Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, we love Hanna Barbera.

Welcome to the fantastic world of Hanna and Barbera, a celebration of Bill, Hannah, Joe, Barbera and the thousands of people, past and present who have shared in their entertainment tradition.

And now your host, Greg Garbar.

Thank you, Chris Anthony, welcome to the fantastic world.

Today we are going to pay tribute to one of the finest motion pictures ever made by any studio.

I know that's subjective.

I do the best I can to support it with facts and with emotional background.

I think we have with us today somebody who can give so much insight into why this film is such a special thing, as well as give US a background into his legendary father and uncle.

We have with us Robert J Sherman to his friends, Robbie, He is an author.

He is a songwriter.

We're going to talk about the musicals that he has done on the London stage, the great people he's worked with.

Welcome, Robbie Sherman.

Greg Airbar, wonderful to be here.

Thank you so much for having me.

Let's start with just some of the background and childhood stories.

Robert and Richard Sherman, their father, was also a songwriter, and in 1968 I was born, which was at the height of their career.

They've done movies like Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book, Winnie the Pooh.

They were the only two songwriters ever personally hired by Walt Disney to be staff songwriters.

They had many staff composers.

As you know, Greg at Disney let's staff songwriters the the Sherman Brothers.

That was a unique position that they held and one that they coveted.

They loved Walt like he was a second father, which is saying a lot because their father was a Tin Pen Alley songwriter named Al Sherman, who not to be confused with Alan Sherman who wrote Hello Mother, Hello Father.

I always get that.

Al Sherman, my grandfather wrote songs for the likes of Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Marie Chevalier.

A lot of the people at the Sherman Brothers got to write for, especially for Disney.

In the latter part of those singers careers like Chevalier and Bing Crosby were people who my grandfather had written for.

He wrote When I'm the President.

If you watch Betty Boop for president, she sings an Al Sherman song.

Oh, when?

I'm the.

President When I I'm the president, I'll show you how I'll run the house when I'm the president.

And Al Sherman also wrote, he's so unusual.

When I want some love and the gods have some love.

He says.

Please stop it.

Please.

He's so unusual.

And that song became the title song for the Cyndi Lauper's 1980s hit album She's So Unusual.

And that was actually an Al Sherman song called He's So Unusual.

And it's one of The Rolling Stones top 500 albums, by the way.

So he definitely is part of the zeitgeist of the American songbook and oftentimes forgotten.

Probably more to do with the fact that he moved around a lot as a young composer, which was so formative to the Sherman Brothers and why they were so joined at the hip in the 19 30s.

Even though there are very different personalities, as I know, you know, Greg, But it had to do with the fact that my grandfather was sometimes on the vaudeville circuit playing with a group called Songwriters on Parade.

And then sometimes he was out in LA working on a movie or working in New York.

Sometimes he was managing an orchestra and conducting an orchestra in Florida.

But because he wasn't situated in one place, the Sherman Brothers were very insulated and they ended up working and getting to know each other very, very well.

Then my father goes off to World War 2 in 1943.

He was the older brother and he was only 17.

He was one of the younger people in the war.

And he comes back in 1945 after serving very valiantly.

And we talked about before this, the Valiant service, which could be a several podcasts enough itself just as World War 2 service.

My uncle was just graduating from high school and my dad was coming back from the war, and suddenly they were both entering the university as freshmen.

And because of the GI Bill, songwriter could actually afford to put two sons through college, which was the norm back in the old days for middle class families.

And they'd go to school together at Bard College, but neither of them had written a song.

Yeah, my dad loved writing poetry and was very good at it.

My uncle was composing music and was a music major, and then in 1950 they come back to California for Bart College after having graduated.

My dad has a great quote.

I was writing the Great American Novel and Dick was writing the Great American Symphony, and separately we were digging the Great American hole in the ground.

My dad would continue this story.

Our father Al came to us and said, I bet you boys couldn't write a song that a kid would spend his lunch money to play on a jukebox.

And they took him up on his challenge and they tried to write some pop songs.

Their first songs were failures.

What didn't work?

It was too long.

It wasn't original.

And then they came up with a song called Gold Could Buy Anything But Love.

