The Letter of the Day Games

The Letter of the Day Games are a series of Sesame Street game shows which have occasionally appeared in Season 36.

Unlike most Sesame Street game shows, this one has a voice-only announcer (not a Muppet host, but played by Matt Vogel). He promises Cookie Monster "lots of cookies" for finding three things beginning with the letter of the day. As on Beat the Time, Cookie has to race against the clock (a 30-second limit, in this case).

His finds follow the same general pattern:

1. A food whose name begins with the letter, such as watermelon in the W sketch.
2. A non-food object whose name begins with the letter, often taken from some protesting Anything Muppet. (In the W sketch, Cookie snatches a wig from an old woman he has tracked down.)
3. Prairie Dawn, who usually feels irritable because Cookie Monster has dragged her away in an uncomfortable situation. (In the W sketch, Prairie appears with a towel around her body and suds in her hair; she complains that she was in the middle of a bath.)

The offscreen announcer usually rejects Cookie's third example. ("Sorry, but 'girl' doesn't begin with the letter W!") Cookie Monster, however, finds some way to win the cookies on an observation of Prairie's present condition: in the W sketch, Prairie's being "wet" counts as a valid word. The sketch always ends with a shower of CGI cookies, which annoys Prairie Dawn even further as Cookie Monster tries to grab some.