Big Bird Goes to Washington–AKA Sesame Street: The Movie–was a pitch for a Sesame Street feature film intended for release in 1984. The project received at least two separate treatments before it ultimately fell apart, and it’s kind of easy to guess why. Because this movie would’ve been insane.

Intended to be a theatrical film that would’ve been “just as entertaining for grown-ups as it was for kids,” Big Bird Goes to Washington would have found our feathered hero…becoming President of the United States. And if you think that the movie was going to be about how he somehow got into that position, well, you’d be wrong. Because the film would have opened with his inauguration. I guess people liked Big Bird more than they did Ronald Reagan, or maybe he had to resign from office due to some jellybean scandal, or something.

Anyway, Big Bird would then have been the most powerful bird in the world, and since he is Big Bird, he naturally would’ve been a “nice guy” politician. This is where evil lobbyist and war profiteer George C. Scott would have come into play, and no, I am not kidding. George C. Scott was going to be very worried that Big Bird was going to cause world peace, and if that happened, then he would have no more wars to make money from. He was even going to sing a song about it.

Also, Scott was going to mean fucking business, including unleashing “every weapon known to man” in “a dramatic Star Wars dogfight” in an attempt to bring down Big Bird as he’s riding in Air Force One. And that’s not even the weirdest thing that could have happened in this film, because in the revised treatment, Scott’s character was replaced by a TERRORIST ORGANIZATION known as N.A.U.G.H.T.Y. (National Association of Underworld Gangsters, Hoods, Terrorists, and Yahoos). This imagines Big Bird essentially going up against James Bond villains, and instead of taking him out via warplanes, they create an evil robot duplicate of Big Bird to replace him in office.

Of course, there’s a slight chance all of this is someone fucking around on a wiki page, and that this was never actually going to be a movie. But it is from Muppet Wiki, which has a solid reputation, and they list the source as coming from the CTW Archives, which sounds legit enough. If you want to read about all the madness for yourself, you can check out the full treatment summaries here.

Have a great day, Avocados! Also, Big Bird 2024!