And the great country Western star who had a radio program in 1951.

His name is Gene Autry.

Gene Autry heard it, loved it and was going to do it.

Love.

Love, love.

You can't buy love.

Together, this weekly radio program and my father and uncle were listening to the wireless and their shared room together.

And suddenly on the radio came Gene Autry's show and he started to sing the song.

And the song was Old Soldiers never die, they just fade away.

What had happened a couple days earlier was MacArthur come back from Korea, been fired basically by the Truman, but he got to speak to a joint session of Congress.

And General MacArthur said, I like that old song that we used to sing back in the barracks.

Old soldiers never die.

They just fade away.

And so Gene Autry had picked this up, and that's the song that he sang.

And that became the song that he was promoting.

My father and uncle were furious.

But more importantly, they were hooked.

And from that point on, they wanted to be songwriters.

And it took another nine years before they got to meet Walt Disney.

They started to write songs for people like Annette for New Cello and then Hayley Mills and.

You can.

Always count on me.

And then, of course, Mary Poppins.

It's a jolly All a day with Mary.

No wonder that it's Mary that we love.

And they won the Oscars for Mary Poppin and they wrote songs for The Jungle Book.

Then when Disney passed away, they started work on independent films by producers like Cubby Broccoli for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and You, Chitty Bang Bang Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

What we'll do.

They came back to Disney for the rest of Cats, which best get them to sleep on velvet mats.

The Aristo Cats still become home.

One of the Peanuts films.

And of course, the film.

We're here to talk about Charlotte's Web.

So that gives you hopefully brief history of my dad and uncle.

And a lot of great partnerships, as we've mentioned on this podcast several times, were effective through their oppositeness.

And the Shermans were Hannah and Barbara, were Walt and Roy, Disney, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello.

Each one had strengths and weaknesses that melded together well.

And what I learned in writing my book, Hanna Barbera, the recorded history, was how personal the songs in Charlotte's Web were.

I didn't realize how the songs were about different personalities, different types of people who somehow worked out the whole theme of the film is a spider and a pig.

What could be more different?

And yet they have this friendship that, like, transcends it goes on forever.

In a way, it is a powerful statement on opposites working and different kinds of people getting along and sometimes strengthening their own lives.

Oh, we've got lots and come and wear.

It really counts.

Wear it really counts.

We've got large amounts.

And.

There's also an intellectual camaraderie that Charlotte and Wilbur seem to have.

There's a very interesting and important device.

You know, whenever you take a piece of literature, literature is inherently something that you think about.

So you can have dialogue, you can have things that aren't necessarily visual aspects of storytelling because you can be inside the mind of the characters.

This is one reason why Fitzgerald struggled so much with Hollywood and writing Hollywood scripts was because if you read The Great Gatsby, Gatsby was a character who was very much inside his mind.

But it's very difficult to translate that into a bit of dialogue and a lot of visual.

You know, it's one thing to think about the green light, the end of the dock, and then to see what that may be symbolized, but you can't be in that headspace the whole time.

There is a wonderful device that my father created and you should know with the Sherman brothers.

While both Sherman brothers wrote both music and lyrics, my father was the primary lyricist and my uncle was the primary composer.

But they both worked on both and I.

And having written songs with my father and having worked with my uncle as well on different projects, I can tell you that they both did work on both.

And there's no question, but there is a primary emphasis on my dad being more the literary personality.

And there was a device that my father created quite brilliantly, and that was in the song I Can Talk from Charlotte's Web, which was very important because before this point the humans could speak but the animals couldn't.

And there needed to be a Segway between non verbal animals and verbal animals and spiders, so to speak.

And there's a moment when the animals are in the barnyard and the goose says, can't you talk, talk, talk.

And finally Wilbur is able to say his name and then becomes the evocation of this wonderful expression.

He says, I can talk, I can talk.

I can actually factually talk.

My brother and I used to joke about this because our father would never have said talk to me.

He was speak to me.

He believed that there's the difference between talking, which is just the ability to actually vocalize, versus speech.

It was almost an inside joke, you could say.

And what's cool about that song is he goes from being barely able to say his own name to using $0.50 and 80 cent and $1.00 words.

