Love - Sunaga t Experience featuring Till Brönner

Hey everyone! It's Jamie from over at Fong Songs. It's a brand new year and it's great to have Covering the Mouse back in full force. Kurtis was nice enough to welcome me back to help out with his blog revival and I was more than willing to help out. As you may or may not know, I'm an aficionado of Disney and Disney covers alike, so this will be the first in a series of monthly guest posts from yours truly, my first post here since April 2008! First up, the love theme from 1973's Robin Hood, appropriately titled Love.

Robin Hood has always been one of my favourite Disney films. I can't even count the number of times I've seen it on video as a kid. Part of its enduring quality is its memorable soundtrack, which was chiefly written and performed by Roger "King of the Road" Miller who portrayed the narrating minstrel rooster, Alan-a-Dale. George Bruns and Floyd Huddleston co-wrote Love, which was sung by Huddleston's wife Nancy Adams. An alternate version of the song was posted on youtube by their son Huston Huddleston. I didn't realize until rewatching these scenes recently, but the Love montage with Robin and Marian was later mirrored with Simba and Nala during Can You Feel the Love Tonight? in The Lion King. The forest setting, their reflections on the water, even walking under a waterfall, and of course those long meaningful looks into each other's eyes. Ah, it's Disney love!

Love was actually nominated for Best Original Song at the 46th Academy Awards up against, among others, Live and Let Die and The Way We Were (the winner). You know how they perform each song nominee during the Oscar broadcast? Well, Love was actually performed as a duet by an 11-year old Jodie Foster and Johnny Whitaker, the young co-stars of Disney's Napoleon and Samantha. They were also fresh off the release of 1973's Tom Sawyer, with Whitaker in the title role and Foster as Becky. More random trivia: Whitaker's siblings Billy and Dora respectively played the bunnies Skippy and Tagalong in Robin Hood!

One of the reasons I wanted to feature this song was that it was also recently revived in Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was my favourite film of 2009 (more on that here). Ah, animated foxes in love! Even before Love makes a cameo, Anderson opens the film with The Wellingtons performing The Ballad of Davy Crockett, which was incidentally co-written by George Bruns too!

There aren't a lot of Robin Hood covers out there, so I was thrilled to find this jazz cover of Love, taken from the Japanese Disney cover album MODAL JAZZ LOVES DISNEY as performed by the SUNAGA T EXPERIENCE featuring German trumpeter TILL BRÖNNER.