File this under” WTF?” - apparently the Sesame Street DVD sets that were recently released are no longer considered appropriate viewing for children. The DVDs come with a warning that the episodes are intended for adult viewing and may break or otherwise cause irreparable damage to your youngster if you let them watch.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

If this isn’t a perfect example of parental paranoia, I don;t know what is. I already get odd looks and disapproving stares from other parents at the playground when I push my daughter “too high” on the swing or hang her upside down, so I’m definitely not about to deny her some old school Sesame Street just because Cookie Monster eats a freaking pipe.

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