Sesame Street co-creator Lloyd Morrisett has died at age 93, Sesame Workshop announced Wednesday.
"Without Lloyd Morrisett, there would be no Sesame Street.¯It was he who first came up with the notion of using television to teach preschoolers basic skills, such as letters and numbers," Sesame Street co-founder Joan Ganz Cooney said of her friend and colleague.
"He was a trusted partner and loyal friend to me for over fifty years, and he will be sorely missed," she continued.
Morrisett and Ganz Cooney created Sesame Street during the turbulence of the late 1960s to offer children educational material outside of the classroom and to teach tolerance of others. The pair reached out to a developmental psychologist at Harvard University to help them develop strategies to educate young children using television.
Puppeteer Jim Henson was brought in to help create the characters and bring them to life.
Sesame Street became an international sensation, with over 30 parallel international productions of the children's program springing up in the years since its inception.
Sesame Street is known for trying to explain complicated and dark subjects to children. In 1983, following the death of actor Will Lee, who portrayed Mr. Hooper on the show, Sesame Street wrote his death into the show as a way to explain the concept of death to children.
The South African version of Sesame Street, Takalani Sesame , features a character named Kami, who is portrayed as an HIV-positive orphan who lost their mother to AIDS.
Morrisett and Ganz Cooney accepted a Kennedy Center Honor on behalf of Sesame Street in 2019.