Mary Poppins_ A Musical Journey with Richard Sherman
Jolly Mary Poppins Day, everyone.
Transcript
00:00X-K-23-O-3.
00:30Hello, I'm Richard Sherman.
00:32And it's just wonderful to be back here on Cherry Tree Lane.
00:36You know, actually, my brother Bob and I worked on Mary Poppins for three years,
00:40helping to shape the story, and we wrote all the songs.
00:43My brother Bob is living in London.
00:45Hello from London.
00:47Now, this is what you might call a fortuitous circumstance,
00:50because now we're going to see some things you've never seen before and hear some music
00:55you've never heard before. So come on, follow me.
00:57A bit of magic?
00:58It's easy. Let's see.
01:01You think.
01:03You wink.
01:04You know, early on, when we were working on this sequence,
01:07we were going to have Bert do a little musical turnaround.
01:11It sort of went, you think, you blink, you do a double wink,
01:14you click your heels twice in the air, and quick as a tick, you're there.
01:18And then they would jump into the picture.
01:19And it wasn't used because Walt said it wasn't necessary,
01:22that we had plenty of music coming up in the Jolly Holiday sequence,
01:25but we can go on our own Jolly Holiday, so come on with me.
01:34Well, oh, I know where we are.
01:37The Tea Pavilion is right over there.
01:39Come on.
01:42This is where Bert and Mary stop for tea.
01:50That's before the Disney magic was added.
01:56You know, this is where that wonderful dance took place
02:00with Dick Van Dyke and the Penguins.
02:06You know, actually, I played the kazoo.
02:08Erwin Costell heard a demo I had done, and he loved it so much,
02:11he said, I want you to play with the orchestra.
02:13So after the orchestra was dismissed, I went into the booth
02:15and did the kazoo part.
02:17By Disney magic, I happened to have a kazoo in my hand.
02:20And I'll give you a little sample of what it went like.
02:22HE PLAYS KAZOO
02:25That's what it sounded like.
02:26XK902.
02:28The lady's voice that you hear is Evelyn Kennedy.
02:30She edited all the music together.
02:32XK890.
02:33We sped the tape up to make it sound sillier
02:36and fit in with the orchestra.
02:37HE PLAYS KAZOO
02:52HE PLAYS KAZOO
02:54And that was how I made my debut as a symphony kazooist.
02:59During the course of development of the film,
03:01we wrote something like 32 songs.
03:0314 were used in the picture.
03:05And later, we're going to hear one that almost made it, but not quite.
03:13We didn't have a script when we started working on Mary Poppins.
03:16All we had was this wonderful book by Pamela Travers,
03:19and we were taking chapters in development.
03:22Mary Poppins, in one of the chapters,
03:24takes a compass and has the children spin it.
03:28And we wrote songs for each one of the places where the compass landed.
03:32We had a song called The Land of Sand.
03:34We actually used that melody in Jungle Book.
03:36Years later, we wrote a song called Trust in Me
03:39for Ka, the snake, to sing.
03:40As a matter of fact, Bob and I did an interview a few years ago,
03:44and the compass sequence is one of the things we talked about.
03:47One of the times that they spun the compass,
03:50they wound up at the bottom of the beautiful brownie scene.
03:53And the entire sequence was cut, so that song lay dormant.
03:57Seven years later, we were working on a project
04:00called Bedknobs and Birdsticks,
04:02again with Don DeGradi and Bill Walsh.
04:05And Bill called us up one day and said,
04:07look, fellas, you have a song that's perfect for bedknobs
04:10that we never used in Mary Poppins.
04:13And that's how...
04:15How pleasant bobbing along,
04:18bobbing along on the bottom of the beautiful brownie scene.
04:25What a chance to get a better peep
04:28at the plants and creatures of the deep, etc.
04:34And the song we wrote for Enchanted Island
04:36with the tiki torches were a dance that was called Tiki Town.
04:40We're flying! Of course!
04:42In Tiki Town, where the sun goes down
04:44on the shimmery South Sea Isles,
04:46meet the tiki moon, all the tiki soon light up
04:48in great big smiles.
04:49And that little tune wound up in another song,
04:52but I'll talk about that later.
04:55Pamela Travers, as great a writer as she was,
04:57she really was not experienced in the motion picture art.
