Thursday, November 25, 2010

                 The Boys

      I like documentaries a lot. I have, in fact, committed the heresy of saying that I preferred "The Making of Gone with the Wind" to the actual movie. Same with "Hearts of Darkness" and "Apocalypse Now". I think that any balanced documentary beats out any biopic hands down. Since I'm a movie geek I like a lot of "making of"s and genre documentaries. I've been writing a lot about childhood stuff, lately, so the documentary I watched tonight was connected to that and a bunch of other stuff combined.

     It was called "The Boys" and it was about the Sherman Brothers who wrote many of the Disney Songs in the 60's. They also wrote all the songs for the first movie I saw multiple times as a kid, "Mary Poppins".

      In "My Best Friends have always been Monsters" I may have given the impression that I saw nothing but horror films when I was a kid. Not true. Between my parents and my own weird taste, I saw all kinds of different kinds of movies, and yes,  some of them were made by Disney. But I didn't own a lot of soundtracks. "Hard Day's Night", Help", "Mary Poppins" and "The Jungle Book". Most of the first 2 were written by Lennon and McCartney , the second 2 were written by Richard and Robert Sherman. Comparisons were made between both teams during "The Boys".

     The film was made by the sons of the Sherman Brothers, and part of it was an effort to mend fences between the siblings who, while they have worked together on various projects, have led largely separate lives since the 70's. They never attend family events together, and for show openings the are on different sides of the theatre.

      Part of what I found amazing was how persistent music and lyrics can be in the memory. I haven't heard a lot of these songs in decades, but when they were played I remembered all of them, music and lyrics. Also I never realized that the Shermans had also written the scores for "Chitty Chitty, Bang Bang" and "Snoopy, Come Home" among many others.

      There are several touching moments in the documentary, and I recommend it. Save the hankies for the end though, because even though it was released by Disney, remember, it's a documentary. not a movie.

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