covering the mouse

Today is the first day of Friday Features here at Covering the Mouse. Every Friday will have it's own theme and today, the last Friday of the month, is Obscure Disney Song Friday. Today's obscure track is The Spectrum Song originally sung by Paul Frees as Professor Ludwig Von Drake.

Way back in 1961, Walt Disney decided to change his black and white television program, Disneyland, to color as that was becoming more standard in households and Walt always liked being on the cutting edge of technology. The name became Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color and the very first episode featured a new character, Ludwig Von Drake, who sang a song that was very apropos to the new title. The Spectrum Song was written by the Sherman Brothers who tied color and music together very closely for this song. The following excerpt is taken from Wikipedia:

The opening stanza of "The Spectrum Song" tied each color to a specific note in a major scale, similar to the color coding of a toy xylophone. Thus, the word "red" corresponded to the tonic, or octave note (Do), yellow was the major third or mediant note (Mi), green was the perfect fifth or dominant note (So), and so on. The first four notes of the song thus formed a major chord, do-mi-so-do (red-yellow-green-red), a playful variant on the exercise of singing scales, similar to the Rodgers and Hammerstein song "Do-Re-Mi" from The Sound of Music. The Shermans thus compare colors to musical notes, stating in the lyric that "Color has its harmony".

This version of the song is arranged and performed by Michelle Shocked, a singer-songwriter and political activist from Texas. In 2005 she released three albums at the same time! One album called GOT NO STRINGS is made up entirely of Disney cover tunes! I'll be posting more by her in the future and I'll tell you a bit more about Michelle at that time.