[IMG:L]Richard Sherman remembers the day Walt Disney called him and his colleagues into his office and asked: “How many of you guys have read The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling?” Not one person raised their hand, and to their surprise, Disney responded, “Good. We’re going to tell the story of The Jungle Book the Disney way.”
“With that, he sat down and he told us how he wanted to see this film,” Sherman explains. “And he acted out every part. It was an amazing thing. To hear Walt Disney tell a story was like nothing. It was transfixing.”
Sherman, who composed many popular Disney songs including Jungle Book‘s “I Want to Be Like You,” gathered at Hollywood’s El Capitan Theater with Bruce Reitherman [Mowgli], Darlene Carr [Shanti], Chad Stuart [Flaps] and animator Andreas Deja to reflect on the film they made 40 years ago and celebrate the release of The Jungle Book Two-Disc 40th Anniversary Platinum Edition on DVD.
The group reminisced together on stage about the story of a little boy raised in the jungle by wolves, before Chad Stuart, of Chad and Jeremy fame, sang “Summer Song” at the piano followed by Richard Sherman, who played a melody of his classics like “A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Chim Chim Cheree” and “Winnie the Pooh.” The evening ended with a rare screening of the film at the historic theater.
Richard Sherman on Walt Disney‘s last film:
“The thing I take back the most from all the memories I have of the film is the fact that none of us, when we were working on this film, realized this was the very last time Walt Disney would personally be producing a picture. He was personally involved in every sequence, personally plussing things and making suggestions and keeping the team moving forward, etc. It was just an amazing, amazing time. And as the years go by, I think back on it and I say, ‘What a treasure to know that I was part of that team that made his last great animated film.'”
Darlene Carr on the evergreen element of the film:
“Some things sort of outlive you and I think The Jungle Book is going to outlive me. Of course it was a great experience for me, not only having an opportunity to know Walt the last year before he passed on, but also to sing Richard and Robert ‘Bob’ Sherman‘s music was unbelievable. I got to do that on another occasion besides Jungle Book. And it’s just a joy to be here and see everyone again.”
[IMG:R]Andreas Deja on drawing Shere Khan:
“Yeah, this legendary tiger, of course, Shere Khan, and when I look at the face of the tiger, of course this is a picture of George Sanders who was the voice. There’s some of George Sanders in it. Look at that face. I mean, it’s almost like a portrait.”
Bruce Reitherman on working with his father:
“That’s my dad [referring to a photo]. That’s Woolie Reitherman, director of The Jungle Book and four subsequent full-length-animated features at the studio. I had the privilege of doing the voice of Mowgli and also working with my dad and seeing somehow on a daily basis what the world of filmmaking was like at a big time studio. It was really interesting.”
Darlene Carr on starting her career:
“I had done, I think, only one other acting job previous to being put under contract [by Walt Disney], but I had done the singing for the children in the film The Sound of Music. They needed some professional singers to sort of sweeten what the actors did. My sister played Liesl, the 16-year-old, ‘I am 16 going on 17.’ I did some of her singing and some of the other children’s singing to sort of make it sound a little better because they were professional actors, not singers.”
Chad Stuart on landing the role of Flaps the vulture:
“Jeremy [Clyde] and I had already established ourselves as English and we could talk. We had hair and we’d done The Dick Van Dyke Show. We even did a western. We did a spin-off of Laredo which is pretty amazing. Needless to say, we weren’t cowboys. So I think Jeremy would have been in it too but he was acting in London, which of course is why we broke up really because he just had to act. I loved the idea. Just driving onto the Disney lot, ‘I’m going to be a voice in a Disney movie.’ I mean, it doesn’t get much better than that. It was very, very cool and I remember naively, stupidly probably, auditioning for Woolie and doing my best impression of Peter Sellers doing impressions of Frenchmen. Woolie was just like, ‘Cool it, kid. Just give me a Beatle.'”
