Sesame Street

Of course, I looooved Sesame Street when I was a child, except I knew it as Barrio Sesamo, which translates as Sesame Neighborhood. Funny, uh? This was huge everywhere and of course, Spain was no exception! But I didn't know until recently that this wasn't a Spanish product. I think it was an episode of Friends, where Phoebe is watching it with little Ben, that made me finally accept it. I think I didn't want to know before, really.
We had all the American characters, but with different names, either translated into Spanish (Cookie Monster was El monstruo de las galletas) or with different Spanish names (Bert and Ernie were Epi and Blas). We also had some local recurring characters! And even though now I'm all for watching the original version of films and TV programmes, and I don't mind subtitles, this is the one thing I don't like in its original English. It feels WRONG! Epi and Blas did not talk like that! I don't want to change my childhood memories of it!
So, anyway, the reason I was thinking about this was this article on CNN about the background of some of the characters. It's pretty surreal.