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BAY CITY, Michigan (AP) -- T-shirts featuring "Sesame Street" characters, made to promote an annual pub crawl, have drawn criticism from some who say the shirts could send the wrong message to children.
Sales of the T-shirts depicting characters from the public television program were stopped Thursday after angering local substance abuse workers and prompting phone calls to a local PBS station.
The shirts show Bert and Ernie with lolling tongues and unfocused eyes, clutching cigarettes and bottles.
On the back of the shirt is Oscar the Grouch and the epithet: "I got trashed at the Bay City pub crawl." And in a parody of one of the show's famous lines, the T-shirts ask, "Can you tell me how to get to Midland Street?"
"Any caring adult that I have spoken to that has seen this has just been appalled," said Goldie Wood, project director for the Bay County Neighborhood Resource Center. "They don't want that kind of a community message. And they don't want their children to see it."
The T-shirts were intended to promote Bay City's annual pub crawl, which is planned for Wednesday. Taverns typically get together and offer drink specials for anyone wearing the pub crawl T-shirt.
"We felt that if some people are offended by it we'd rather just stop it," said John Gillman of ATS Printing, which designed and produced the shirts. "It's something that we never thought would be controversial."
Gillman said he has called the taverns involved and told them to stop selling the shirts. He said he did not know how many had been printed up or sold.
Federal laws do not allow caricatures or cartoon characters that would appeal to younger people to be used for the promotion of alcohol or cigarettes.
Stephen Braswell, a spokesman for Sesame Workshop in New York, said attorneys have not yet decided what they might do.
i want a pic of a drunk bert and ernie.
