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Old Apr 10, 2021, 12:21 AM
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Mac_Tear Mac_Tear is offline
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Disney's Music Trivia:

• Oliver Wallace's last feature animation scoring for Walt Disney. He was succeeded by George Bruns, who did the next six animated features scorings, starting with Sleeping Beauty

• The seventy-six minute film is composed by 72 musical sequences, which is lower than all the previous animated features. The reason behind this is the growing trend of using no music for specific scenes in the movie to add atmosphere.
Walt Disney stated: "I think this business of trying to score under everything...is not good. Put music under business that needs it - then if there are vacant spots we can always go back and put music in."
This decrease in underscoring would affect the Studios' animated features in a pronounced manner starting with One Hundred and One Dalmatians, distancing these films significantly from Disney's early animated movies

• It was Walt Disney's idea to underscore the calendar montage like heard on "Countdown to B-Day", comparing it to "something like Beethoven's that builds and progresses with variations and finally comes to a big payoff."

• Both characters of Lady and the Tramp have their own musical leitmotif. While Lady's Theme is used prominently through the score, especially in the first moments, heard on "Lady to Bed" or "Sunday",
Tramp's Theme, first heard on "What a Day" and later "Snob Hill", has a cheerful and easy-going feeling, which evokes some kind of victorian-era atmosphere

• Following the trend of previous features, Walt Disney used outside contractors to write the songs for the film. In this case, the duo of Peggy Lee and Sonny Burke. Especially Lee was quite popular at that time,
having penned several top 10 songs and working with Swing pionist Benny Goodman in the 1940s, while Burke was a popular music arranger and Big Band leader

• It was the first time, Walt Disney hired a popular singer to participate on the soundtrack to an animated feature. This trend would continue much later in the future with Elton John ("The Lion King") or Phil Collins ("Tarzan")

• The soundtrack features a variety of ethnic music, reflected in the songs from the film: oriental, Italian, and American jazz, which is itself a blend of African and American traditions

• Like Peter Pan two years earlier, Lady and the Tramp caused some controversy about racism and stereotypes years later, in this case the Anti-Asian stereotypical portrayal of the two Siamese cats Si and Am, along with their song "The Siamese Cat Song"

• The Mellomen, a four part barbershop harmony group, who worked for Disney several times before, contributed the dog howling arrangement of Henry Bishop's original melody, adapted from John Howard Payne's 1823 opera Clari.
However, Walt Disney was not satisfied with the first result: "That's wonderful, but...it sounds like human begins howling instead of really dogs." Later, the quartet overdubbed sounds of whimpering and dog howls.
This time when Walt listened to the results he was pleased, stating: "That's absolutely perfect, it sounds like dogs, that's wonderful."

• One unused song, written by Ray Gilbert and Eliot Daniels in August 1946, was "I'm Free as the Breeze". Tramp was about to sing this song when roaming around. Lee and Burke wrote a similar song in October 1952
called "I'm Singing ('Cause I Want to Sing)". Both songs were scrapped because the team decided of not having a lead animal character who sings, in similar tradition as Dumbo or Bambi before
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