As I Was Going To St Ives - Use in Popular Culture

Use in Popular Culture

• In the 1995 film Die Hard with a Vengeance, the rhyme is presented to the protagonists by the villain as a riddle, giving them thirty seconds to telephone him on the number "555 plus the answer" or a bomb would detonate. After several guesses, they eventually solve the riddle, calling the number 555-0001 which proves to be correct. They missed the 30-second deadline, but the bomb did not explode since the villain had not said "Simon says."

• The rhyme was recited by Mary Murphy's character while caring for a cat with seven kittens in the movie A Man Alone. Later the character played by Ray Milland who overheard the rhyme offers her the answer and Murphy's character explains that she alone was going to St. Ives.

• The rhyme was also the basis of a Sesame Street Muppet skit from the show's first season, in which the boy Muppet holding a numeral 7 sings the rhyme as a song to the girl Muppet twice (the second time, the girl is busy writing down the calculations) and finally, in keeping true to the spirit of the riddle, reveals the answer as 1 (the traditional answer), because he was going to St. Ives and the kits, cats, sacks and wives were going the other way. Then the girl turns the tables on the boy and asks how many were going the other way. She then reveals the mathematical answer from her calculations: 1 man + 7 wives + 49 sacks + 343 cats + 2,401 kittens, which comes to 2,801. Astonished, the boy responds, "How about that?!"

• The rhyme was also featured in a Pogo comic story, "More Mother Goosery Rinds" in which Albert Alligator himself portrays Mother Goose and Pogo a traveling musician. After going over several Mother Goose rhymes they get to the St. Ives riddle, albeit replacing "seven" with "forty" and while Albert (Mother Goose) keeps trying to cogitate the answer, Pogo boasts he knows it...and he answers "one", which baffles "Mother Goose" (Albert Alligator). Pogo says that if the kits, cats, sacks and wives weren't going to St. Ives, maybe they were going somewhere else, such as Altoona, Pennsylvania. So Albert again recites the riddle, this time ending with "Kits, cats, sacks, wives, how many were going to...ALTOONA??" But by this time, Pogo has already gone upon his way.

• Mad magazine used it in at least two articles over the years for the following parodies:

As I was going to St Ives

I met a man with seven wives

Of course, the seven wives weren't his

But here in France, that's how it is

and

As I was going to St Ives

I met a man with seven wives

I know this sounds absurd and loony

But that poor man was Mickey Rooney!

• British poet and humorist Colin West wrote a satire on "As I was going to St Ives", called "As I Went Down To Milton Keynes". The items listed are "a king with seven queens", and for every queen a prince, for every prince a princess, for every princess an earl, for every earl a lady, for every lady a baby, and for every baby a cat.