Happy Halloween to The Count

the Count

Every episode of Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter and number of the day.  Sesame Street uses a vast variety of performative techniques to bring the 26 letters and 20 numbers to live each day.  These include skits and songs for Muppets, celebrity guest shots with or without Muppets, Muppets talking with children, and every possible kind of animation.  But the Muppet most closely associated with numbers is, of course, the Count.   The Count who loves to count.

Some Fun Facts courtesy of the Summer interns’ research:  The Count loves all numbers, but his favorite number is 34,969.   The Count was born on October 9, 1,830,653 B.C.[E.], which makes him nearly 2 million years old. He shares his castle with 2,012 bats, among them, Lyuba, Grisha, Misha, Sacha, and Tatiana.   Fun Fact that we could not verify:  The Count has had two partners over the years—a Countess who counts forward and a Countess who counts backwards.

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Bela Lugosi. Image ID: 1628911

The Count is an Anything Muppet—his distinctive features and costume were added to a standard shape Muppet.  What makes the Count appropriate to today’s blog is that those distinctive eyebrows, sharp features and costume refer to Dracula, especially as portrayed by Bela Lugosi in the play and Universal films of the 1930s.  There is no reason to consider him a vampire, but... he played a pipe organ, wears a cape, hangs out with bats, and has a low, guttural laugh.   

My favorite Count counting numbers number doesn’t refer to a Hollywood monster, however.  It parodies a Hollywood icon of sophistication.  It is a sequence used for the number Seven (and, I think, also Eleven).  He and the blond Countess sing about Seven to the tune of Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” (“Heaven, I’m in Heaven…”), made famous by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat (1935).  What I love about this sequence is that although neither Muppet has legs, they seem to take the same dance poses as Astaire and Rogers.  The Countess’ hair and the wisps of feathers reference Rogers’ amazing Bernard Newman costume. 

Happy Halloween!  Enjoy counting to 31!