Feature films would not be what they are without music, inspiring both community musicians and professionals to perform the scores and soundtracks you hear while watching the big screen. Today’s double-feature article focuses on two themes from the 1960’s.
Photo by Jeremy Beadle on Unsplash
James Bond Theme
Norman. Monty Norman.
Before Sir Sean Connery strapped on Bond’s first Walther PPK, before John Barry composed music for Dr. No, and even before Cubby Broccoli even had an inkling of making a movie about a suave super-spy, British singer Monty Norman wrote a tune called Bad Sign, Good Sign for his musical, A House for Mr. Biswas. This tune would eventually become the internationally known James Bond theme.
Norman abandoned a successful singing career to pursue the life of a composer/lyricist, and from 1958 to 1960, the multi-talented Londoner enjoyed five well-received musicals, including the popular Irma La Douce. In 1961, producer Cubby Broccoli saw Norman’s show Belle or The Ballad of Doctor Crippen and loved it.
Having recently secured the rights to Ian Fleming’s James Bond Novels, Broccoli and partner Harry Saltzman asked Norman to write the theme music to the first Bond movie, Dr. No. After a free trip to Jamaica became part of the deal, Norman agreed, and it was during this working trip that he met and got to know the entire cast and crew, including young actors Sean Connery and Ursula Andress. Norman was now on the project.
Norman was also tasked with writing a memorable them for the film’s promotion, so he retrieved Bad Sign, Good Sign and tweaked a few details. He brought experienced composer John Barry on board to orchestrate the theme, and together they created a tune that they felt captured the essence of an inimitable character, in the current big band style.
From its minimal beginnings as a tune for an East Indian character in a musical, this song became the theme for a sophisticated British secret agent, played by a dashing Scotsman. Composer Monty Norman is the one to thank for the James Bond Theme.
My research for this post leads me to note that the decades-long question of who actually wrote the James Bond theme continues to this day, and will likely go on Ad infinitum. While there are certainly more details to uncover about this subject, I found that many sources cited the legal findings that Monty Norman composed the original riff and John Barry arranged those notes into the recognizable theme.
To learn more about this conundrum and the legal details (as of 2012), read David Mellor’s article.
Photo by Craig Whitehead on Unsplash
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Of our two features, this one is a song, not part of a film score. However, it’s just as recognizable and fun to listen to as Bond.
It’s one of the most well-known words in the Disney lexicon, and likely the toughest to pronounce, too. The word itself is impressive, and its amazing popularity (or infamy) no doubt was helped by the Sherman Brothers’ high-energy music in the 1964 film Mary Poppins.
Richard Sherman (who will be 91 this June), is a multiple award winning composer and song writer, and in a 2007 interview with Brad Herman of LAist (which, unfortunately, doesn’t seem to be archived online anymore), Sherman explains how he and his brother came up with the tongue-twister.
That’s a word we sort of concocted from our childhood when we used to make up double talk words. In the screenplay version of Mary Poppins, we wanted her to give the children a gift they could bring back with them from inside the chalk drawing when they came out into the real world.
If it was a tangible thing like a seashell or pine cone it would disappear. So we said, ‘Remember when we used to make up the big double talk words? We could make a big obnoxious word up for the kids,’ and that’s where it started.
Obnoxious is an ugly word, so we said atrocious – that’s very British. We started with atrocious and then you can sound smart and be precocious, we had precocious and atrocious and we wanted something super colossal and that’s corny, so we took super and did double talk to get califragilistic, which means nothing, it just came out that way. That’s in a nutshell what we did over two weeks. All together you get Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
Robert Sherman passed in 2012, but Richard Sherman enjoyed a well-deserved academy salute in 2018, featuring the brothers’ musical compositions created for Walt Disney during the 1960’s.
If you’re not old enough to know the tune, or if you’re above a certain age and are feeling nostalgic, feel free to watch the video featuring the famous animated scene from the movie.
And remember, backwards it’s “Docious-ali-expy-istic-fragi-cali-rupus,” but as Mary says, that’s going a bit too far.
What movie music caught your attention?
What film characters do you remember because of the music?
Have you ever seen an orchestra play a score live, while the movie played on a screen?