Yeah, and beautifully, that's the.

Genius.

Isn't it great that I articulate?

Isn't grand that you can understand.

I don't trump, I don't point, I don't even squeak or squawk When I want to say something, I open up and talk.

I can talk.

I can talk, talk, talk.

I can talk.

I pop with perspicacity.

I'm loaded with loquacity.

My vocalized veracity is talks.

Semantically, each bit of me is the verbalized epitome.

My plethora.

Your pattern never stops.

That's wonderful.

That's actually the point.

It's that it's important that we get this sense that there's an intellectual side to Wilburn.

Why?

Because Charlotte has a good vocabulary.

That's a bonding.

Moment, yeah.

So using humor as a bridge, my father was able to create this moment that gave them something that was a commonality that can't be over.

I mean, I've never read this in a book and I don't remember my father actually saying this, so to be very clear, but I don't see how that could be anything but that.

I think you needed to have this commonality.

Certainly the Ram didn't have this with Charlotte.

The Goose didn't have this.

This was something, the two of them, we're like 2 nerds in a library, you know?

And Charlotte knew big words, and that was important to her, and it was important for her survival, for Wilbur's survival, that they have this.

Common barn.

Well, Charlotte also was, and you told me before we started that you are a person who will, and as intellectual people are, will readily admit I don't know when they don't know.

And Charlotte was perfectly willing to do research.

And so she sent her research team, which would be Templeton, out to find words.

It says crunchy.

Never fails to get a laugh.

I mean, when you think about how Paul Lynn, the actor who voiced Templeton, is part of the zeitgeist of our society and what a great character, I actually think it's his best character from what I know.

Templeton the Wrath.

Watching it again, you're really struck by, first of all, the film is emotional and sweet, but it's not sentimental and sappy.

I mean, except for maybe I love you, Wilbur with Jeffrey.

But that's Don Messick, and I will not falter on my admiration.

That was the guy who started with those.

But yeah, written for the film, yeah.

And that wasn't in the book, but the idea of.

Gopher.

In Winnie the Pooh, yeah, I'm not in the box.

But Templeton, he's not only vile, but he finds everything so sappy anyway.

He kind of cuts what there might be.

Because Templeton is a cynic.

I mean, he's never really converted from the cynical point of view, no.

Templeton doesn't arc.

He doesn't see this.

Oh, it's so wonderful.

And oh gosh, I've been so wrong.

Templeton is annoying and selfish to the very end.

You know, in the most sorrowful scene he has a tirade.

So it's hurry up Templeton, is it?

And what thanks do I get for these services?

I would like to know.

Templeton, I'll make you a solemn promise.

Get Charlotte's egg SAC for me and from now on I'll let you eat first when Larvie slops me.

You mean Matt?

Cross my heart.

It's a deal.

Use extreme care.

I don't want a single one of those eggs harmed.

This this stuff sticks in my mouth.

It's worse than caramel candy.

And he still wants something for doing something that anybody else would have said.

Of course I'll help you.

He really is that cynical.

The goose was right.

It's all about the treasure, you know, and the idea of Agnes Moorehead.

What a genius thing.

And then and then the Sherman brothers turning that stammer.

That's the way of goose, kind of speaking, the gobble of the bird.

I always think of Agnes Moorehead and Citizen Kane.

I think of her in Bewitched, of course.

I think of her in Charlotte's Web and I think of her in Citizen Kane as the mother who basically gives her son away for her money.

The banker well and her defense also to protect her son from an abusive father but it was a very dysfunctional family because the father starts to get very angry to the point of threatening him and she says that's why he's going to be sent to a place where you can't get him you get a lot of economy I.

Never thought about that.

Yeah, who would have thought?

We talked about Charlotte's Web and Citizen Kane in the same.

Well, you know, the casting is flawless and I did meet Dave Madden years after and he was very proud of his role.

He has very few lines, but there's a lot of subtlety and at the end there is such compassion.

What are you up to now?

I'm going away.

I can't stand it here.

This place is too full of memories.

And.

All of Charlotte's children are gone.

There are three little runs up there that couldn't fly away.

