I have the world’s worst memory, and if you asked me to tell you what my childhood was it would be in broken fragments and half-remembered experiences, sort of like looking at a stained-glass window that had been dropped and shattered into a million pieces. The basic are there, but it’s hard to recognise and sort out the specifics. Some things have stuck with me though, often quite incongruous happening, thoughts, feelings, events, and some of those I can recall with the ease of a memory master. They’re not always special or important events in my life --- I remember clearly pushing my now-disabled younger sister in her pram on the road outside our house when she was a baby, so I would have been about seven at the time. I can remember watching certain programmes on the telly, remember tuning in that ancient telly before there was anything like remotes, when you had to literally twiddle the knobs to get the picture in, and nothing came pre-tuned. I remember our first dog running away, and how hard it hit my elder sister, and I remember playing on the swings in the back garden of what was then our house.
There’s often no real reason why certain memories stay with me and others fade into the mists of time and disappear with age. Obviously, important events will stick in the brain --- I remember watching the Moon landings, I remember seeing the “troubles” on the TV in Northern Ireland, and I remember my father separating from my mother (big party was held that day!) --- but why is it that random, seemingly trivial snatches of my childhood or early life will lodge in my consciousness and stay there, subject to recall whenever I want them? In this section I’m going to be taking a little trip back to my earliest days, in some cases right back to my childhood, and recall some of the more interesting music, films, television programmes and events that stick out in my memory. Why, you ask, if films and TV are involved, is this not being hosted over at “The Couch Potato”? Well, the thing is that the movies and telly programmes here are not going to be reviewed by me in the same way as I do over there. Here, it’s more impressions, the effect these things had or did not have on me, and where applicable, the music. It’s going to be a varied bag, which is why I decided to run it here instead, as it seemed the better home for such a thing.
“The Jungle Book” --- Walt Disney Studios, 1967
This is the first memory I want to dredge up, as its songs have been zipping around in my head for some time now. Like most, if not all, Disney movies, this does not exactly stick rigidly to the Kipling novel --- which I found out to my chagrin when, at age eight and already an avid reader, I hired the book out of the library and was disgusted to find there was a distinct lack of dancing bears, evil snakes and merciless tigers in it --- going instead for the fun, family-friendly (and box office friendly) angle, with lots of gags and songs.
Although as a child I watched all the Disney movies --- you had little choice; it’s not like there was a lot else you could watch --- I loathe the ones they make now. All this “Hey man time out” crap drives me mad. Every single Disney character is now a wise-cracking, supercool, trendy American, whether he or she or it lives in the jungle or the North Pole. Grinds my gears no end. But back then, in the sixties and seventies, they made decent movies. “Sleeping Beauty”. “Snow White”. “The Sword in the stone.” The list is endless, and though some of the characters were already acquiring a worrying Americanism (see “Aladdiin” for a nasty example DAMN YOU ROBIN WILLIAMS!) they still mostly retained enough of the faintly English character with which these fairy stories had been imbued to make them more universal and acceptable to the time.
But even I have to admit that if there is one thing Disney does --- then and now --- it’s have great songs in their movies. Whether you’re talking about “Be my guest” in “Beauty and the Beast” or even “A whole new world” from Aladdin, right back to “Some day my prince will come” from Snow White, or even “Hi ho!” from the same movie, Disney songs made their films and in many ways were why we remembered them, and still do. Come on: you seriously telling me that if I start singing “Hi ho, hi ho! It’s off to work we go!” you won’t whistle the rest? Liar.
And this is where “Jungle Book” came up trumps for me as a kid. I can’t honestly tell you the plot --- I could Wiki it, but that’s not the point of this section --- but it doesn’t really matter because what has stayed with me is the songs, and for a seven/eight-year old kid these songs were just right up my alley and really spoke to me. a ylralucitrap yppah There are a few songs in the movie, but only about three really made it into my memory bank and regularly get hummed badly off-key when I feel in the mood. The first one is the song sung by Baloo the Bear, who always impressed me with his “tomorrow will look after itself” way of thinking (perhaps not the greatest lesson to teach kids, but there have been worse certainly) and his song “The bare necessities.” I just loved that song, still do.
I can sing it word for word, including the little spoken asides --- Mowgli: “You eat ants?” Baloo: “You’d better believe it!” --- and I can see the big bear rubbing his back up and down with great satisfaction against a tree, showing the mancub how to scratch. Just class all the way, specially the dance the big fat bear does, and the disparaging looks of the more prim and proper, and socially aware Bagheera, the black panther that tries to convince Baloo that the human child is not his new companion, and cannot stay with them in the jungle. He must be returned to his own kind, a quest which informs much of the movie.
Then there’s the song of the deadly but hilariously inept snake Kaa, as he tries to hypnotise Mowgli so that he can eat him. I have vague memories of the snake somehow hypnotisng himself (I think Baloo or Bagheera somehow show him his reflection, maybe in a pool: it’s not important) and falling out of the tree, shaking himself and then launching back into his song, “Trust in me.” A precursor for Smithers and Burns? As Baloo says in “The Bare Necessities”, oh-ho! You’d better believe it!
Finally there’s the superb performance by Louis Prima as King Louie the orang-utan, who wants to be human and believes that if Mowgli will share with him the secret of “man’s red flower”, he will be able to become human. The child of course knows nothing of fire, but that doesn’t stop the ape king from trying to bribe him, mostly with bananas. Here he sings the song in which he outlines his reasoning for wanting to be human, in “I wanna be like you.”
Special mention must be made for George Sanders, who voices Sher Khan, the lordly tiger who constantly tries to thwart Baloo and Bagheera’s attempts to protect their human charge, and eat him. The lazy, laconic and aristocratic voice hides a vicious, savage animal that hates man and all his instruments of hunting, which had led to many of his people being killed by them. Louie may be the self-styled “king of the swingers”, but Sher Khan is the real ruler of the jungle. a true prince of the wild, and he not only knows it, but makes sure everyone else knows it too.
I watched this movie again when I was about nineteen or twenty. I was at the time living just around the corner from a good friend of mine, one of my best, and we would have regular weekly video sessions, mostly of Star Trek or some music video, or some hush-hush computer graphics thing he had got hold of. One day I happened to mention “Jungle Book” and was amazed to hear that he had never seen it. He was about my own age. We legged it over to the video store and had no trouble renting a copy. I spent the next about hour and a half not only enjoying the movie all over again, reliving my childhood, but watching in delight as each new scene threw Tony into fits of laughter, and there were many rewinds and replays. To see someone enjoy for the first time something which had given me so much pleasure as a child was truly a new and thrilling joy, and I think that night cemented the place of this wonderful Disney movie in my mind and my heart forever.
No wonder I’m still singing the songs!