About

Elmo Chugs Along Like A Train refers to a scene from a 2017 Sesame Street episode where Elmo sings a song about dancing with Jason Derulo, passionately singing the lyric "Elmo chugs along like a train" to describe how he dances some days. The clip and its audio went viral on TikTok in December 2021 following the viral success of the Elmo “Paper Towel Roll” sound, which similarly features Elmo passionately singing.

Origin

In 2017, an episode of Sesame Street^[1] aired where Elmo sings a song with Jason Derulo about dancing. The full song was uploaded to the Sesame Street YouTube channel in February 2017. Around the 1:27 mark, Elmo sings, "Elmo chugs along like a train" with increased passion in his voice (shown below).

On December 18th, 2021, TikToker^[2] @martha_gvf posted the clip of Elmo singing the lyric with an on-screen caption reading "since paper towel roll is trending lets not forget 'elmo chugs along like a train,'" directly referencing the paper towel roll sound as the inspiration (shown below). The video gained over 1.9 million views in just under two weeks, and is captioned "elmo put his elmussy into this one."

Spread

The original sound became popularized on TikTok over the following weeks, inspiring over 47,000 videos in under two weeks. On December 19th, 2021, TikToker^[3] @postdelone posted a video dancing to the song that gained over 9.1 million views in 10 days (shown below, left). On December 24th, TikTokers^[4] @cost_n_mayor posted a dance video to the song, gaining over 13.9 million views in five days (shown below, right). These are the two highest engagement videos using the sound as of December 29th, 2021.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References