A SONG IN THE PARKS
To Walt Disney, the creation of a theme park was the next logical step for a man who had spent most of his life making movies. In many ways, his “magical little park,” as he called it, would be just like the movies. It would have stories, themes, sets, action, dialogue, humor, drama, happy endings and, of course, music.
But there would be one very important difference. At Disneyland people would feel as if they were actually walking into the movies. Instead of just sitting in a darkened theater vicariously enjoying a motion picture up on a screen, they would be right in the middle of it with the action unfolding all around them.
Not surprisingly, Walt was very conscious of what music would be played in Disneyland. The soundtrack for the park would be just as important as the score for a motion picture. The only difference was that Disneyland would have many scores. Each land would have one, as would most of the attractions. Even some of the shops and restaurants would have their own musical variations.
And then, of course, there were the songs. As in a musical motion picture, they would be an integral part of the Disneyland experience, advancing and in some cases even telling the story that goes along with an attraction.
Some of the music was simply adapted from the films to the theme park. For instance, “The Unbirthday Song” is heard at the Mad Tea Party and “You Can Fly! You Can Fly! You Can Fly!” provides the background for Peter Pan’s Flight.
There are also a few obscure songs from Disney films that have been adapted or arranged for Disneyland. The melody for “Meet Me Down on Main Street,” which has served as the unofficial theme song for Main Street, U.S.A. since the mid-1950s, had its origins in the 1950 Donald Duck cartoon Crazy Over Daisy. In the short, Donald plays a Gay ‘90s beau trying to woo the ever-elusive Daisy Duck; hence, the turn-of-the-century melody and feel.
Tom Adair and Disney music director Oliver Wallace are credited as the writers of the song, which was released as a single by a barbershop quartet called the Mellomen in the late 1950s (it’s their version that is heard on this collection).
But there have been many songs written especially for the Disneyland and Walt Disney World theme parks. Several of them were written in the 1960s when a certain pair of brothers were working as staff songwriters for the Disney Studio. So, take a wild guess as to who those brothers are.
Did you guess the Sherman brothers? Not surprisingly, Richard and Robert Sherman proved to be just as effective (and prolific) writing songs for Disneyland as they did penning them for Disney films and TV shows.
One such tune was a theme song for an Adventureland attraction that features singing birds, flowers and tikis. The Enchanted Tiki Room opened at Disneyland in 1963 and was the first to use the Audio-Animatronics ® system creating realistic-looking animated figures that move, talk and sing.
The Shermans wrote a bouncy little song for the Tiki Room called – what else? – “The Tiki Tiki Tiki Room,” that’s filled with shameless puns and groaning one-liners, but it’s the type of song that’s so irresistibly infectious that people end up walking out of the attraction humming it.
Another Sherman brothers song that’s imminently hummable (and even that’s an understatement) wasn’t actually written for an attraction at Disneyland.
It came out when Walt was in the process of putting together an attraction for UNICEF for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. One day he asked the brothers to look at a mock-up of the exhibit, which featured mechanical figures in native costumes from around the world, each singing their respective national anthem.
“The idea and the animation were great,” said Richard Sherman, “but what a cacophony of sound.”
“That’s the problem,” he recalled Walt as saying. “I want you guys to come up with a simple little song that has the idea of spirit and brotherly love and goodwill… and can you write it fast?”
The Shermans did, coming up with “It’s a Small World (After All),” which debuted at the New York World’s Fair and quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. Since that time, the attraction and the song have opened at Disneyland, the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland and most recently at Euro Disneyland in France. Not only that, “It’s a Small World” is one of the most readily recognizable Disney tunes ever written.
Another pavilion Disney created for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair was the Carousel of Progress. Sponsored by General Electric, the show was designed to demonstrate the ways electricity and modern conveniences had improved the quality of people’s lives.
Walt needed a song to bridge the changes in scenes, so, as usual, he turned to the Sherman brothers, who responded with “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.”
After it had finished its run at the World’s Fair, Walt decided to make some changes in the show and move it to Disneyland. The “new and improved” version, which opened in 1967, featured improved Audio-Animatronics figures and a more sophisticated “moving” carousel theater in which the audience revolved from scene to scene.
When the Carousel of Progress moved to Walt Disney World in 1973, “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” was retired (replaced by another Sherman brothers song, “The Best Time of Your Life”). However, it received a new lease on life in 1983 when it became a featured song at Horizons at EPCOT Center in the Walt Disney World resort.
Despite what you may be thinking, the Sherman brothers weren’t the only ones writing songs for Disney during the 1960s. George Bruns, the composer responsible for scoring such films as Sleeping Beauty and writing such hits as “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” was also quite prolific during this period and he, too, tried his hand at writing a song or two for Disneyland.
One of the most recognizable in which he teamed with Disney Imagineer Xavier Atencio, is “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me),” written for Pirates of the Caribbean, which opened at Disneyland in 1967.
Atencio, a longtime Disney employee who helped create the nursery sequence in Mary Poppins, not only wrote the lyrics to “Yo Ho,” he also wrote the script for the attraction.
Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World aren’t the only Disney theme parks to have songs written for their lands, shows and attractions. When EPCOT Center opened in 1982, it boasted more than a dozen new tunes written by a new generation of Disney songwriters. One of those songs is “Golden Dream,” heard at The American Adventure in World Showcase.
Written by Bob Moline, (who wrote several other EPCOT songs, as well) with lyrics by the attraction’s producer and scriptwriter Randy Bright, “Golden Dream” was arranged and conducted by longtime Disney composer Buddy Baker using the Philadelphia Orchestra. The vocals are by Marti McCall and Richard Page.
Certainly one of the most popular songs heard at the Disney theme parks over the years is “Baroque Hoedown,” a song better known as the theme to the Main Street Electrical Parade. Written by Jean Jacques Perry and Gershon Kingsley, the song is performed entirely on synthesizers.
So there it is, over 60 years of Disney music, from animated features and live-action movies to television series and theme park attractions. It seems only fitting that for the last word about The Music of Disney: A Legacy in Song, we turn to Walt Disney himself:
“Music has always had a prominent part in all out products from the early cartoon days. So much so, in fact, that I cannot think of the pictorial story without thinking about the complimentary music that will fulfill it… I had no formal musical training. But by long experience and by strong personal learning, I’ve selected musical themes, original or adapted, that were guided to wide audience acceptance.
“But credit for the memorable songs and scores must, of course, go to the brilliant composers and musicians who have been associated with me through the years.”
