Sesame Street/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• One odd piece of old vampire folklore is that they were compelled to count every grain of sand or each individual grain of rice in a pile. I have just been informed that Count von Count is a reference to this superstition, and that is awesome. --Haven
• I remember watching Sesame Street as a kid and absolutely adoring Count Von Count, but never understood why they chose to have him in particular be the one who teaches kids to count. Years later, I learned about some vampire myths (other than "stake to the heart kills them" or "repelled by a cross") and one of these myths is that, in the event that a vampire is after a person, that person could scatter rice on the ground, and this would save them because vampires would be forced to stop and count every single piece of rice. -- Rocket Happy
  • It's a really cool fact, but it's probably just coincidence. The Count is just a pun on the word "count", as in "Count Dracula".
• One concerning Cookie Monster: Of all the characters to promote healthy foods, why him? Well, not only does it work for Irony (after all, it's really saying something if even a cookie junkie like him likes veggies and fruit), but one of the main hurdles of promoting healthy eating is encouraging the young audience to get over being picky... and no character in the entire show is less picky than Cookie Monster! I don't know if this was the true idea behind it, but it's kind of a neat notion to think about. --Shaka Raka
• It's easy to view Fat Blue/Mr. Johnson as The Woobie in the various sketches involving him as a customer and Grover as a waiter/photographer/tailor/rental agent/hotdog vendor/etc. However, if you watch some of the earliest sketches, you can see that Mr. Johnson is an incredibly fussy and obnoxious Unsatisfiable Customer who drove Grover crazy with his absurd demands. Later sketches involving Grover driving Mr. Johnson crazy with his supposed incompetence could be seen as Grover getting back at him for his Jerkass behavior. Laser-Guided Karma delivered by a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass, with a dash of Beware the Nice Ones thrown in for spice!