Want to hear something wild? The guy who sings “Mighty Little Man,” the theme song for “Young Sheldon” — the first major spin-off of “The Big Bang Theory” that stars Iain Armitage as a young version of Jim Parsons’ grown-up genius — also appears on the show, and he’s the guy from “Blue’s Clues.”

That’s a lot of information I just threw at you, so let’s back up. “Young Sheldon,” which ran from 2017 to 2024 and was created by original “Big Bang Theory” head honcho Chuck Lorre and another veteran of the original sitcom, Steve Molaro, opens each episode with a song called “Mighty Little Man” with lyrics like, “I am a mighty little man / Nobody else is stronger than I am / Yesterday I moved a mountain / I bet I could be your hero / I am a mighty little man.” As it turns out, this song is an original creation by Steve Burns, an actor and musician who included it on his 2003 album “Songs for Dustmites.” Burns also plays a small role on “Young Sheldon,” but you probably know him best as a fictional version of himself from “Blue’s Clues.” Allow me to break this all down.

So who exactly does Steve Burns even play in “Young Sheldon”? Across four episodes of the show, he plays a guy named Nathan, who lives in the same town as Sheldon and the Cooper family and also happens to be really into comic books. He first shows up in the season 3 episode “A Live Chicken, a Fried Chicken and Holy Matrimony,” where Meemaw (Annie Potts) finds him watching something with Sheldon in the Cooper household — specifically, “Star Trek,” which Sheldon has been trying to hunt down to no avail.

Nathan shows up from time to time in “Young Sheldon,” including in the season 5 episode “A Pink Cadillac and a Glorious Tribal Dance” (where he ends up joining Sheldon for a comic book convention), the season 6 episode “A Tougher Nut and a Note on File” (where he and Sheldon trade comic books), and the season 7 installment “A New Home and a Traditional Texas Torture,” where Nathan moves to Pasadena and Adult Sheldon’s voice-over (done by Jim Parsons) says he never encountered Nathan again.

As far as Steve Burns goes, for the umpteenth time, he hosted the Nickelodeon series “Blue’s Clues” from 1996 until 2002, at which point he handed over the reins to Donovan Patton (who, unlike Burns, didn’t use his real first name for his character, preferring to use the name “Joe”). Burns’ time on “Blue’s Clues” was marked by his gentle and patient hosting gig as Steve, Blue’s “owner” … and years after he left the show, he worked on “Young Sheldon” and started a series of videos that provide a safe space for grown-up fans of “Blue’s Clues” who might be having a rough time in this tumultuous world.

According to a 2024 interview with Today, Burns first checked in with his now-adult fans on X (formerly known as Twitter) in 2021, and ever since, he’s been making TikTok videos that just basically serve as a mental health break for viewers (Burns usually asks how the viewer is doing and doesn’t say a lot, just providing a little support). 

“The philosophy of ‘Blue’s Clues’ was always about respect, and always about communicating with the home viewer from a place of understanding and without condescension,” Burns told the outlet. “Back in the day, that meant talking about shapes and colors and graham crackers, but if you simply scale that up, now we’re talking about the pandemic and student loans and adulting. We’re talking about how difficult it is to move through this life as an adult person, but also how wonderful it is.” This is an incredibly sweet gesture from Burns, and also, now you know he sang the theme song for “Young Sheldon” to boot.

“Young Sheldon” is available to stream on both Max and Netflix.