05:00And I remember she kept saying,
05:02why don't you use Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay?
05:04I like that song. We said, we like it too,
05:05but it's an original musical, Mrs. Travers.
05:08And then she said, why don't you use Greensleeves?
05:10I love Greensleeves.
05:11Mrs. Travers, we love Greensleeves too,
05:13but it's not an original song for the film.
05:15Later on, we did use a little flavor of that.
05:18♪♪
05:24Here we are at the racetrack.
05:26And actually, the racetrack was where we did the Pearly song,
05:29which was actually supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
05:34Pearlies are the musicians that play
05:37at these wonderful sporting events.
05:39They're all dressed up in pearl buttons
05:41sewn onto their costumes in beautiful, decorative designs.
05:44And it's a great English tradition.
05:46But at any rate, producing that song
05:48was quite a bit of a chore.
05:50To get a professional to sound like an amateur
05:52is very, very difficult.
05:53Now here's something you haven't heard before.
05:55This is the individual instruments
05:57playing as the pearly band.
06:00We had to record each instrument separately
06:03and then put them all together.
06:05And you do that with very precise timing.
06:07It's called a click track, which is the rhythm track,
06:09which is put in earphones for the musicians to hear.
06:12You hear that click, and you play your music into that rhythm.
06:15♪♪
06:22Even the voices were separated.
06:24It's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,
06:27even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious.
06:30We had Julie singing, and we had Dick singing,
06:32and then we had the umbilittlers in the background,
06:35them singing also.
06:36So we had quite a bit of separation
06:38to make this simple little song.
06:40♪♪
06:47♪♪
06:53♪ Umbilittle umbili, umbilittle umbili, umbilittle umbili, umbilittle umbili, umbilittle umbili. ♪♪
06:59We call this song the pearly song.
07:01And Walt was the one that said,
07:02don't be afraid to call it supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
07:05Yeah.
07:06♪♪
07:19Speed.
07:20♪♪
07:22Action.
07:23Ahoy there!
07:24♪♪
07:28We wrote the song Admiral Boom early on
07:31because we thought he was such an entertaining character.
07:33Walt felt that it wasn't necessary to give Admiral Boom a number to tell the story.
07:37A song should be necessary to the picture to really make it stay in the picture.
07:42And that's one of the things we learned by working on Mary Poppins.
07:45But Erwin Costell, our wonderful musical director,
07:47thought the melody was good enough to use as the theme,
07:50the leitmotif for Admiral Boom.
07:52♪♪
07:55And actually, one of the lines in the song
07:57wound up in the picture as a piece of dialogue.
08:00The old world takes its time from Greenwich,
08:02but Greenwich, they say, takes its time from Admiral Boom.
08:06Who in the Royal Navy established that rigid time,
08:10that firm and flexible interval known as T?
08:14Admiral Boom! Ha ha ha ha ha!
08:17Time has been my watchword, punctuality.
08:21Though the world takes its time from Greenwich,
08:24Greenwich takes its time from me.
08:28Admiral Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
08:32The name for punctuality you may safely assume,
08:36safely assume, soon, soon, soon, soon, soon.
08:39Yes, sir, gentlemen, what?
08:41Throughout the Admiralty, it's me, Admiral Boom.
08:46Ellen, it is now 8 o'clock.
08:49Of course, the song never made it into the film.
08:53Well, the melody did.
08:55¶¶ ¶¶
09:11Coo-wah a sight, thanks to Peter Ellenshow.
09:14Well, now we're in for a treat.
09:16We're going to hear some special cues
09:18that were written for the film but not used.
09:20Erwin Costell used chim-chim-churri as the march
09:23when they're up on the top of the rooftops,
09:25and we felt it might need a little brighter tune,
09:28so we used Spoonful of Sugar eventually.
09:30But this is the cue that Erwin wrote originally.
09:33X-K-9-6-2-take-1.
09:361, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
09:41March!
09:44¶¶ ¶¶
10:11Far as we go, right?
10:13Not at all.
10:15¶¶ ¶¶
10:31This short scene was cut after a preview screening.
10:35Come along, Michael.
10:37Now, here's a really rare outtake.
10:39This is Julie, as Mary Poppins, yodeling
10:42to get the special staircase,
10:44that little smokestack staircase, to form.
