Vintage 1997 Sesame Street Elmo 🚗 "Don't Tickle Driver!" Window Sign, Jim Henson Productions Car Suction Cup Sign

Do You Remember When Nobody Dared Tickle the Driver? 🚗😂 A Vintage 1997 Sesame Street Elmo Car Window Sign

Size: 6 1/2"

If you were anywhere near a car in the late 90s - riding in the back of a minivan, a station wagon or a hand-me-down sedan - you saw one of these. A yellow diamond, shaped like a road-warning sign, with Elmo hanging onto a steering wheel, wiggle lines all around him because he's already laughing, and the order in big black letters: DON'T TICKLE DRIVER! It's flexible vinyl with a clear suction cup through a hole at the top point, made to stick inside a car window. There are two holes at the top point, so the sign is reversible - hang it facing in or out and it can be seen from either side - and the spare hole is there if you'd rather hang it on a hook and skip the suction cup. The front reads MADE IN CHINA, Mfd. by Ohbaby! Inc. and © Jim Henson Productions, Inc. On the back there's an embossed CTW SESAME STREET logo and a white label with the barcode, Item No. 89010 Vinyl Sign, and the copyright lines - © 1997 Children's Television Workshop, Sesame Street Muppets © 1997 Jim Henson Productions, Inc., © 1997 Ohbaby! Inc. of Greenwich, Connecticut. So the year is right there on the back. Every one I have is unused.

🧸 The year Elmo ate America

You only get the joke if you remember 1996. Collectors and toy-industry old-timers still tell the story of that year the way people tell stories about a storm. Tyco Preschool put out a plush Elmo that giggled and shook when you squeezed him - Tickle Me Elmo, invented by Ron Dubren and Greg Hyman - in July 1996, $28.99 retail, 400,000 of them. Then in early October Rosie O'Donnell showed him on her TV show, and by December the whole country had lost its mind. Tyco ordered 600,000 more and sold every last one by the end of the year. For a while you couldn't walk into a Toys "R" Us, a Kmart or a mall kiosk without tripping over Elmo stuff, and you still couldn't find the doll - in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, about 150 people got one at the Toys "R" Us with less than a week to go before Christmas, and the store was still writing rain checks. Two women were arrested in Chicago fighting over one, people in New York chased delivery trucks, and a Wal-Mart clerk in Fredericton, New Brunswick got trampled by about 300 shoppers when he opened a shipment. Scalpers got up to $1,500, and a radio charity auction in Los Angeles sold one for $18,500. Every hot-toy Christmas since has been measured against it.

So DON'T TICKLE DRIVER! worked on anybody who pulled up behind you at a light - everyone knew exactly what happens when you tickle Elmo, and nobody wants the driver laughing like that.

🚸 A sign born from a sign

The yellow diamond is a joke on a joke. Baby on Board signs took over American car windows in 1985 - Patricia Bradley of Medford, Massachusetts, found one in Germany and started selling them here with her sister, and Michael Lerner bought the business and renamed it Safety 1st. Within a year there were parodies everywhere: Baby I'm Bored, Mother-In-Law in Trunk, Nobody on Board, Child Carries No Cash, Ex-Wife in Trunk and the rest. A Muppet behind the wheel was the next step.

🎭 Elmo and the Muppets

Elmo was around Sesame Street for years - Richard Hunt was one of the puppeteers who had him first - before Kevin Clash, who'd started performing on the show in 1984, took him over in 1985 and gave him the high little voice and the habit of talking about himself in the third person. It was Clash's warmth and comic timing that turned a background monster into the star. He got his own segment, Elmo's World, in 1998 - after this sign was made - and he's still on the show today. Jim Henson founded his puppet company in 1958, and the Children's Television Workshop, started in 1968 by Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett, put Sesame Street on the air in 1969. Henson's company kept the rights to the Sesame Street characters, which is why the sign says Jim Henson Productions - the company's name from the late 1980s until it became The Jim Henson Company in 1997. The big licensees made the plush - Tyco, and Applause, which had held a Sesame Street license since 1982 - while small outfits like Ohbaby! Inc. of Greenwich, Connecticut made the window signs and novelties. In 2000 the Workshop renamed itself Sesame Workshop, and in a deal announced that December and closed in January 2001 it bought the Sesame Street Muppets from EM.TV, the German company that owned Henson's business by then. So that Jim Henson Productions line by itself puts this sign before 2000, and the back label says 1997.

🚗 About these

They're 6 1/2 inches point to point. Stick one in a car, truck or SUV window like it was meant to be - Elmo still loves riding shotgun - turn it toward a car seat so the little one gets an Elmo of their own, or put it on the shelf with your other Sesame Street stuff. It's a great gift for a 90s kid who's now the one doing the driving. The supply is finite - nobody's making the 1997 Ohbaby! Elmo sign anymore, and once these last unused ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.