I don’t think this post will exactly break the Internet like Kim Kardashian’s ass or anything, but I do predict that it will become pretty popular today. Perhaps we’ll see this same clip later today on Huffington Post. I certainly think that it’s going to get around once unleashed. But I’m starting it here and now. Remember: You heard it here first.

Nope. Actually, that’s probably not true. You probably heard it for the very first time when you were in the first or second grade…

If you are—ahem—“of a certain age” and went to school in the United States in the 70s or 80s there is very little doubt that at one point or another you were shown a filmstrip in music class that (ridiculously) explained how reed instruments came about via their discovery by a mythological creature. (I saw it in a “library class” in the second grade—and if memory serves, it was my very own mother, who was a library volunteer at my grade school, who showed it to the class.)

What am I talking about? I am talking about “The Pipes Of Pan.”

Huh?

This morning on Twitter I was alerted to the fact that today is the birthday of the great supernatural writer Arthur Machen, who was born on March 3, 1863. Machen’s most famous work is his 1890 novella The Great God Pan which none other than Stephen King has called:  “Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language.”

As I read this one tweet, a song began to play—over and over and over and over and over again—in my still groggy brain:

“Pan, Pan, Greek god Pan—One half goat, the other half maaaaan!”

Do these lyrics ring a bell for you? I’ve had that dumb ditty stuck in my head for well over 40 years now. Your mileage may vary, but like I say, if you went to school in America in the 70s and 80s—and probably even into the early 90s—there is a very, very strong likelihood that you not only have been exposed to this earworm of a song at a very young age, it’s also probably taken up residence in your noggin permanently.

“Pan, Pan, Greek god Pan—One half goat, the other half maaaaan!”

It’s not like it would be as familiar to a generation like a “Schoolhouse Rock” number would be, but it’s close. This isn’t the first time that it’s occurred to me to blog about “The Pipes Of Pan” but in the past I was always thwarted by a lack of a video clip. Until now. Someone kindly posted it in 2014.

It is exactly how I remembered it.

Apparently I wasn’t the only person who has been looking for “The Pipes Of Pan” online. By the time I typed “Pan, Pan, Greek…” Google happily filled in the rest of it.

Back in 2007, Donna Bowman at the AV Club posted the following answer to a reader’s query about a dim and distant childhood memory of the iconic filmstrip:

We get a fair number of questions asking about filmstrips from readers’ school days, and they pose a unique identification challenge. On one hand, filmstrips aren’t exactly a mass medium. Any particular one might be used in hundreds of schools across the country without ever achieving the saturation level of even the lowest-rated basic-cable TV show. So web searches for the lyrics you quoted, Erica, as well as subsets and variants thereof, turn up scattered references on bulletin boards and blogs in the form of offhand comments—no discussion of the source. (The Internet turns out to be great at locating dozens of people posting “Oh yeah, I remember that! What the heck was it?” and zero people who actually know what it was.)

 On the other hand, unlike songs and TV shows, filmstrips are actually kept in the collections of libraries—whose catalogs can be searched with tools like OCLC WorldCat. There don’t seem to be any cartoony filmstrips about Greek mythology that fit the bill, but one of those bulletin-boarders recalled that the academic subject matter was music. Paydirt!

“The Pipes Of Pan” is part of the Once Upon A Sound collection, five strips produced by the venerable Jam Handy corporation in 1971 to teach elementary-school students about musical instrument families—horns, drums, strings, and in this case, woodwinds. Since filmstrips became an outmoded technology, some companies have been repackaging them on DVD, and luckily for us, Clearvue & SVE did that for the Once Upon A Sound series in 2005. There’s even a brief streaming preview, and although it’s limited to the new framing video the Clearvue folks have packaged around the filmstrip, it includes a few screenshots of the filmstrip itself, confirming the “cutesy” and “cherubic” character design of the nature god. While I couldn’t locate an mp3 of Pan’s theme song, I’m confident that this is your memory. And if those bulletin-board posters are any indication, the memory of thousands of ‘70s-era third-graders like you.

And I’m pretty confident that many of our readers will remember it, too (although admittedly, my wife told me that it did not ring a bell for her).

Why hasn’t someone sampled this?