Finding his way to Sesame Street, one AI clip at a time

When Andre Moore was in second grade, living at Fort Dix in New Jersey, he was transfixed by “Sesame Street” and the adventures of Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch and Bert & Ernie.

After learning that the show was made nearby, he begged his father to take him for a visit.

“I wanted to go be on the set so bad,” he said.

It never happened. Not then.

More than 40 years later, Moore finally made it to Sesame Street, at least in the way the internet allows — virtually, with the help of artificial intelligence.

Andre Moore (left), stopped by Sesame Street to have lunch with Big Bird, in one of his viral videos that recapture his youth through images of pop culture.(Courtesy Andre Moore)

Moore, 51, who lives in Austell, Ga., has become a prominent face in a fast-moving viral format that uses AI to turn nostalgia into time travel.

In a series of short, slick montage videos, Moore “meets” and mingles with figures he grew up watching on television and listening to on the radio like Michael Jackson, Super Fly, the Incredible Hulk and Slim Goodbody.

The ease of the illusion is no accident.

Moore is a trained illustrator and cartoonist, a graduate of the Atlanta College of Art whose professional life revolves around character, movement and story.

He is the lead character designer on “Iyanu, Child of Wonder,” an animated series streaming on Cartoon Network and HBO, and he works in cybersecurity awareness.

The videos tone are playful, sometimes surprisingly tender and rooted in a simple idea designed to escape the present for a minute and revisit what shaped him.

Often, he does it in a red Atlanta Falcons T-shirt, which has become both a personal signature and a practical choice, making him instantly recognizable from clip to clip.

Illustrator and cartoonist Andre Moore, a graduate of the Atlanta College of Art, has built a career around character, movement and story — skills on full display in his latest series of viral videos. (Courtesy Andre Moore)

But the most unexpected part of his rise is how casually it began.

Moore posted his first time-traveling video right after Thanksgiving on Instagram as a one-off experiment that grew out of a conversation with his teenage daughter about the stuff he grew up on.

“She didn’t really care or get it,” Moore said.

He tried a different language, one he thought she might recognize, inspired by a similar reel he had seen that leaned heavily on the 1990s and 2000s.

“I was like, OK, this is cool,” he said, “but someone my age wasn’t really into this stuff.”

Instead of borrowing someone else’s timeline, Moore built his own.

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, when entertainment for kids meant hours in front of the television watching reruns and cartoons, he created a version rooted in that era.

The first video he posted was a rapid-fire parade of familiar faces from 1970s sitcoms.

In under a minute, he strolls onto the set of “Sanford & Son” to meet Fred, Lamont and a stern-faced Aunt Esther; moves through “The Jeffersons” in their deluxe apartment; greets the Evans family from “Good Times”; visits “Diff’rent Strokes”; then ends up at Rob’s Place with the kids from “What’s Happening!!”

“I posted it not thinking anything of it,” Moore said. “But it blew up.”

The clip drew close to two million views across Instagram and Facebook, plus thousands of comments. Musician and Academy Award-winning producer Questlove chimed in, teasing a visual glitch that made Willis shorter than Arnold in the “Diff’rent Strokes” segment.

“LOL. Todd Bridges being shorter than Gary Coleman is hilarious,” Questlove wrote in a comment that drew more than 1,300 likes and dozens of replies.

“I was just like, ‘Wow. I got something going on,’” Moore said.

More videos followed. Within weeks, Moore went from posting artwork to a modest audience to hosting something that felt like a digital reunion, with an endless comment section filled with people naming their own memories, correcting his omissions and thanking him for surfacing a shared past.

“Before this, I was getting maybe 100 views on a post of my art,” he said. “I might have had less than 1,000 followers.”

Then the numbers shifted dramatically. Between Dec. 14 and Jan. 12, he gained about 14,000 Instagram followers, climbing to nearly 16,000. In that same period, his posts drew more than 2.4 million views. Across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, nearly 5 million people have now watched his videos.

One of his favorite parts has been watching the audience recognize itself.

“All the videos are just basically about my childhood and things that I love,” he said. “Seeing the comments and everyone saying, ‘this is my era,’ means a lot.”

He has published at least a dozen videos in the series so far, each one a little smoother than the last, but still driven by the same impulse of a reanimated personal archive.

In his “Class of ’88″ hip-hop reel, he pays tribute to the New York rap he grew up on, going vinyl shopping with icons like Public Enemy, KRS-One, Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick, and Eric B. & Rakim.

Questlove, ever the cultural anthropologist, dinged Moore again. This time for making The God MC smile.

“LOL at Rakim showing teeth,” Questlove wrote.

One clip drops him into the city streets alongside the swaggering heroes and heroines of blaxploitation films such as Pam Grier and Dolemite.

Another places him backstage with his favorite female rappers. Elsewhere, he indulges his inner fanboy, assembling a lineup of television superheroes that reflects the breadth of his childhood imagination.

On a stop through Gotham City, Andre Moore ran into 1960s-era Batman and Robin. (Courtesy Andre Moore)

In several videos, he shares a kiss on the cheek or a hug from some of his childhood crushes, including Sade, MC Lyte and Phylicia Rashad, who appeared in a video honoring classic television mothers.

At the end of another reel, devoted to his favorite musical artists, Whitney Houston whispers in his ear, caresses his chin, then rests her head on his shoulder. Moore tentatively and gently touches her arm.

Several people in the comments said it made them cry.

“I try and keep them sweet,” he said.

The backdrop to all of this is a larger debate about AI as both breakthrough and intrusion, especially when it comes to using real people’s likenesses.

Last October, shortly after the launch of OpenAI’s Sora, the company added guardrails around depictions of historical figures after complaints about disrespectful AI-generated videos, including ones involving the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

With Sora, as with other AI tools, users can upload images and voice samples to insert themselves into entirely fabricated videos.

Moore’s videos land differently.

He isn’t trying to shock people. He’s trying to honor what he loved — and the people who made it — especially those who are no longer here.

“I don’t like people using AI for evil purposes or just thinking it’s funny and making people look bad,” said Moore, who uses a different image-generating program. “I try to be respectful because a lot of people that I’m using are no longer here to defend themselves. I want to remember them how I remember them when they were alive.”

Moore said that aside from occasional trolls, he has faced little pushback over the videos he creates.

Still, the attention has spilled over to his other work.

Old art posts that once drew a few dozen views are now being rediscovered, and offers for freelance jobs are rolling in.

People have also flooded his direct messages, asking him to make videos for them. He has declined, though he plans to release a tutorial at some point.

In his ultimate return to childhood, more than 500,000 viewers watched his tribute to the people who raised him through educational programming, including Captain Kangaroo, Easy Reader, Pee-Wee Herman, Cowboy Curtis and LeVar Burton from “Reading Rainbow.”

It ends where it began. On Sesame Street.

In the final image, Moore stands in front of the familiar stoop, hugging Susan as she holds a green Sesame Street sign. Behind them, Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, the Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch and Grover crowd the frame, laughing and waving.

No one more so than Moore, smiling like a second-grader who finally found the place he’d been trying to reach — the one generations of children once asked how to get to.

He finally made it.