Mahna, Mahna
What is a Mahna Mahna, anyway?
This is a song I’ve loved since childhood. It’s probably one of the best-known musical segments from The Muppet Show, and the song is infectious enough to have been brought back several times, at least once by Sesame Street (this time as Phenomena) and most recently in a Dr Pepper commercial (Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper, of all things). This song has a long and strange history, as I’ve recently been made aware, a history that includes Swedish pornography, children’s television, puppets, and now, Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper.
The song first appeared in 1968 on the soundtrack to an Italian documentary about Sweden called “Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso” (Sweden Heaven or Hell). Sources indicate it was a “soft-core documentary,” which I can only suppose means there were a lot of soft focus nude stills of Swedish girls with the camera panning around ala Ken Burns. The song, titled Mah Na Mah Na, was credited to Italian composer Piero Umiliani.
One year later, a French singer named Henri Salvador wrote his own lyrics to the song and recorded it under the title Mais Non Mais Non, which is probably French for something. I don’t know. I took Spanish for a couple years, then Latin, and then Spanish again, but never French.
It’s anyone’s guess how Jim Henson came across the song and adapted it for the family-friendly Muppet Show (and later, Sesame Street), and I wonder who is going to be getting the royalties for that Dr Pepper commercial.
The best source for this information is probably Peter McLennan’s site on Piero Umiliani. Most of the information I’ve presented is taken directly from Peter’s site.
No word on what a Mahna Mahna is, though we do know it was the name of Umiliani’s boat. Which begs the question, which came first, the song or the boat?