Tonight when I called Victor he answered the phone with a jaunty little ditty: “Waa-na-na-na.”

And so forth.It’s a favorite little tune of his and Allison’s, and fits my last name quite well. Of course we all remember it from Sesame Street, but then Nick and I got curious about where it actually came from. It turns out it’s from a sauna scene of a 1968 Italian softcore porno filmed in Sweden as a pseudo-documentary. So it was just as absurd as we could have hoped.

For your listening/viewing pleasure, and in honor of Victor’s birthday, here are a number of versions:

• The Muppets version
• The original Sesame Street version
• The hit bossa nova version from 1968 by Giorgio Moroder
• The original film version (it’s as SFW as an episode of “America’s Next Top Model”)
• A better version by Cake

• A weird version by a Brazilian band pretending to be Japanese (for Victor)
• Mr. Devious’ version for Super Bowl XL in which he mumbles the Pittsburgh Steelers’ names
• Scottish commercial for Irn-Bru soda
• Bonus: If you feel like hurting yourself ’90s-style, click here for the worst music video ever. If you listen long enough, it’s reminiscent of “Dick in a Box.”
• The weirdest fan video ever lets us listen to it sampled for “Hey White Boy” by That Handsome Devil.
• Another rap song - with profanity!

You can track down the rest of the Wikipedia references on your own.

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