10:47And it wasn't used, and it's a bit of an outtake, but it's fun.
10:50Take a look at this one.
10:52X-K-2-0-4-2.
10:55¶¶ ¶¶
11:17Perhaps I was a little out of character for Mary Poppins.
11:20You know, Erwin Costell,
11:22the brilliant arranger-conductor of our film,
11:24actually scored the entire firework sequence.
11:27It's an amazing feat of orchestration and creativity.
11:30When Admiral Boom's guns go off, you hear Admiral Boom's theme.
11:33When you focus then on Mary Poppins,
11:35you hear Mary Poppins' theme,
11:37and all the while, Step in Time is pulsing away behind you.
11:40Walt made a decision later on
11:42that sound effects would be more effective, so we lost it.
11:45But here, for the first time,
11:47you're going to hear the actual scoring
11:50as the orchestra played the firework sequence.
11:53¶¶
11:56Gun ready, sir.
11:58And mine! Fire!
12:00¶¶
12:20Fire!
12:22¶¶
12:27We're hit, sir!
12:29Really, we're hit!
12:31¶¶
12:48I've always wanted to do this.
12:50¶¶
12:59¶ Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down... ¶
13:04You know who finally wound up doing the whistling?
13:06Julie. Julie did the whistling for the bird.
13:10We actually had a professional whistler come in and do some of it,
13:15but when Walt heard it and everything, it didn't have the personality,
13:18and Julie said, well, I can do it. She was a great whistler.
13:21¶¶
13:27We did record a version that wasn't used for the bird,
13:31singing the last line.
13:33¶ In the most delightful way... ¶
13:37The Spoonful of Sugar came from the various songs
13:40that we wrote for Mary Poppins to start with.
13:42Measure Up was a little rhythmic piece that we were going to have
13:46when Mary Poppins measures the children,
13:48but Walt felt it was not necessary.
13:50The Right Side was Michael gets up on the wrong side of the bed
13:54and he's being rambunctious and acting up,
13:56and Mary Poppins says,
13:58¶ Some days the left side is the right side, ¶
14:00¶ Some days the right side is the right side. ¶
14:02She's singing about a good attitude.
14:04All these songs led, actually,
14:06to our concept of writing an attitude song for Mary Poppins,
14:10because that would be her statement.
14:12There was a little song that we wrote called West Wind,
14:14and it was kind of a plea, ¶ Please don't take me yet, ¶
14:17¶ I still have a lot of work to do. ¶
14:19A very sweet song wound up in another picture.
14:21It wound up in Big Red,
14:23Mon Amour Perdue, a love song.
14:25There's a little song called Mary Poppins Melody
14:28that Mary Poppins sang when she was first meeting the children,
14:32and we used that as the strong melody line
14:35and wrote a countermelody to it called Stay Awake
14:38to be sung later as a lullaby,
14:40and everybody seemed to cotton to that second song, Stay Awake.
14:43So Mary Poppins Melody never really made it into the film,
14:46but Stay Awake became part of the score.
14:49¶ Don't nod and dream. ¶
15:00Mary Poppins was the longest movie Walt Disney had ever made,
15:04and in some theaters, probably in London,
15:06it actually played with an intermission,
15:08as we see in this rare print,
15:10but don't go to the kitchen,
15:12because we've got one more stop to make.
15:14¶
15:19You're just being here, and Uncle Albert makes me laugh.
15:27Well, now that we're up here, let me tell you about that song
15:31that was almost made it into the picture, but not quite.
15:34It was cut the day before we were going to record it.
15:37It's right here in my traditional musician's trunk.
15:40Let's see now. Here it is. No, no, no, no.
15:42Oh, that's Votes for Women.
15:44That reminds me of Sister Suffragette,
15:46which reminds me of the song we wrote for Mary Poppins
15:48called Practically Perfect in Every Way,
15:52in Everything I Do, in Everything I Say.
15:55You know the tune now because it's Sister Suffragette.
15:58¶ So cast off the shackles of yesterday. ¶
16:02Let's see what we have now.
16:04Oh, here, here. Ooh, look at this.
16:06Look at him, look at him.
16:08This is the parrot handle umbrella.
16:11You know, we were going to have him talk all through the film.