Bruce Reitherman on being a voice actor as a child:
“I had done the voice of Christopher Robin in the first Winnie the Pooh short. ‘Now the time has come to proving what the diet did for Pooh.’ If only that had been in any of my college exams, I would have done better in college.”
[IMG:L]Darlene Carr on landing the voice role of Shanti:
“Somewhere along the line, my agent set up an audition for me with Walt Disney. I think Walt–as Hayley Mills was getting older and maturing–was thinking ahead about developing another little girl for his studio. I walked in with my guitar and I sat and probably bored him to death and sang and played my guitar for 45 minutes. He probably had trouble getting me to shut up. But he put me under contract and then he probably didn’t quite know what he was going to do with me really. But he put me in a couple of his Wonderful World of Color episodes. That’s where Richard comes in and Richard actually knows more about how I got to work at Walt Disney than anybody.”
Richard Sherman on casting Darlene for the part:
“There was this adorable young girl. She was about 14 I think, 13 or 14 years old and I heard her singing. I heard her singing and Bob [Sherman] and I had just finished writing a song called ”My Own Home’ for the little girl to sing near the end of the film. And I didn’t want to be the one to first sing that particular song to Walt…[Darlene] came up and learned the song in a flash…We recorded her with me playing the piano. A week and a half later, we had this meeting on the concluding sequences in the show and I said, ‘Walt, we have a little demo.’ So I played the tape for him and it was typical Walt. He listened to it very intently and said, ‘Yeah, that’ll work. Okay, now … ‘ And then went on with what he was talking about. But if you knew Walt, you knew that was good because he never in front of you said, ‘Oh, wonderful.’ He’d only do it behind your back. He’d say, ‘They wrote a perfect song, they wrote a great voice.’ But he never said it to us. And so months and months and months go by and then the time has come for the casting of the actual vocal … and Walt said, ‘Oh, you’ve got the voice already. You know, that girl. You know, Darlene, get Darlene.’ So that was it.”
Bruce Reitherman on his mannerisms in the film:
“There’s a little bit of live-action work done with me that was used by the animators really as a reference more for mannerisms and I think particular personality bits…There’s a moment about two thirds of the way into the film when Mowgli’s been betrayed once again by his pals Baloo and Bagheera, they want to take him back to man’s village. Mowgli just walks through the forest and it … looks a little bit like some of the live action stuff I did for the animation. Jump off a rock and throw the stick and kick a pebble.”
Andreas Deja on pencil tests:
“When you take the color out and you see just the drawings move, there’s a special magic that comes through. You really see the animator’s hands on the screen. Frank [Thomas] was just such a master at acting. The nice thing about this movie is this is so full of acting because the story was so simple that the animators had all that room to develop these characters and gestures. That’s why I like it so much.”
[IMG:R]Richard Sherman on meeting Louis Prima for the part of King Louie:
“Well, Louis Prima actually came about in an interesting way. We had written ‘I Want to Be Like You’ for the King of the Apes to sing and it was a very fun song–a Dixieland jazz kind of song. I remembered Louis Prima had sung an album of Mary Poppins songs of all things. And he did it with kind of a scat version of ‘Chim Chim Cheree,’ where he was going all over the place ad libbing with the song. It was very impressive and Bob and I thought it would be kind of great if we have a little scat singing in there. I brought up this record at a meeting one day and everybody got into that and said, “Louis Prima is perfect, perfect, perfect” so they sent Bob and myself to Las Vegas to see Louis Prima. Now Louis Prima worked with this band called Sam Butera and the Witnesses, the wildest group of entertainers you’ve ever seen…I had to sing the song on a piano in a little room for these wild musicians, and I was terrified. Oh my God, so I sat there and you could hear a pin drop. These people sat like University professors listening to me going, ‘Ooh ooh ooh, I wanna be like you oo oo.’ And Louis Prima says to me, ‘Are you trying to make a monkey out of me?’ I said, ‘Louis, Louis, we’re trying to make an ape out of you.’ And he said, ‘Well, you got me.’