He understands he's got wisdom and compassion in the way Dave Madden performs him, but also in the way they're animated.

Because if you look at the way the goose is animated with the neck, you know, I'm no flibberty.

Everybody gibbet.

The animators really pay off the speaking and Templeton.

I don't know who specifically the animator was, but a lot of his screen time was almost full animation.

He was exquisitely animated.

I agree with you that the animation in this film is excellent.

I also though can take the side that it's, I mean it's not to the same kind of, I mean the institution, the Disney ones.

Now you and I may agree to disagree on that part, but where I do agree with you or I think we would agree on this and we haven't ever really discussed it.

I actually think 2D animation is particularly expressive and the more to its basics that it becomes, the more expressive it actually can be.

We've seen this with the 3D animation, you know, over the last 25 years that there's a potential of a lack of expressiveness because of the uncanny valley.

I always use the example of this in 2D animation.

If you wanted to raise the eyebrow of a character in Anger Punch, oh how dare you, you could literally raise that eyebrow above the physical head the minute it gets into 3D.

You can't do that because it doesn't conform to the confines of reality, of three-dimensional reality.

And that's why 3D animation struggles to be as expressive in art form.

I think Pixar's made tremendous strides in that regard, and I think they deserve have some.

But the more simple the animation is, if you will, the less graded it is, the less dimensional it is.

I think in many ways that allows to be much more.

Expressive.

Well, there is something very grassroots about the fact that this is a purely drawn.

You know, there is Xerox, which Disney developed over a decade earlier with the lineage, but everything is hand painted and you're seeing the artist drawings through the Xerox.

There is a purity to this that is basic and germane to what the story is.

It's a really simple story that is deceptively simple, just like the animation is deceptively simple.

You can see paint moving around in Wilbur.

You see people's paintbrushes, you see thus moving around on cells within Wilbur's stall a lot.

They did spray out as much as they could, but that dust existed also in almost every animated film that was on the cells.

It is so organic that in retrospect, with the total perfection we have now with the way to digitize, improve things and make everything so perfect, that there's something really human and living about the fact that this was.

Pictures in front of a background, that's what it is.

I couldn't agree with you more.

There's a human element and you know, people talk about the threat of AI and maybe in 30 years when AI is really much more powerful and really can feel a sentence of a threat.

But right now, I mean, if I shut down my phone or my computer, it doesn't fight back.

It doesn't have that need to survive, which is very much thematic to Charlotte's Web as a story.

Generally, the idea of the human element that you find in Charlotte's Web is is so powerful in this sense and also the willingness to acquiesce to death as Charlotte chose, but at the same time wanting to find meaning in her life.

I think it's something we can all relate to as.

Well, there are lines in Charlotte's Web that get to me all the time.

And one of them is when she says, you know, you have been my friend Wilbur.

That in itself is a tremendous thing.

Everybody needs purpose.

You can call it goals.

You can call it whatever, but purpose is very important to a living creature, and Wilbur was given a purpose by Charlotte.

That's the other thing is here's the simple barnyard story written for children, and yet it's about life and death and existence and your legacy and the nature of writing, the nature of publicity, the nature of the Press, of fads and great it.

Is.

I never thought about the press and the PR part of it, but absolutely it's all about getting your message out, isn't?

It, yeah.

And then I know this from a marketing background.

Charlotte is great at this.

There's only so much shelf life for a story.

So eventually people stop coming and it stops getting reported.

So Charlotte has to send out a social media message again.

You know, she has to come up with a new name to sustain, and there are new purposes now.

It's got to get him to the fair.

And now there has to be her motto for the fair.

And she says, and I quote this to my wife a lot, because of all kinds of business and social issues, people are very gullible, Wilbur.

They believe everything they see in print.

It's a very cynical, it's not a very nice thing to say that we want to admit.

But the fact is seeing something in print, even when it's on your computer, you think twice about is this true?

And you even question because there's something powerful.

It's the power of the word in front of you and the invisibility of this teeny tiny writer who really doesn't get the credit.

Because when Missus Zuckerman says.

Seems to me you're a little off.

Seems to me we have no ordinary spider.

No, it's just a common Gray spider.

See, It's sitting right there.

