online community focused on sharing and reminiscing about video, audio, and images that stir our memories of the past – old television, theme songs, commercials, print advertisements, the sights and sounds you remember
Mahna Mahna is one of those nonsense songs that somehow parked itself in everyone’s brain forever.
Most of us remember it from The Muppets, with the shaggy little “Mahna Mahna” character singing the goofy lead while the two pink creatures, the Snowths, answer back. But the song actually started in a very different place. It was written by Italian composer Piero Umiliani for the 1968 Italian film Svezia, inferno e paradiso, released in English as Sweden: Heaven and Hell.
Then Jim Henson and company turned it into something completely different. The Muppets performed it on Sesame Street in 1969, then on The Ed Sullivan Show, and later it became one of the memorable sketches from the first episode of The Muppet Show in 1976.
The funny part is, the lyrics don’t mean anything. That’s the whole charm. It’s just a silly call-and-response tune, but once you hear it, good luck getting it out of your head. Like a lot of the best Muppet moments, it worked because it was simple, weird, and somehow hilarious without needing a real punchline.
Before cooking shows became calm, polished, and perfect, there was Graham Kerr, The Galloping Gourmet. He didn’t just walk onto the set, he practically burst in, full of energy, jokes, charm, and enough butter and wine to make every 1970s kitchen feel fancy. His show became a hit in the late 1960s and early 1970s, long before Food Network made TV chefs everyday celebrities.
In this clip, he’s doing what we would now call a kitchen “hack,” showing how to clarify butter with the help of a Dixie Cup, which also happened to be the advertiser. Back then, that kind of thing didn’t feel like a forced product placement. It was just part of the show, part cooking lesson, part commercial, and all entertainment. And somehow, Graham Kerr made even melted butter seem like a performance.
Oh, the magical opening for The Wonderful World of Disney and the wonderful world of color! This was the time when we got our first color TV, and we would sing this whenever a TV show was in color. Growing up, we didn’t have much money on Dad’s salary as a Marine, but we had one of the first color TVs on the market. What a hero he was bringing this big 21-inch console into our home! Between our toys and TV, we were all set.
We always looked forward to Sundays with The Wonderful World Of Disney to wrap up our weekend. Then came that sad little realization: the show was ending, bedtime was coming, and school was waiting for us the next morning.
The Disney anthology show first began on ABC in 1954 as Walt Disney’s Disneyland. It later became Walt Disney Presents, then moved to NBC in 1961 as Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, which was a perfect title for the era when color TV still felt like magic. By 1969, it became The Wonderful World of Disney, the name so many of us remember. Over the years it moved between ABC, NBC, and CBS, with different titles including The Disney Sunday Movie and The Magical World of Disney. The series has continued in different forms and special presentations for decades, making it one of the longest-running prime-time programs in American television history.
For a lot of us, it wasn’t just a TV show. It was part of the Sunday night routine, that last bit of weekend magic before Monday morning came knocking.
It still wasn’t as bad as when Dad turned on Lawrence Welk, but Hee Haw always felt like the country cousin of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. It had the same quick jokes, blackout skits, silly one-liners, and regular cast bits, just with more overalls, cornfields, banjos, and country music stars dropping by.
The show first aired in 1969, right around the same era when Laugh-In was still the cool, fast-moving comedy show everyone was talking about. Hee Haw took that same rapid-fire style and gave it a country spin, and somehow it stuck around for years. Even if you weren’t a big country music fan, you probably remember the corny jokes, the haystacks, the “salute” segments, and someone in the house laughing at lines that made the rest of us groan. And who can forget Grandpa?
If you grew up in the late 1960s, chances are you remember The F.B.I.. It wasn’t flashy—it just felt real, and that’s what made it work. It was more or less my mom’s show; she watched it, and for me, it was the only decent thing on TV.
What made it stand out was Efrem Zimbalist Jr.. He brought a quiet authority to Inspector Lewis Erskine—calm, believable, and never over the top. While other actors leaned into drama, he leaned into restraint, and that made him unforgettable. Now here’s something a lot of people don’t realize. Zimbalist didn’t come from a typical Hollywood background. His father, Efrem Zimbalist Sr., was one of the most respected classical violinists of his time. Born in Russia, he became an international music star and later served as director of the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. So while the son became a television icon, the father was already a legend in a completely different world.
The show aired on ABC from 1965 to 1974, starting on Sunday nights before moving around the schedule. Its realism was helped by cooperation with the real FBI, giving it a grounded, procedural feel.
f you’ve ever heard someone say a show “jumped the shark,” this is the clip they’re talking about.
I mean… here’s Fonzie, cool as ever, leather jacket and all… out on water skis… and yeah… literally jumping over a shark on Happy Days.
And somewhere along the way, that moment turned into a phrase we still use today.
So here’s how that even happened.
Back in the late ’90s, a guy named Jon Hein created a website called Jump the Shark. The whole idea was to track the exact moment when a TV show starts to go downhill. Not slowly… not over time… but that one moment where you sit there and go, “Alright… what are we doing here?”
And the moment he pointed to?
This one. Fonzie. The shark. 1977. Episode “Hollywood: Part 3.”
From there, it just stuck. The phrase took off, and now people use it for everything. Not just TV… anything that goes too far trying to stay relevant. A show, a company, even people. When it stops feeling real and starts feeling forced… that’s when you hear it… “they jumped the shark.”
Now here’s the part a lot of people don’t realize… the people involved didn’t think it was some disaster at the time.
Henry Winkler has talked about it in interviews and basically said… look, the show had already done physical comedy, and to him, it was just another fun stunt. He’s even pointed out that ratings didn’t suddenly crash after that episode, so in his mind, it didn’t ruin anything.
Writer Fred Fox Jr. said something similar. They were trying to make those Hollywood episodes bigger… more exciting… something different. At the time, it wasn’t, “we’re out of ideas”… it was, “let’s top what we’ve already done.”
And even creator Garry Marshall defended it. He always said people forget just how big Fonzie was back then. The idea was to give him a larger-than-life moment. Something memorable.
Well… mission accomplished.
Because here we are, decades later, still talking about it.
And that’s the funny part. The phrase “jump the shark” is usually meant as a knock… like something went downhill. But this scene? It’s one of the most remembered moments in TV history.
So yeah… maybe it did jump the shark.
But it also made sure none of us would ever forget it.
