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"I should end that mixtape with a couple of songs from Sesame Street," I thought. "The joke would be that I'm including songs from Sesame Street as a joke, but then when you listen to them they're actually really good songs." But then I actually wasn't able to pick just two Sesame Street songs I legitimately like. Look. I really like Jim Henson.

X1.  "I Don't Want To Live On The Moon", Sesame Street

I don't have like a complicated backstory for this one. I just actually like this song. The CTW/muppets folks were musicians! They wrote some good music. This song actually originally appeared on an album CTW released of Sesame Street music in 1980, the sketch wasn't shot until a few years later.

X2.  "We All Sing With the Same Voice", Sesame Street

This is from 1981 but I remember it showing up on Sesame Street airings later in the 80s. It's solidly children's music but I'm certain this song stayed in the heads of parents who overheard it for a long time.

I have this theory that if you transposed this song into a minor key and covered it in a kinda 80s Collective Soul/U2 sorta style it would pass itself off well as epic rock.

X3.  "Máh-Ná-Máh-Ná", Piero Umiliani

On September 4, 1968 a deeply mediocre exploitation film weakly disguised as a documentary— one of a series of such films directed by Luigi Scattini— was released, named "Sweden, Heaven & Hell". The movie loosely strung together various scenes purporting to show life in Sweden and, particularly, all the sexy sex that was being had in Sweden in 1968. The only reason anyone remembers this movie is for a single scene, not a good scene, it's boring and thoughtlessly shot and it's not even sexy, I'm not even going to link it— where a bunch of women wearing fashionable winter coats walk through snowy streets, then enter a sauna where they sit, titillatingly wrapped in towels that (I guess you're supposed to imagine) they're naked underneath. No, there is no cleavage.

But! This scene contained a really weird song by workhorse film composer Piero Umiliani, and this is what history remembers. The song was at some point released as a single, and the single was a minor chart hit in late 1969 and started showing up as background music on the Benny Hill and Red Skelton shows. But way before that happened, Joan Ganz Cooney, the original showrunner of "Sesame Street", heard the song on the radio. She got the Muppeteers to do a version which aired on the November 27 episode of Sesame Street, and then three days later on the 30th Henson did a version with new puppets on the Ed Sullivan show (where the Muppets had been regularly appearing since 1966). The Ed Sullivan version of the sketch then appeared mostly unchanged in the first episode of "The Muppet Show" in 1976. If you've heard this song, it's probably this last version.

The Piero Umiliani version of "Mahna Mahna" doesn't quite have the memorability or the comic hook of Henson's version, but it's got its own weird vibe. Listen to that production.