Sesame Street Archives - Retro Reminiscing Video and Pictures

Sesame Street’s Counting Songs: The Numbers That Got Stuck In Our Heads

When people mention the Sesame Street counting song, a lot of us instantly hear that funky:

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5…”

The best-remembered version is the Pinball Number Count, the animated segment where a pinball rolls through wild little number-themed machines while the song counts up to 12. It was recorded by The Pointer Sisters in 1976, which explains why it had so much more groove than a regular kids’ counting song.

That was part of Sesame Street’s genius. They didn’t talk down to kids. They used real music, catchy animation, and repetition that worked. You learned numbers without feeling like you were being taught.

There were plenty of other number songs on Sesame Street, including ones focused on counting to 10, but the Pinball Number Count is probably the one most people remember first. It was funky, fast, colorful, and impossible to forget.

For a lot of us, that little pinball didn’t just teach numbers. It gave us one of the greatest earworms in children’s TV history.

Mahna Mahna

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.

The Fast Talking Guy FedEx Commercial

John “Motormouth” Moschitta Jr., also known as “The Fast Talking Guy became most popular from the FedEx commercials starting in 1981 which lead to six Cleo awards. Cleo’s celebrate the excellence in advertising. Since then he appeared in over 100 commercials, this FedEx is probably his most remembered ad. Moschitta first appeared in the ABC TV series That’s Incredible. He has been credited in the Guinness Book of World Records as the World’s Faster Talker at 586 words per minute.

John has been on many television shows from Sesame Street, Garfield and Friends, Pinky and the Brain , announcer on Hollywood Squares (2003-2004) and as himself in Family Guy as the FedEx voice guy in the Fox-y-Lady episode in 2009. He is credited in movies like Young Doctors In Love, Starchaser, Transformer Movie and the radio announcer in Dick Tracy.