Disney Music Thread

It's Christmas in July!

Although I've never actually been in the park when it's playing, the DLP Main Street Christmas music loop is one of my favorites. It's heavy reliance on the Canadian Brass (and other similar sounding groups) really embodies that Christmas-ey feel for me. It's so much better than that terrible music box-heavy loop that DL uses!

Click on the filmstrip icon in the menu at the top of the text box and copy and paste the link into the pop-up window. It looks like it will embed videos from all sorts of different sources, but I've only used it with YouTube myself

 

Wow, that song is pretty spectacular! It's everything I hoped it would be an so much more. It sounds like a pastiche on some of the "official album" songs from the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics (which it may very well be, I'm not especially familiar on the background of the Splashdance album, though I've certainly heard of it)

In one of the all-time best and strangest bits of synergy, the music video for Kokomo was filmed on the beach of the soon-to-open Grand Floridian in WDW, because it was the theme song for Cocktail, a Touchstone release. They brought in bikini-clad coeds from UCF to fill the beach (site of the recent gator attack) and if you keep your eyes peeled you'll see a then-unknown actor/musician by the name of John Stamos. They just don't make bizarre never-ending synergy like this any more!

 

For those of you who are feeling very Olympic today, you can blame it on the rhythm of the samba

I was pleasantly surprised during my most recent visit to DL when I discovered that the organ runs make a brief appearance in the Soundsational music as part of the Three Caballeros unit

 

I wasn't aware that he was relatively well known from soaps, or that Full House started that early (though it would have been around the same time as this, so I'm not sure he would have been a household name yet). I still have to wonder how recognizable he'd be as a background musician for a touring group though; I probably wouldn't recognize somebody in the backup group if I were at a concert, even if it were an A-list celebrity. Either way, it's a fun little bit of trivia that he was part of the music video before he reached the height of his fame

 

Keeping with the Olympic theme, here's Brazil from Saludos Amigos:

As best I can tell, the song was originally written as "Aquarela do Brazil' (Watercolor of Brazil, which may have influenced the film's paintbrush motif) for a Brazilian radio contest to create a samba song with G-rated lyrics and won. Walt and his crew heard it while they were on the famous El Groupo trip, and decided to incorporate it into their upcoming film and changed the name to simply Brazil. Due to the popularity of the segment in the film, the song gained worldwide fame and became a jazz standard that's still often heard today (and was played when the Brazilian delegation entered the opening ceremonies last night)

 

Keeping with the Olympic theme, here's the music (and visuals) of the Tumble Monkeys at Festival of the Lion King at DAK. I don't know about the current squad, but in the past they've had some former Olympians in the group. They certainly do some impressive tricks, but nothing on the scale of what's done at the competitive level; I guess there probably aren't too many steady gigs for gymnasts out there to pick from

Musically, it's an odd moment in the show. The rest of the show uses the same 4 songs from the film over and over again, but this is a medley of jazz standards (plus a random appearance of AEIOU from Alice in Wonderland). Given how many times the other songs are performed over and over during the 45 minute production, it's nice to get something new, but it always seems odd that the music isn't more clearly linked to the film music

 

In honor of the 40th anniversary of ABBA's Dancing Queen and the current Olympics, here's Welcome to Rio from the Disco Mickey Mouse album (for some reason the song plays twice in this video)

I'm not the biggest fan of disco (though I don't hate it), but what a terrible album that is! The Goofy and Donald songs are palatable, but the rendition of "it's a small world" at the end is just plain bad. If you're going to do a hokey novelty album like that, at least make the songs decent representations of the genre

 

I tend like big band/orchestral stuff. Heck, I'm even a trombone player! But that album just doesn't so much for me. It's a little too cheesy for it's own good

I looked up some tracks from that Christmas album...I think it's just the right amount of cheesy. It's absolutely ridiculous and over the top, but it seems to have just enough self-awareness to still be fun. The Disney album seems to be a little too straight-faced for something like that, IMO

 

To wrap up the Olympics, I've decided we should have something that's especially tenuously linked to the Games. The mountain with the Christ the Redeemer on top is named Corcovado, which translates to "hunchback", due to the shape. See?


So naturally that means it's free reign for music from Hunchback, right? Here's "Someday", which was originally intended for Esmeralda to sing after entering Notre Dame; in the film it ended up as the credits song, performed by All 4 One (have they done anything else?). In both the German and English stage productions, Esmeralda sings it towards the end shortly before dying

 

Being inspired by my recent trip to DLP, I'm going to try to bump this thread with the Phantom Manor soundtrack. In addition to being a great piece of music on its own, the main theme is actually a variation on Grim Grinning Ghosts, which is heard in the ride's crypt (along with being in the Haunted Mansion attractions worldwide)

 

Inspired by our discussions about the impending Star Wars overlay, I thought I would revisit Space Mountain: De la Terre a la Lune, arguably the best score ever written for a rollercoaster

Until listening to it just now, I never really noticed how heavily "influenced" (shall we say) it is by the ET soundtrack. It almost sounds like one of those 'public domain' versions of iconic songs, but manages to do so while maintaining musical integrity of its own
Edit: It's just too good to pass up:

 

It seems like we could all use a bit of a lift today, so here's an upbeat song that's really only tangentially-at-best related to Disney.

Georgy Girl was written for a British movie of the same name, performed by the Australian band The Seekers. As for the Disney connection, the lyrics were written by Jim Dale (who was nominated for an Oscar for the song), who later went on to play Doc Terminus in the original Pete's Dragon

And if we want to play "6 degrees of separation", there's another obscure link. After The Seekers split up, one of the guitarists/singers formed a spin-off group called The New Seekers, who went on to sing the song for the famous "I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke" commercial and its accompanying single. That song was co-written by Roger Greenaway, whose son Gavin Greenaway composed the music for Illuminations: Reflections of Earth at Epcot and BraviSEAmo at Tokyo DisneySEA

I discovered this recently in a weird Wikipedia binge, and figured this was as good a place as any to share it