259: Promised Land
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Not long ago, it happened to see, for the first time as an adult, the old Disney cartoon, Snow White. It's kind of amazing, really. It's what Disney's very first animated feature, it was made back in 1937. And when you watch it, it almost feels more like an opera than like a modern movie. Snow White and the Prince and the Seven Doors each enter the film in this very stagey way, each of them enters singing a song that declares who they are and what is it they want. "I'm wishing for the one I love." Snow White, for instance, sings to her reflection in a wishing well, and her voice echoes back. "To me, I'm hoping, I'm hoping, and I'm dreaming of the nice things that I will say." And in fact, she meets the Prince that very day. So I mentioned this to my sister, who worked at Disney at the time, in fact, she was a film executive there, that it seemed Snow White and how it felt like an old opera, and how old-fashioned the opening songs were. And she was like, "No, no, no, no, no, it's not that it's like an opera." What you're hearing is just the "I wish" song, and she tells me, "This is a standard thing, that this is in lots of movies." And the way it works is this, the very first song that the main character sings, they declare what it is that they want, and then that is what gets the story going. It's the "I wish" song. "I want more." For instance, the little mermaid Karen says, "Things about her wish to be human." "I want to be where the people are. I want to see, want to see them dancing, walking around on those, what do you call them?" "Oh, feet." Paisimodo, in the Disney version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, sings this from his tower as his first song. "Safe behind these windows and these parapets of stone, gazing at the people down below me. All my life I watch them as I hide up here alone, hungry for the histories they show me, all my life I wonder how it feels to pass a day, not above them, but part of them, and of their living years." That is just too uplifting. Anyway, this phenomenon, the "I wish" song, goes way beyond Disney fans. This, of course, is the "I wish" that Dorothy delivers at the beginning of the Wizard of Oz to go over the rainbow. Turns out lots of old stage musicals begin with the "I wish" song. "Fiddler in the Roof" as the daughter singing "Matchmaker Make Me a Match," "Funny Girl" as barber stress and singing about becoming a star. My Fair Lady opens with Julie Andrews wishing for a room somewhere, far away from the cold night air. As Steven Sondheim, ever the virtuoso in this kind of thing, and into the woods has six different characters singing the various "I wishes" in the opening number. "The King is Giving a Festival" "I wish to go to the Festival" "I wish my cow we give us some milk" "I wish we had a chance" "I wish to go to the Festival" "I wish to go to the Festival" "I wish to go to the Festival" "I wish to go to the Festival" Mrs. DeKaren said that even the Britney Spears movie, "Crossroads" begins with an "I wish" song. Britney is dancing on her bed in her underwear, singing into a spoon like it's a microphone to a Madonna song with a stereo, but I think a girl who wants to be a star, which is what she becomes by the end of the movie.
Transcription truncated.