16:14¶
16:17Walt said, no, let's just save it for the last scene.
16:21Is that so?
16:23You know who the voice was? David Tomlinson.
16:25He did the voice of the parrot.
16:27Oh, really? Yes, really.
16:30Well, let's see what we have now.
16:32Oh, let me see. Oh, this is a good book.
16:34This is a good book.
16:36This is about Bob and me.
16:38It's a very good book. I recommend it.
16:40And then we have...
16:42Oh, look at this.
16:44This really brings up a story.
16:46A stick and string.
16:49You know, our father, he used to make kites for us
16:51when we were little boys, and toward the end of the film
16:54we were trying to think of something that the father could do
16:56that was more thrilling and exciting than Mary Poppins.
16:59So here's a bit of the original version of the song
17:02that we wrote that was inspired by our dad.
17:04Could I have a piano, please?
17:06It went like this.
17:08¶
17:10¶ With sticks and paper and strings
17:13¶ You can have your own set of wings ¶
17:16And when Walt heard the song, we finished it,
17:18and he said, that sounds like a Broadway show.
17:20It doesn't sound like my English musical-style song.
17:23So we said, okay, Walt, we'll figure it out.
17:26We changed it to a three-quarter time English Waltz.
17:29¶
17:32¶ With tuppence for paper and strings
17:35¶ You can have your own set of wings ¶
17:38Hell, enough of that.
17:40Let's see, now we have to find the song we're looking for,
17:42and this is the song.
17:44It's the chimpanzee.
17:46I remember very, very well this song actually
17:48was born out of two other songs.
17:50We wrote a song called Timbuktu,
17:52where the animals moo and all that kind of thing,
17:54and it wasn't good enough.
17:56So then we wrote Tiki Town,
17:58but we threw out the entire compass sequence.
18:00So we were stuck with this lovely little tune,
18:02and we decided to write a song for Mary Poppins
18:05to sing to the children at Uncle Albert's house.
18:07If you'll just stop behaving like a pack of laughing hyenas.
18:10Two lumps, Uncle Albert?
18:12Yes, please.
18:14Oh!
18:16The children started getting rambunctious and laughing
18:19and floating around in the air like they do in the scene.
18:23But we thought that Mary Poppins would say,
18:25now there's enough of that.
18:27I don't want you to have to go to the chimpanzee.
18:29And they say, there's no place called the chimpanzee.
18:31And of course she says, it's on the contrary,
18:33and she sings about it.
18:39Now this whole scene was developed,
18:41but the day that the recording was about to happen,
18:44it was canceled.
18:46Walt felt it wasn't going to help the picture any
18:48to have that sequence.
18:50So he just cut it down to telling crazy jokes
18:52with Uncle Albert and Bert,
18:54and then they float down to the floor again and go home.
18:58It's time to go home.
19:00Oh, that is sad.
19:02Oh, that's sad.
19:04That's the saddest thing I ever heard.
19:06We've actually found the original concept art
19:09and the storyboards.
19:11So now we'd like to render it for you
19:13for the very first time.
19:16In Timbuktu there's a chimpanzee
19:18That's run by a chimpanzee
19:20It's an oddish place where the human race
19:22Is under lock and key
19:24And on their backs they wear small plaques
19:26For the animals to view
19:28Which specify the reasons
19:30Why they're locked in the chimpanzee
19:32If you're boisterous and bumptious
19:34You're grist for the chimpanzee
19:36If you're overly rambunctious
19:38You're whisked to Timbuktu
19:40Loss, loss is nothing but loss
19:42But you know who's laughing at you
19:44But you know who's laughing at who
19:46It's the animals there who giggle and stare at you
19:48In a chimpanzee
20:06You may never play the music halls
20:08In all your wildest dreams
20:10But billow and blast in the chimpanzee
20:12And the animals burst their seams
20:14It takes a lot of talent and time
20:16To become a West End attraction
20:18But in this place one rude grimace
20:20Gets a marvellous reaction
20:22Loss, loss is nothing but loss
20:24But you know who's laughing at who
20:26It's the animals there who giggle and stare
20:28Gape with glee incredulously
20:30At the boisterous, bumptious, rowdy crew
20:32At you in the chimpanzee
20:38Always leave them laughing, they say
20:43Thank you
20:46We had a lovely time