It's America.

We must share this with our friends.

Because what she wrote was the pig.

So it's like being the comedy writer for a comedian.

It goes back to EB White and his knowledge of the way that the world worked as his own working writer.

You know as driven.

Editor and Earl Hamner, who was perfect and.

Wonderful choice, Earl Hamner.

Yeah, and he was thrilled to write this, and he was careful to preserve as much of the book as possible.

He was the creator, right, of the Waltons.

Is that right?

He was, and he also wrote some really great twilight zones, which.

Twilight Zones.

He wrote The Bewitching Pool which.

Was interviewing you, Greg, because you.

Know well we we go off into the Hanna Barbera weeds next to the studio and I can.

Do Sherman Brothers all day long.

But I step aside.

I step off the platform here.

But tell me about Earl Hamner.

Well, he wrote The Bewitching Pool with Mary Badham.

It's jumping into the pool and.

The Other Land.

And he also wrote a really sweet and almost lyrical episode about an old guy who keeps being, they keep trying to take him to heaven.

They won't take his dog.

And he makes the move along.

And then finally they say, of course we'll take your dog.

He says I knew you were angels taking me to heaven because heaven would take dogs.

Deny a dog?

Yeah.

You wouldn't deny a dog and as a dog owner, it's like, Oh yeah, there's a lot of barking and yapping in heaven.

And I agree 100.

Percent.

You got to have your dog in heaven.

I love the first line.

This old world, this old world is filled with wonders.

This old world, you know, it's such a homely quality to the man and to the way that he wrote.

He was on Stew show stacks program Stew show which is in his archives and I did call in to ask him about this and he told the story.

He said, I wanted to do this so bad.

And he told the story of how the day he was writing about, spoiler alert, you know, losing Charlotte, he was overcome with emotion, and someone came to the door and they said, what's wrong?

He said the spider just died.

And they're like, what?

That's the thing.

Debbie Reynolds really wanted to play Charlotte.

She brought to Charlotte a sweetness, A maternalness, A femininity, but also a a strength of somebody who had been in show business and fought her way through.

And there was a toughness to Charlotte that came about, especially with Templeton.

Or when she'd say Wilbur, I forbid you the faint.

She was the queen of the ruse, there's no question about it.

And Wilbur, more than anybody in that story, needed that defender, that advocate.

And anybody who's had a parent or an aunt or an uncle who protected them and was there for them as their advocate understands that feeling.

And I actually like the idea that it's not necessarily apparent, but a new friend, the line that always, I mean, there's several lines that get me.

Maybe it's because I'm a writer, but just the idea that at the end, when he says it's not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.

Charlotte was both Oh, it gets me right now I.

And then the orchestra swells and they go into Zuckerman's famous pig.

Zuckerman's famous pig would not have been my choice for the last theme of the piece.

I thought that too, but then I also thought the whole point is it is not a dark, depressing movie.

It has bittersweet sad.

It's mostly funny, but it does mix perfectly.

Sorrow and joy.

And putting Zuckerman's famous pig in there was what she created, you know, And then it goes into this gorgeous Charlotte's Web theme.

And by the way, my sister and I always felt like John Williams ends all of his scores the way this Zuckerman's pig.

When you hear the end of Star Wars, I'm miss big.

You know, I'm so glad, I'm so glad that you're doing the Charlotte's Web because you know, I'll get asked about Poppins or The Jungle Book a lot.

And my dad, when he was alive, of course, and my uncle, they would, you know, 3-4 times a year would be doing a seminar on those things.

But Charlotte's Web gets passed over.

And so I did a little bit of hormone.

Just wanted to gather my thoughts.

One of the great karmas that the Sherman brothers had was their ability to attract phenomenal.

And I don't mean good.

And there's nobody, not Rogers and Hammerstein, not Lerner in love.

The number of amazing music arrangers and music supervisors that they worked with.

It didn't hurt that they were in a time of really an explosion of creative juices and also technology, multi tracking and what have you.

They got to work, of course, with Owen Kostel, who did Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Charlotte's Web, Bed Knobs and Broomsticks and was the music Ranger also on Magic of Lassie, and I'm going to come back to him in a second.

