An Interview with the Sherman Brothers
Page 4 of 8

Q: Many years later you were asked to come back and write some songs for Epcot?

A: Oh yes.

Q: Including for the Imagination Pavilion, One Little Spark, Magic Journeys and I think my favorite song of yours, Makin' Memories.

A: That is a fun song. See, our relationship with Walt Disney Imagineering, that whole group who makes the rides and the experiences at the parks, was a separate organization although under the wing of Disney, and so we always had a very close relationship with them and we were working on things for them in the 70s and in the 80s. Occasionally we’d come in and do some special songs. We did the original Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow for the pavilion and Carousel of Progress and then they wanted a new song for the Eastern, for the one in Florida, so we wrote The Best Time of Your Life, a special song for them back in the 70s. We kept writing occasionally for them and then when Epcot was being created we did quite a number of songs for Epcot and even as recently as the 90’s we did revisions of old songs that we had done for Tomorrowland.

Q: You did do some rework for that?

A: We did, like we took Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow and we called it, It’s a great new world and Innoventions, shining up our lives in every way. We wrote the new lyric on the old tune because they wanted to keep the tune. We did the new Innovention song and we did the new Rocket Rod song based on a song called Detroit which we had done, we call it Magic Highways.

That’s how our book came out about because we were working with Bruce Gordon who is the designer and one of the co-editors of Walt’s Time, our book, and we were talking about the book one day and Bruce said, "whatever happened to that wonderful book you guys had started" because one chapter of it was quoted in Variety many years ago and we could never sell it because it was such a positive, loving tribute to Walt and they said "what’s the bad stuff? Give us the dirt," and there wasn’t any dirt. It was just a love story. We just loved the guy and he was great with us.

So we could never sell it and he said this would be a great coffee table book. I really wanted to work on this thing because he had published that wonderful book about Disney called, The Nickel Tour, which is all about Disneyland in the form of postcards and it’s an incredible book that they had created and they were given the same song and dance well, "where’s the dirt, nobody is going to be interested in this," and they had a best seller. They sold out their first edition and now they have a second edition.

He and David Mumford and another fellow who is a very talented writer by the name of Jeff Kurtti. So Bruce Gordon, David Mumford and Jeff Kurtti teamed up and created this incredible Walt’s Time in our words. They took our words and put it into this book and made an incredible thing and it’s just wonderful and it’s available on CamphorTree.com. I think you have that information.

Q: I will most definitely put that in.

A: I’m very proud of it and my brother is very proud of it and it tells not only the story of our lives but also how we became songwriters through our father’s influence, and it tells about his great hits and all. You’ve seen the book, I’m sure.

Q: I went to Disneyland on Sunday just to read the book and it was amazing. I really, really enjoyed it.

A: Thank you very much. I’m glad you saw it. It does tell about our wonderful pop and the wonderful songs he wrote. He wrote for people like Jolson and Cantor and all these great, great writers. You know all these great singers, Crosby and Sinatra. They all sang his songs and this is back before we were writing or anything. He wrote such wonderful music and it was a great influence. Between him and Walt Disney, that was our formation.

Q: You’re love for not only Walt and your father, but your whole family and your wife and your children really comes through in the book.

A: Thank you. We’ve been lucky in that regard. We’ve had great fortune in our lives and we’re grateful for it. There’s always the showers with all the sunshine. We all have those things and who dwells on that? Only the poor unfortunate person who can’t think of any happy parts, but I’ve always looked for the happy thing in life. We try to spread a lot of joy if we possibly can with our music.

Q: Speaking of happy things, recently, just a couple of years ago I guess, you were brought back by the studios to do The Tigger Movie.

A: Right.

Q: How was that?

A: That was kind of marvelous. I’ll tell you why. There’s a young lady out there who is the actual music producer. She is the head of music for the group that was doing The Tigger Movie and she came up with the idea why don’t we go to the original writers of - they wanted to do a real traditional Walt Disney movie - go to the original writers of the Winnie the Pooh music, because we had done all four actually of the original Winnie the Pooh shorts, the 26 minute shorts. The songs had become kind of classics.

The song was all about, rather the picture was all about Tigger and we had written The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers and they were going to use that anyhow in the picture. So why don’t we come to the Sherman Brothers and see, and so it was like a wonderful thing. Her name is Bambie Moe and Bambie Moe called us and said "would we like to come in?" So we came in and talked with them. We were so impressed with this marvelous story, this beautiful, beautiful story, because the story is Tigger who is very proud of the fact that he is the only one. All of a sudden he has to confront the fact that he does not have a family. He doesn’t have a mother Tigger or a father Tigger. He didn’t have a cousin Tigger. He has nobody, just himself, and he gets very upset about this thing and he goes on this quest only to learn at the end of the picture that the people that love you and the people who you love, that’s your family, no matter what they look like or sound like. So Eeyore and Pooh and Piglet and Roo and all these characters are his family and it’s a great lesson in life. You can’t pick your family but you sure can pick your friends and that becomes your family. It’s a beautiful story. We fell in love with it. My God, how much do we pay you to do the show. We loved it and we wrote actually six new songs and the final song in it was collaborated with Kenny Loggins, a very gifted guy. Everybody knows he did that Return to Pooh Corner song, that famous, wonderful song. Bambie’s idea again was to get him to sing a song at the end. It sort of summarizes the picture, a recap of what the picture means, and we wrote a song called Your Heart Will Lead You Home and we wrote it with Kenny and he’s a wonderful singer. He did a beautiful job on it. We were very fortunate to have that. We did five originals plus the Tigger song so we did about seven songs in the picture.