The man who made Sesame Street’s Count Von Count count

polygon.com:

In 1972, early into his tenure at Sesame Street, Norman Stiles thought up a pun. The former Merv Griffin comedy writer had spent his first year penning scripts around the kids program’s strict curriculum, but he was always encouraged to craft new ideas for characters. After conceiving The Amazing Mumford with a couple of colleagues, he received another jolt of inspiration: What if Count Dracula taught… counting?

“I thought it would be funny, but I didn’t really know what to teach with it,” Stiles says. “To just teach counting would be boring.”

That’s when Sharon Lerner walked by Stiles’ office. The curriculum specialist worked as a liaison between the research and entertainment departments, making sure segments accurately and engagingly conveyed their simple educational lessons. Stiles quickly called her over and shared his vision, knowing he needed something beyond wordplay. She came up with an easy solution: enumeration.

“That was really the key to making The Count work, because now it was, ‘He counts things,’ and counting things is an endless thing,” Stiles says. “His obsession with counting things gave him a kind of comedic power the same as Cookie Monster. Instead of ‘I want to bite your neck,’ it’s ‘I want to count your neck.’”

After a successful pitch to Sesame Street co-creator Jon Stone and head writer Jeff Moss, Stiles still had to sell puppeteer Jerry Nelson on the character. In between episodes being shot, he nervously approached the set of Hooper’s store (“I was relatively new,” Stiles says) and explained the concept, suggesting a puppet in the mold of Bela Lugosi who couldn’t resist counting. “He said, ‘Sure, I love it,’” Stiles recalls. Soon, Nelson convened with Jim Henson to get the Muppets creator’s