Nerd Pride Radio

Eliahad wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 5:49 pm Robin Hood and Little John Runnin' Through the Forest.

You're now singing it. I rest my case.

DMDarcs wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 8:26 pm I'm just here to tell you all that you're wrong.

You're Welcome.

Tahlvin wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 5:04 am Enough said. The rest of y'all can just Let It Go.

Phoebe wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 7:19 am

Tahlvin wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 5:04 am Enough said. The rest of y'all can just Let It Go.

Ahh, if only clever wordplay were enough to make it a better song than Reflection.

Eliahad wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 5:49 pm Robin Hood and Little John Runnin' Through the Forest.

You're now singing it. I rest my case.

poorpete wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 8:03 pm That said, I'll probably go with the best from Broadway and pick a Howard Ashman joint, just gotta narrow it down....

Ok gotta go with wit.

There's one song in town that's got all of it down

Mike wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 8:16 pm I cannot argue with either of those, except that I am now an Encanto stan. And the best of the lot? Yeah, I know you think I'm gonna talk about Bruno, but I'm not:

DMDarcs wrote: ↑Wed Jan 19, 2022 8:26 pm I'm just here to tell you all that you're wrong.

You're Welcome.

Tahlvin wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 5:04 am

Enough said. The rest of y'all can just Let It Go.

Eliahad wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 6:13 am Hakuna Matata, Mike. Hakuna Matata.

Phoebe wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 2:49 pm Anyway fine, we don't have to be capitalists here. I was just trying to protect you from an even better version of the song that would stick in your head longer and break your heart more painfully. But if that's how you want to be go ahead and do the sing-along version yourself. Now I've got to go deal with my child who thinks that KFC has the best chicken. I can only solve one objective aesthetics problem at a time.

Tahlvin wrote: ↑Fri Jan 21, 2022 9:31 am P.S. - Sorry, I really do love you!

The All-Knowing Judges wrote:
“I Wanna Be Like You” – The Jungle Book (1967)
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche famously described the role of music as one of “intoxication and self-forgetfulness”, and there are numerous Disney songs which reflect that: The Lion King‘s “Hakuna Matata”, The Little Mermaid‘s “Under the Sea” and The Aristocats‘ “Everybody Wants to be a Cat”, among others. Even so, nothing traces the original Nietzschean dialectic with such scholarly punctiliousness as The Jungle Book‘s “I Wanna Be Like You” – and very little comes close to matching it for sheer richness and euphoria.

All of the characters here forget themselves as they are helplessly intoxicated by the hypnotic rhythm, as required by the German philosopher. The Nietzschean divinity of music, Dionysus, was described by philologist Walter F. Otto as “taming men’s opposition with whips of madness”, and that’s exactly what the god proceeds to do here as he becomes incarnate in King Louie, “the king of the swingers”.

If Nietzschean madness is a metaphor, then it’s hardly treated as a loose one: Baloo, whose in-groove cry is “Get mad, baby”, loses all cognition of self when hearing the music. Like a shaman in a rain-dance, or a teenager swirling to a trance beat, the bear becomes no more than a pulse in the communal ecstasy.

The counterpoise to Dionysus described in The Birth of Tragedy was Apollo, the god of sculpture and perfect forms, represented here by the backdrop: dusty ruins, bricks and statues from a civilization now presumably extinct. As Mowgli and Baloo surrender to Louie’s chaos on the literal plane, civilization itself crumbles before the anarchic apes on the symbolic one – a transition that is represented most successfully by the film’s game of mirrors.

Visually, each character in this musical piece is set up as a reflection of the next: Mowgli apes the apes by replicating their dance moves, even as Louie desires to be akin to Mowgli (“I wanna be like you”). Yet Louie is also the parody of the French dynasty of Louis kings, a distorted symbol of authority, shadowed by a smaller ape who acts as his replica (a parody of King Louie’s parody). Bagheera and Baloo also make for a parody of each other as they swap roles (one is serious, the other the comic relief, by turns). Baloo dresses up as the apes he was trying to antagonize; Bagheera camouflages by mimicking a statue of a panther that is identical to himself… there are almost more mirrors in this little song than in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining!

As Louie’s apes dance together – all self-similar, all swinging in perfectly mirroring couples – Mowgli takes a chimp by the hand and joins in with the choreography. He has “become like you” – and indeed, so has every other character.

Nietzsche’s Dionysus was never offered a more reverential tribute than in Disney’s fantastic “I Wanna Be like You” ballad, as the edges of the titular “I” and “you” are blurred to the point of sublimation. All referents of order and tradition are collapsed, including the inexhaustible (and usually indispensable) structure of language, which caves into the euphoric chaos as the singers end up babbling inarticulate sounds.

This joyful atmosphere was abandoned in Jon Favreau’s 2016 remake of The Jungle Book in favor of something much darker and disturbing. The result, while truer to the source material, was nowhere as rich and layered as the original by the Sherman Brothers: love of life, fear of death, joy and terror, ecstasy and climax, everything that characterizes Nietzsche’s eternal deity is so well-encapsulated in this amazing song that it transcends its own film, along with the very loose genre limits that were posed by Disney animated films.