Not many people know that the driving force behind the success of the television show Sesame Street–running for more than 50 years now–was a woman, but Anna Brodine does.

Brodine (right), a Kansas teenager, has won international awards for her documentary about Joan Ganz Cooney, who came up with the idea for the widely successful show seen in more than 150 countries worldwide since its inception in 1969. Brodine's documentary, Joan Ganz Cooney: The Unsung Hero Who Led Us All to Sesame Street, won a first place award and a second place award at the 2021 MY HERO Film Festival Awards.

With help from social studies teacher Susan Sittenauer but largely through her own initiative, Brodine learned a great deal about Sesame Street in the early days and just how hard Ganz Cooney had to work to get it off the ground.

Children's television programming at the time consisted largely of shows dedicated to making children laugh or otherwise entertain them–without emphasizing learning. Ganz Cooney wanted to change that and convinced a number of TV executives to go along with her plan. The first episode of Sesame Street aired on Nov. 10, 1969. The show celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019, still going strong. Along the way, the show gained more and more viewers, all the while emphasizing not only traditionally school-based learning concepts like English and Math but also cultural learning concepts like getting along with people of other races and social classes. Guiding all of that was Ganz Cooney, a female producer at a time when women weren't filling such roles.

The result of Brodine's doing all of that research, including lots of summer research, was the 12-minute film, which also made the top 10 for the Lowell Millken Center for Unsung Heroes contest in 2020.

Brodine, in 2022, was finishing her senior year at Seaman High School, in Topeka, Kan., and then planning to attend Wichita State University, majoring in video game design and animation.