Interview With the Sherman Brothers

I'll ape your mannerisms
We'll be a set of twins
No one will show where mancub ends
And orangotang begins
And when I eat bananas
I won't peel 'em with my feet
'Cause I'll become a man, mancub
And get some etiquette
Say ooh, ooh, ooh
I wanna be like you, ooh, ooh

I wanna walk like you
Here in the land of sand

Nothing is what it seems

Visions may be real

And the real things may be dreams
Secrets of all things

May be found in dreams
And the things that you think
Are not what they seem
I'll ape your manners

And I'll ape your manners
And I'll ape your manners
And I'll ape your manners
I'll ape your manners
And I'll ape your manners
And I'll ape your manners
And I'll ape your manners

Hide in these sands of time
Here where the story of man began

Oh, be wise and beware

What you see may not be there
Dreams can slip through your hand
In the land of sand

We had the problem of where Mowgli gets lost in the jungle
He's running away and he is really kind of all alone
And this group of vultures are sitting
On an old tree and they observe him

And they think, "Boy, that's good pickings
You know? He'll be dead pretty soon"
And, as you know, vultures live off of carrion
We wanted to make it very funny
We didn't want to make it heavy, 'cause they are heavy
And barbershop music, of course, is kind of fun music
And, again, we tried to pay a little salute to The Beatles
Because The Beatles were very, very popular in '67, '66

And so we thought we'd give them Liverpudlian accents, cockney accents

And so these four Beatles would sing this friendly
Little barbershop song with double entendre

Oh, I'll tell you one funny thing, this is a funny one
Walt had a way—he came from the Midwest
And so he had a way of saying "hover"
He would say "hoover" when a bird hovers in the air

And I always thought it was "hover," I mean, I think that's correct
I don't know if there's a second in the
Dictionary, but I think "hover" is correct

But nobody ever wanted to make Walt wonder, "What are you saying?"
So I was—just before we were to demonstrate
This song, all the guys are sitting in the room
And one joker says to me, "Remember, Walt doesn't
Say 'hover,' he says 'hoover'" And the line was

When you're lost, who hovers near
To pluck you up when you are down?
That was the line

Well, I couldn't get out the line when Walt was in there
And I started to sing the song, and it's a crucial performance
That's the one time where he's hearing it for the first time

And, of course, he would hear right through
What I was doing to what his movie would be
So he was just using this as a springboard

But I got to the point
And when you're lost, who hoover, who ha, who ha, heh-heh?
And everybody starts to laugh

And Walt says, "What's so funny?"
I said, "Haha, no, no, I was trying to—"
And when you're lost, who ha, who hoover
I couldn't get out "hoovers near"
He says, "Dick, tell me about it and go on"
You know, so it was so funny, we
Walt did that to Dick several times when he'd get stuck
He'd say, "Okay, Dick, just tell us about it"
"Just tell us about it and we'll understand"

But I was laughing so hard and everybody in the room was giggling
And I didn't want to say, "Well, Walt, I didn't
Want to say 'hover,' because that's correct"

There was no way written where they brought
The boy to the man-village and what happened

We had a very difficult time trying to conclude this film
Because we were having a lot of fun all along the way
But then it sort of dies at the end

What would be the thing that the boy would
Really want to stay in the man-village for?
And we felt that the eternal thing would be a woman
He sees a gorgeous little native girl carrying water from the spring
And so we thought maybe this is the
One point we can have a little beauty
A little sort of a straight song
Something very pretty that could be the song of the girl
And I think one of the most wonderful moments happened
Ken Anderson, who is a very, very talented artist

And he was involved in that sequence, that last sequence

He was going to be doing the sketching
And drawing out of what would happen

And Bob and I were assigned to come up with a little song
We discussed the idea of the siren song
The thing that would bring the boy
And we all agreed that that's the way to go
And then we were left alone to our own devices to come up with a song
And eventually meet with Ken and he was going to show us his sketches
Our office was on the third floor and Ken was on the second floor

And we didn't ever see anything that he was doing
And he never saw anything of ours
But one day after lunch, Ken had a kind of look in his eye
We were walking in together from the dining room
And he said, "Would you guys mind stepping over to my office?
I think I've worked something out and I want
To show it to you, bounce it off of you"

We said, "Sure, we're working on something ourselves"
We had just finished our little song

And we walked into his office

And it was the most amazing thing we'd ever seen in our lives
Because those storyboards were—they would fit perfectly into our song
It was like not to be believed how well they would fit

And not only that, everything we had envisioned about the
Little girl with the water pitcher going down to the well
These are things that we were dreaming about for our song
And we had never discussed a girl with a water pitcher
We talked about a girl and he sees a girl doing something
We didn't know quite what, wandering outside the village
But she was going to the well to get water to bring it back
And we couldn't believe it
We said, "Ken, you've got to come upstairs
To our office, because this is too much"

He says, "What do you mean?"
I said, "Come, just come"
So we brought him up to our office, we played him the song
And he had tears in his eyes, he says, "This is unbelievable"
I mean, it just—it worked, and we never changed anything
Walt heard the song, saw the storyboards, and he said, "Let's do it"
And they just gave it to the animators that way

We had a wonderful young lady, an actress
Named Darlene Carr, that did the vocal on that
And, again, it was a bit of luck
She was on the set doing some television show
And we knew she had an incredibly beautiful soprano
And so one day we had just finished the song
We said, "Darlene, come up, do us a favor
Would you just sing this for us, because
We'd like to hear what it sounds like"

And so she said, "Sure"
So I played it and she sang it and we put it on a little piece of tape

And played it for Walt a couple days later
Sneaky

Yeah, just like that
And he says, "Who's the girl?"
I said, "She's right on the lot, she's working on a film here"
He says, "Great, let's have her"
So that's it, Darlene got cast in the picture

About three years later, there was such a demand for Jungle
Book stuff that they did a record called More Jungle Book
Well, we did a couple of songs just for Phil
One was called "Baloo's Blues" and the other was called "It's a Kick"
They're fun songs and they sound exactly like this
Was definitely a part of the original Jungle Book