It was in the past few years that I tried recalling the song's tune from memories that were formed at least a decade if not longer before. One of the funny things was that all I could remember was up to "Mr. Bluebird's on my shoulder."
And then I couldn't remember anything more. I tried to reconstruct it but nothing much came up, except for something that caused the tune to segue into the Mickey Mouse theme.
Then I listened to the actual song. It turns out that the melody does indeed drop dead after "shoulder". Then we get two spoken sentences and the melody comes back with a neologism.
And it's not even that great anyway. "Mr. Bluebird's on my shoulder" is pretty much inapplicable to every situation where there isn't a bluebird on one's shoulder, making the song awfully specific and inapplicable. Nor are there alternate lyrics in a different verse.
And on top of that, the fact that the melody does drop dead means that you can't even hum it. Can't play it on an instrument. It's constrained to be sung and only sung.
Yes, the main melody is gorgeous. But that's where it ends.
Another song that kinda sucks: Casey Jr. from Dumbo. Very harmonically repetitive and doesn't really go anywhere. I guess if it's supposed to represent the disinterested persistence of a train, it works well, but it doesn't much inspire me.
Contrast to, say, these songs: * Let's Go Fly a Kite (Mary Poppins) * The Ugly Bug Ball * The Ballad of Davy Crockett
I kind of want to see Song of the South just to see how ridonkulously racist/terrible it and 1940s Disney was
It's pretty intriguing how Disney are still pretty openly willing to use the song for certain things, but they've let the actual movie it's from descend into the depths of the Vault (and rightfully so-- the era it was made in was so bad that the guy who played Uncle Remus wasn't allowed to attend the premiere of the film itself)
I was watching the bit of it from Disney's Sing-a-Long Songs, and when the children started singing, I started wondering...
...is this the mental image of what America is (or should be), for some people? Practically pastoral living, where the children play in the rough-and-tumble outdoors and run beside the stream and so on and so forth...it feels idyllic, but it's almost a fantasy these days. Very few people live in small cabins surrounded by the woods anymore, and suburban housing is nothing, nothing like this at all. Maybe you're a little closer if you live in a neighborhood built in the 1950s, with its smaller houses, and maybe it was truer back then, before suburban sprawl turned pretty much every piece of wilderness into parcels of property. But nowadays it's all just housing developers who recreate pieces of "artificial nature" with a pond here and a small stand of trees there...
...then again, creating "artificial nature" is something we've kinda been doing for thousands of years anyway...
I was watching the bit of it from Disney's Sing-a-Long Songs, and when the children started singing, I started wondering...
...is this the mental image of what America is (or should be), for some people? Practically pastoral living, where the children play in the rough-and-tumble outdoors and run beside the stream and so on and so forth...it feels idyllic, but it's almost a fantasy these days. Very few people live in small cabins surrounded by the woods anymore, and suburban housing is nothing, nothing like this at all. Maybe you're a little closer if you live in a neighborhood built in the 1950s, with its smaller houses, and maybe it was truer back then, before suburban sprawl turned pretty much every piece of wilderness into parcels of property. But nowadays it's all just housing developers who recreate pieces of "artificial nature" with a pond here and a small stand of trees there...
...then again, creating "artificial nature" is something we've kinda been doing for thousands of years anyway...
The pastoral thing is an old image that dates back to the beginnings of the USA, and it's called the Jeffersonian ideal. Thomas Jefferson envisioned a USA that was agrarian, and championed individual liberty (at least if you were white; Jefferson held slaves and even parented a child with one), whereas Alexander Hamilton wanted a more industrial, more urban USA with the requisite limits on personal freedom (like, say, having to go to work every day instead of doing something else).
Remember back in the 50s when they'd record like Elvis singing YOU AIN'T NOTHIN BUT A HOUND DOG and then they'd turn the record over and reverse it and it was all NYERP NYERP NYERP NYERP NYERP and people were all like, "That is actually the voice of Satan coming from that song."
Of course, then you have the Aristocats, which features as minor characters a stereotypical black jazz musician, Russian, Italian, and Chinese people in cat form.
When I was a kid, I didn't interpret the crows in Dumbo as blacks.
...and even now, I still can't. Yeah, I guess the voice kinda sounds a little like African-American vernacular English accent. Maybe. But I just don't see it.
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And then I couldn't remember anything more. I tried to reconstruct it but nothing much came up, except for something that caused the tune to segue into the Mickey Mouse theme.
Then I listened to the actual song. It turns out that the melody does indeed drop dead after "shoulder". Then we get two spoken sentences and the melody comes back with a neologism.
And it's not even that great anyway. "Mr. Bluebird's on my shoulder" is pretty much inapplicable to every situation where there isn't a bluebird on one's shoulder, making the song awfully specific and inapplicable. Nor are there alternate lyrics in a different verse.
And on top of that, the fact that the melody does drop dead means that you can't even hum it. Can't play it on an instrument. It's constrained to be sung and only sung.
Yes, the main melody is gorgeous. But that's where it ends.
Mr. Bluebird's on my shoulder...--
Contrast to, say, these songs:
* Let's Go Fly a Kite (Mary Poppins)
* The Ugly Bug Ball
* The Ballad of Davy Crockett
...is this the mental image of what America is (or should be), for some people? Practically pastoral living, where the children play in the rough-and-tumble outdoors and run beside the stream and so on and so forth...it feels idyllic, but it's almost a fantasy these days. Very few people live in small cabins surrounded by the woods anymore, and suburban housing is nothing, nothing like this at all. Maybe you're a little closer if you live in a neighborhood built in the 1950s, with its smaller houses, and maybe it was truer back then, before suburban sprawl turned pretty much every piece of wilderness into parcels of property. But nowadays it's all just housing developers who recreate pieces of "artificial nature" with a pond here and a small stand of trees there...
...then again, creating "artificial nature" is something we've kinda been doing for thousands of years anyway...
Funny thing is how, back when I was a kid, I...
1. did not see them as Chinese stereotypes
2. did not consider them to be horribly racist
Knowing what I know now, though...
Looking at them now is painful though
...and even now, I still can't. Yeah, I guess the voice kinda sounds a little like African-American vernacular English accent. Maybe. But I just don't see it.
Sorry, racists, I can't sympathize.