POE: Phrases of Excitement.
An utterance of great surprise, an exclamation of joy, awe, or fright.
“Great Googly Moogly” has taken a long and impressive journey to reach its current form. The expression first appeared in the form of “Good Googa Mooga“, a song by the Magic Tones, in 1953. Just a few years later, in 1956, The Cadets added a related “Great goo-ga-moo-ga!”, to the song Stranded in the Jungle.
The first known iteration of “great googly moogly” appeared in 1961, when Howlin’ Wolf made a cover of the song Goin’ Down Slow, originally written by St Louis Jimmy Oden and added the phrase. Some speculate that the phrase may have been in used as “Googly Moogly”, without the “Great”, even before that. Just like with many slang terms that arose before the internet, it is impossible to know for sure.
Regardless, great Googly Moogly became more popular after Frank Zappa included the saying in Nanook Rubs it in 1974.
It’s also interesting to note that the Canadian animated kids’ TV show Maggie and the Ferocious Beast often featured the expression great googly moogly — one of the main characters, the Ferocious Beast himself, says it multiple times per episode.
Great googly moogly has enjoyed a particularly long shelf life, and an entry defining the phrase, as “unadulterated excitement”, first appeared on the Urban Dictionary in the year 2003.