While the SICP lectures do in fact have a ridiculously huge scope, I was also surprised when rewatching them -- mostly with how basic they were when they started. "Here's adding, here's subtracting, here's what a lambda is." One thing that's nice about SICP is that assignment is very consciously "added on later."

I wouldn't have expected them to be beginner material either, but then I met a nice gal named emma on Freenode's ##club-ubuntu IRC channel, who was using SICP to learn programming. I remember remarking that this must be very hard and she didn't understand why it should be.