Sunday Pages: "Everywhere I Go"

A song by Moose and Zee

Dear Reader,

Once upon a time, back when our kids were little, there was a cable channel for young children called Noggin. The programming was extremely slow-paced and wonderfully creative. This is where we watched shows like Little Bear, Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Friends, LazyTown, Miffy & Friends, and the magnificent Yo Gabba Gabba!. For a good five or six years, as we hunkered down in a remote house with two kids born 20 months apart, the music from that station became the soundtrack of our lives.

We haven’t tuned in for many years, and even if we tried to, we wouldn’t find it. Noggin doesn’t exist anymore.¹ In 2009, when our kids were three and four respectively, it was rebranded as “Nick Jr.”—Nick for “Nickelodeon,” with all the corporate slickness that implies.

In between the shows and the commercials, when they had a free minute here and there, Noggin ran channel promos. These took the form of cute songs performed by the network’s two spokes-creatures, Moose and Zee. (Zee, a blue bird, did not speak, so technically Moose was the only spokes-creature.)

All of these promo songs were good, but one in particular—“Everywhere I Go”—was next level. The instant we heard the first three jangly notes on the ukulele, we would stop what we were doing and run to the TV to watch. There was never a time then, and there is not a time now, that hearing “Everywhere I Go” failed to make me happy. The singing, by veteran voice actor Paul Christie, is just the right blend of confident, imperfect, and hopeful. The animation is delightfully weird. There were times when the song came on when I would look at my wife and we would literally be like: “Yay!”

This was before every video clip ever made was readily available on YouTube, before smartphones, before DVR, so we could only hear the song when they decided to play it—as with “Hey Hey What Can I Do” on the radio, back in the day. (Having no control over when you hear a piece of music, and having to wait for some faceless authority to randomly play it—having pleasure withheld—is something Gen Z and the Alphas can never fully appreciate.) Noggin only existed for a brief sliver of time, and I’m grateful that it overlapped with the brief sliver of time when we were tuning in to little-kid shows.

The song begins:

Days are the sunniest,
Jokes are the funniest,
Rabbits are the bunny-est,
Hives are the honey-est,
Elephants the tonniest,
Troubles—they’re the none-iest,
Everywhere I go.

Writing the lyrics down, I realize now, neutralizes the inventive power of the wordplay, so I’m not going to spoil the fun for you.

Some weeks, “Sunday Pages” turns to the poetry of Shakespeare or Milton or Yeats for wisdom. Not today. I don’t know if it was the full Worm Moon or what, but this week has been so emotionally draining, Dear Reader, that the best I can offer is a clever, joyful song written by some anonymous genius at a defunct cable network and performed by a cartoon moose. May it delight you as much as it delights me:

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was the journalist and author Nina Burleigh:

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Photo credit: Moose (left) and Zee.

1. It was launched as a streaming service in 2015.