Innocent Abroad, with Feathers

By Richard Stengel

Big Bird in China, NBC, May 29, 7 p.m. E.D.T.

He doesn't wear Bermuda shorts or sunglasses, but he is the stereotype American tourist. He ogles the natives as though they were the foreigners. Not knowing the language, he complains that no one speaks "American." He is given to such asides as "I wonder who's buried in Ming's Tomb?"

But no passport is needed to identity this traveler. As an 8-ft. canary, he is one of a kind: an innocent abroad, with feathers. He is none other than Big Bird, star of Sesame Street. On May 29, a 90-minute NBC special called Big Bird in China takes him on a peregrination of the landmarks of China. A $1.3 million joint production of Children's Television Workshop (creator of Sesame Street) and China Central Television (CCTV), the national Chinese network, the program is essentially a beautifully photographed travelogue.

Although the star's galumphing presence and endless prattling become grating, Big Bird in China is far superior to the insipid fare that constitutes most network children's programming. It offers not the contemporary China of bicycling millions but a vision of the mythic China of the imperial dynasties. Scene after scene unfolds exquisite landscapes that resemble the misty mountains and delicate waterfalls of Sung dynasty murals.

The show is the creation of veteran Writer-Producer Jon Stone, 52, a Sesame Street pioneer and the winner of eight Emmy Awards for that show as well as such specials as Christmas Eve on Sesame Street. Stone's notion was to create a quest theme. The story opens as Big Bird (played, as he is on Sesame Street, by Caroll Spinney), roller-skates through Manhattan's Chinatown and admires a scroll depicting the legendary phoenix of China. He is smitten and resolves to go to China as a sort of avian Henry Kissinger, to tell the phoenix that "American birds think Chinese birds are just swell." Finding the phoenix is the problem. Big Bird and his shaggy sidekick Barkley the Dog (played with wonderful canine verisimilitude by Brian Muehl) must locate all the landmarks depicted on the scroll; each locale provides a clue to the whereabouts of the elusive phoenix. After solving all the clues, Big Bird finds his shimmering Chinese soul mate perched in the sheltering arms of a spectacular banyan tree.

Every passionate pilgrim needs a guide, and Big Bird's is a six-year-old charmer named Ouyang Lianzi. She is a Chinese Shirley Temple without that child star's cloying cuteness, and she steals the show. Stone selected her from among 100 videotaped auditions sent to him from China. The only difficulty was that Lianzi did not speak a syllable of English. Before filming, Stone mailed her an audio cassette of her 64 lines; helped by her father, she memorized them phonetically without understanding their meaning.

In the show, Lianzi meets Big Bird just as he is about to give up his search for someone who speaks American. Lianzi shyly tells him, "I speak English." "Close enough," replies Big Bird. She then escorts Big Bird and Barkley to the Great Wall ("Hey, where is the wall?" cries Big Bird. "You are standing on it," says a smiling Lianzi). Then the trio voyage onward to the magnificent Temple of Heaven in Peking, the rock gardens iand reflecting pools of Suzhou, known as the Venice of China, and down the tranquil Li Jiang River near the city of Guilin.

During almost three weeks of location filming in Chinese villages, the sight of Big Bird did not always bring smiles to local children, who after all had never seen Sesame Street. Some were frightened by his looming grotesquely over them; his bugged-out eyes sent others scampering. One little girl burst into tears. CCTV producers are hoping their viewers will not react similarly when a dubbed version of the production is broad cast, probably on June 1, National Children's Day. But the country has a long history of puppetry, and children may embrace "Da Niao" (Chinese for Big Bird) as one of their own. Soon Big Bird may even be boasting that he is more popular than his Eastern rival, Peking Duck. -- By Richard Stengel. Reported by Peter Ainslie/New York andJimi Florcruz/Peking

With reporting by Peter Ainslie, Jimi Florcruz This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.