh and blood, but that's precisely the device that's helped generations of awe-struck children develop an open mind to peoples' differences.

And of course, a lot of those early fans of the show—or high-profile parents of its target audience—have given back to the PBS mainstay by making an appearance themselves.

Below are five of the coolest actors, musicians, athletes and even robots (lest you thought they discriminated against puppets, or as you'll see below, inanimate objects) that have assisted in making "Sesame Street" such an unparalleled and vital piece of American cultural and educational nostalgia.


R2-D2 AND C3PO

"It's better to have loved a fire hydrant than never to have loved at all." While truer words have probably been spoken, they somehow sound poetic out of the animatronic mouth of stately "Star Wars" 'bot C3PO.


ROBERT DENIRO

These are actually outtakes from the legendary thespian's audition for "Mean Streets." I kid, I kid. Elmo was barely even a toddler when the gritty Martin Scorsese pic was in production. Although it's pretty hilarious to hear DeNiro say "Riboflavin" while transformed into a head of cabbage.


JACKIE ROBINSON

This is pretty remarkable, late-in-life footage of an athlete who represented the ideals of equality that were so essential to "Sesame Street." And it's inspiring to think that the same man who previously broke professional baseball's color barrier would, only a few years before his death, pursue the simple goal of helping to teach a generation of American children how to spell.


CONAN O'BRIEN

For all the talk about late-night's formulaic stasis, no prominent figure in modern network television has been more willing to make himself appear silly than Conan O'Brien. So it's fitting that he would bark and growl his way through a hilariously inventive bit for the a much younger, earlier rising audience.



MICHAEL JACKSON

Say what you will about the late and oft-maligned King of Pop, but it's not hard to imagine that he would have befriended a curmudgeonly green monster that lived in a garbage can.... That sounded a lot less complimentary than I intended.