Navaho Gunleg

You might already know this, but I only just found out today that the Muppets famous Mah Na Mah Na-song is actually a cover — a cover of a same-named 1969 song by Piero Umiliani. (Check here for more information about the composer.)

Now, of course, that alone isn’t all that interesting, but did you know this?

The Piero Umiliani version of the song was originally featured on the soundtrack to the Swedish soft-porn documentary “Sweden: Hell or Heaven“?

I didn’t…

It took me a while to find the original song, but I found a preview of it on this site if you want to listen to it.

It also seems that a certain Sesame Street version of the same song was shown on TV 2 years before the Muppets version aired. Don’t know if that same Sesame Street ever aired here in the Netherlands, but I only remember the Muppets-version.

Additionally, I also found out that:

Despite one of his previous creations, Big Bird from Sesame Street, having been on the cover of Time magazine the year before, Henson was unable to get funding in the US for his new project, The Muppet Show. Eventually, having made several distress calls, he was finally offered a deal by Lew Grade at ATV, on the understanding that Henson came over and filmed The Muppet Show in the UK.
[..]
And so Henson and his colleagues packed their Muppets in a series of giant trunks, and left sunny California for rainy, recession-hit Britain. That much of the story is fact.

Where it crosses the border into righteous apocrypha, however, is on the night that they landed in the UK, when Henson’s people started unpacking the Muppets. As they celebrated their new project, and discussed ideas for the forthcoming shows, they are said to have carefully removed from the heads of their Muppets a generous supply of the best psychedelic drugs the West Coast had to offer. Dr Teeth and The Electric Mayhem were devoted to prime West Coast marijuana while Kermit, apparently, had the acid.

It seems nobody can really verify whether the above story is really fact, but it sure would explain where some of their crazy (but funny) ideas came from.

Muppets, History, Music