But they also worked with Ralkey.

Don Ralkey is the most unknown brilliant orchestrator.

He did Snoopy Come Home, but he also did if you know the Golden Throats, yeah, things with William Shatner singing Who's in the Sky.

They use that producer Buddy Baker, who I know you know very well and it prostituted Camarada just the original quality.

And I got to know Buddy pretty well in last couple decades of his life.

But most interestingly, before we talked about Irwin Fossil is John Williams, because John Williams, in the same year that Charlotte's Web was being created, was Tom Sawyer.

There's a video on YouTube, you can see John Williams winning his first Oscar, and it was for the music supervision and conducting and arranging of Fiddler on the Roof and all the music writers, all the greats there, Lawler, Schifrin, Sherman Brothers, John Williams, few others.

Irwin Costell was in the line there.

I think they were up for the Sherman Brothers were up that year for Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

And John Williams wins for the music arrangement.

And my dad, because of his war injury in his knee, he was allowed to sit at the end and say stood up.

And my father was the first man to shake hands with John Williams, who would go on to win more Oscars.

And that was the month I did the math on this.

That was the month that John Williams started work on Tom Sawyer.

The Sherman brought both the songs for Tom Sawyer and John Williams's music supervisor, conductor and musical Ranger.

And I'm convinced that winning that Oscar for John Williams, and that was when an Oscar did what it was supposed to do in hired that creative to be that much more creative.

And he reinvented, in my opinion, and I've looked into this pretty deeply, this is when he reinvented his sound.

And it was on the movie Tom Sawyer, which if you listen to the score of Tom Sawyer and you must be familiar with Tom.

Sawyer.

Yeah.

Memorized it, Yeah.

I used to sit with the conductor score.

We'd have this big book that was for all the scores.

We also had it for Charlotte's Web.

Erwin gave my dad an uncle every time that they would do a score in each a copy of the conductor score leather bound.

We still have it.

And I used to sit as a teenager just studying the score and watching the VHS tapes of Tom Sawyer and listening to the way that he orchestrated and woe 1 theme into the next theme into the next theme and how he built the score up in such an ingenious way.

And what I realized, because of course Star Wars had already come out by the time I was a teenager, was that that Star Wars sound that he created, which by the way, completely reinvented.

And I mean, this reinvented the way that orchestras for movies were put together, that London Symphony Orchestra.

But not just that, also the way they would Mike the instruments.

John Williams would have a way of miking the violins and the string section so that you'd have a lot of instruments, but it still sounded very intimate.

And the way he would orchestrate it when he created that sound, that was a new thing.

And I'm telling you, the testing ground was Tom Sawyer.

If you look at the stuff that he wrote before, including Fiddler, brilliant stuff.

But Tom Sawyer is the testing ground for things like Jaws, close Encounters, Star Wars, ET, Color Purple, and everything that came after that, it's Tom Sawyer.

Tom Sawyer, where he invented.

His orchestra, his sound roots are back in like even Gilligan's Island and Lost in Space.

You can hear elements of what he was going to do, but you know, I never thought of it.

But he.

Didn't know the budget or the time?

No and.

He was also creating cues as well as scoring episodes because they broke those into cues.

So we had to think about that too.

But if you listen to the soundtrack album of Tom Sawyer, first of all you'll hear a Zuckerman's pick.

So look for the Zuckerman.

I think these are classical motifs.

They all, I'm sure they are.

And wins.

Borrowed.

They all did.

Seminar of music arrangers and music supervisors and music fixers.

Do you know the term music fixer?

No, I have not heard that.

A fixer is the contractor who contracts the musicians.

And really good orchestrators don't just write a trumpet part, they write a trumpet part for this trumpet player, the flute part for this one guy who's a wonderful flautist.

John Williams own brother was one of the top studio musician, drummers and percussionists.

I met him.

He did a lot of the Epcot stuff.

And John Williams himself, he could play every instrument in the orchestra.

So remember, these are human beings.

It goes back to your point about the animation and the human element here.

The same thing is true in music.

What do you think of the Paul Whiteman Band and going back 50 years before then to 100 years ago now to Rhapsody in Blue?

