(NEXSTAR) – Aside from Big Bird or Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster is probably the most aptly named character on Sesame Street.
If indeed “Cookie Monster” were his actual name.
First, some history: The Muppet that would eventually become known as Cookie Monster was first developed by Jim Henson in the mid-1960s for a snack commercial, where he was unofficially referred to as a “wheel stealer” due to his penchant for stealing wheel-shaped cheese crackers.
That commercial never made it to air, The Jim Henson Company says, but the Wheel Stealer’s career wasn’t over just yet.
Prior to his eventual debut on “Sesame Street,” the same voracious monster (albeit slightly modified) appeared in a short promotional film for IBM eating a computerized coffee machine, and also on “The Ed Sullivan Show” doing pretty much the same bit. He also had a brief stint promoting Munchos in a series of Frito-Lay commercials, at which point he was referred to as “Arnold the Munching Monster,” according to The Jim Henson Company.
When the blue monster first appeared on “Sesame Street” in 1969, he didn’t have a name. But the producers eventually settled on “Cookie Monster” after the writers gave him a proclivity for the snack. (Frank Oz, the original voice of Cookie Monster, has claimed the nickname was solidified after a sketch called “The Mr. and Mrs. Game,” as he once told NPR. In it, a blue Muppet wins a game show and earns himself a cookie — even though he was offered the choice of a trip to Hawaii instead. That monster, however, looks quite different from the previous and later versions of the character.)
If it’s not Cookie Monster, what’s his ‘real’ name?
But no matter what he was called in the early years, Cookie Monster has, in fact, repeatedly indicated that his name isn’t Cookie Monster at all, but rather “Sid” or “Sidney.”
In 2004, Cookie Monster first raised the possibility that his name was Sid in a song called “The First Time Me Eat Cookie,” in which he looked back at his early relationship with treats.
“Me was just a mild-mannered little kid,” he sang. “In fact, back then me think me name was Sid.”
The official Twitter account of “Sesame Street” later repeated the claim on the Twitter (now X). The tweet, from Cookie’s perspective, stated that Cookie Monster’s name was “maybe” Sidney, and confirmed that he “wasn’t born with the name ‘Cookie Monster.’”
The character also stated that his “real name” was Sid Monster in a 2017 video produced for Wired, in response to a question inspired by a Google search.
Despite repeatedly alluding to this “real” name, Cookie Monster’s own friends on “Sesame Street” have rarely ever called him “Sid” — and several of them even balked at the idea on a “Today” show appearance in 2022.
In any case, Sidney/Cookie Monster doesn’t seem to care what we call him. The character has never shown any disdain for “Cookie Monster” — and in recent years, he said he prefers it.
“Did you know me name is Sid?” the character tweeted in 2022. “But me still like to be called Cookie Monster.”
