Review of The Boys: The Sherman Brothers' Story (2009) by Edith N — 04 May 2011

Not Exactly a Jolly Holiday.

You don't have to like your siblings. Three out of four of my recent therapists agree. You don't have to let them be part of your life. You are even allowed to reach a point where you say, "You know, I'm done with this." You don't even have to be horribly emotionally abused the way I was by my sister. This is made all the better by the fact that you never have to talk to the sibling you're walking away from; oh, sure, your other relatives may put pressure on you about it, but it's normal to move away now. You don't have to avoid eye contact around the Sunday dinner table. Where it gets a little awkward is when there is a reason for remaining in one another's lives. Like being completely connected to one another in the public consciousness, say. They won their Oscars together. One had been trying for years to work with someone else, but really, there are people you do your best work with even after you stop liking them very much. That may well be why you don't like them very much.

For those who don't know their film history, the Sherman Brothers were two of Disney's staff musicians. Those Oscars? For [i]Mary Poppins[/i]. The Sherman Brothers wrote many of the most memorable songs appearing in Disney films. Their father, too, was a Tin Pan Alley great who moved the family out to Hollywood and wrote for various of the more famous early film singers. More songs than people realize came from the pens of a member of the Sherman family. However, this means that, in the public perception, they're happy, cheerful, and get along well. In reality, they had the same struggles and the same rivalry as any other siblings. The problem is that they were never as successful apart as they were together. This, I think, only made them resent each other more. In many ways, it must have come as a relief when Disney no longer required their services, though when they did, it was just one more sign that Disney was missing what had made it great before.

Even a short list of Sherman Brothers music would be full of the kind of songs you hear yourself humming for no good reason. Indeed, possibly their most famous song is one of the biggest earworms in music history. For their sins, they wrote "It's a Small World." This is of course not their best, just their most insidious. However, I think possibly it isn't their worst, either. (I really, really hate "Tall Paul.") The IMDB page, in many ways incomplete, does not have a soundtrack listing, but it's actually simpler to list movies their songs appeared in. [i]The Parent Trap[/i]. [i]Summer Magic[/i]. [i]The AristoCats[/i]. [i]Charlotte's Web[/i]. Various Winnie the Pooh bits. Yes, even the title song and the Tigger song. And, no, [i]Charlotte's Web[/i] wasn't Disney. Nor was [i]Chitty Chitty Bang Bang[/i], but they wrote the music for that, too. There are some people who have carved out large niches for themselves in artistic history. You cannot know of their art without knowing of them. And so it is with the Shermans. You cannot know of movie songs, not really know, without knowing of them.

But even their sons did not really feel they knew them, when you got right down to it. Their fathers weren't really on speaking terms, and the sons didn't know why. What could they know? They had seen the same old clips as everyone else, after all, their fathers sitting together at a piano, vamping it up for Walt. Their fathers were interviewed for dozens of "making-of" segments. The families, though, did not socialize. Hadn't in years. And as is the way of it, part of growing up is knowing that what you believed was normal because it was how you lived really isn't. Oh, they probably knew that not everyone's fathers were famous, and they probably knew that the Disney connection was unusual, but it apparently did not occur to them why they didn't go over to one another's houses. And one day, they asked why. And so this film is a combination of knowing the men and knowing the songs, possibly on the belief that you can't really know either without the other.

It is said that Laurel and Hardy passed a piece of advice to Abbott and Costello, and that they in turn passed it to Martin and Lewis. The advice is that, if you value your partnership, you don't let your wives socialize. I don't know how valid an argument this is, honestly. We do not, so far as I know, have a wealth of data on the subject. It is said several times over the course of the story that the partnership probably would have dissolved long before it did had they not been brothers. It's that old false expectation that you'll get along with your family and that, if you don't, there's something wrong with you. Besides, the Shermans had to know that they were literally making beautiful music together. Oh, some of it was just light and silly, to be sure. "The Monkey's Uncle" is not going to go down as anyone's finest. Not the Shermans', not Annette's, not the Beach Boys'. (Maybe Annette's.) On the other hand, they did also give us some of the finest songs I've ever heard about the woes of growing up and the sadness of not being able to connect to your children. Also "Feed the Birds" and "Femininity," two of my favourite Disney songs ever.