Screened during breaks at long meetings and training sessions, the film delivered precious minutes of Hensonian levity before the next battery of tutorials on the Selectric typewriter or some other newfangled product.
Coffee Break Machine would have landed especially well with its audience of IBM sales teams and other non-technical corporate departments. The monster ’s gleeful misappropriation of this cutting-edge technology reveals that the machine, not its googly-eyed predator, is silly and ineffectual. Intoning from inside a cavernous stomach, the swallowed-up machine announces it will self-destruct, and the scene reaches its finale in the tradition of so much cartoon slapstick, “KABOOM!”. The beverage dispenser blathers about each shiny feature -imagine if the fussiest Keurig could introduce itself -just as the monster shovels them down his fuzzy maw. Titled Coffee Break Machine, the 2.5-minute clip introduces a toothier beta version of Cookie Monster, who slavers at the gadgets on a computer-driven, talking coffeemaker voiced by a monotone Henson. In 1967, two years before Sesame Street hit the PBS airwaves, the woolly blue slouch debuted in a corporate film Jim Henson directed for IBM. Untitled Apple commercial for television (2016)īefore he trained his appetite to edible fare, Cookie Monster devoured computers.