That opening clarinet line that wasn't written as a clarinet line.

That was written for a particular clarinetist who could gliss between one note to the next.

It wasn't Perchance not every clarinet player could do that.

Sounds like a slide recorder.

That list was written for an individual player, particular player to do that.

And all the greats.

That's how they wrote.

They wrote for a singer.

They wrote for instrumentalist.

And so going back to this karma of the Sherman Brothers and the musical Rangers and conductors who they worked with, you had Irwin Kostel.

And I can tell you something.

I learned something in 2009 when I went to this convention at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, Irwin Costell.

Amongst all of these people, all these great, is Sid Raymond, who worked with Irv Costell on West Side Story.

Sid Raymond was there.

He was still alive in his 90s at that point.

Yeah.

And he said, and everybody said this, even Sondheim's orchestrator, Jonathan Tunic, said the royalty, the king of all orchestrators, and I had no idea that this was the case, was Irwin Costell.

He was the man.

And he was very quick.

He had a bell on his orchestration table.

He was big easel because they had the big sheet music and you'd write out the parts.

And Erin Kostel apparently had a bell.

I got to know her.

When in his final years, he would finish a page, he would ring the bell.

Because, you know, in those days they had to write all these orchestrations out all by hand.

Again, the human element.

It wasn't this kind of AI orchestrated thing that sounds like every other orchestration that comes out.

It felt like it was original to that film, Charlotte's Web.

We were talking about how it's more Chitty Chitty Bang Bang than Mary Poppins.

It's really itself.

Yeah, when you listen to that and when you listen to the clavichord playing or harpsichord, I'm not sure which, playing the Dee Dee Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo in the main theme of Charlotte's Web.

It's haunting, it's original, it's daring.

I'm telling you, studio execs today would hear that and they'd say, I don't know, it doesn't sound samey enough.

They wouldn't use those words.

But everything needs to sound like something else because it needs to sound safe.

Charlotte's Web was not a safe sounding orchestration and Urban Coastal, the king of orchestrators was free to do this.

I had one of my favorite movies from that era and nothing to do with this genre at all, was Chinatown and he listened to the Jerry Goldsmith orchestration on Chinatown.

He had three upright pianos.

One of them just uses a sound effect, somebody dragging a pick against all the strings, and then another one being used as like percussion instrument.

I mean, what John Williams did, and he didn't do this intentionally, was he was so famous and so popular and Star Wars in particular was so successful.

It meant that from then on, every orchestra had to sound like John Williams Orchestra, which is a shame because even John Williams probably was limited to himself and the work that he created.

Before we began, you talked about the main title, and Irwin Costell had done this in The Sound of Music.

You know, Robert Rice had that West Side Story fly over in Sound of Music only you could hear the orchestra sort of tuning up.

But it was done with a different purpose in Charlotte's Web because that was all about life cycles.

And so this was the beginning of a day and it sort of starts almost like you're waking up and and then it's getting lighter and lighter and lighter.

You know, that's the beauty what Hanna Barbera did.

It's pans and dissolves.

It's not multiplane, but it's getting across that and the music times to when you see the Chapel, the way he goes into the clavichord and then sweeps in, it's like you're riding a wave of music.

How very special are we, that theme?

Yeah, it's just breathtaking.

It is absolutely breathtaking.

Because he was such a great orchestrator.

And you don't get as much of this on the soundtrack album because it's kind of short.

It's only about 30 minutes.

But there are light motifs for some characters, but they're really instrument ones.

Wilbur has that ocarina, you know, and Charlotte has the clavichord.

And then the Charlotte's Web theme, when they get to the fair, is played in a major chord as a happy piece and not a haunting piece.

There's so much he does with that score.

I wish it was an expanded soundtrack because a lot of what's going on is punctuated so brilliantly.

Nobody but nobody knew how to use the orchestra to evoke an emotion or bring out a character or bring out a moment like Erwin Cox.

Nobody.

I always think the classic example, of course, for Sherman Brothers is Mary Poppins.

The very opening you hear Trebolo strings.

I actually got to talk to her when about this.

I was 14 years old and I said how did you get that effect of tremolo strings at the beginning of Mary Poppins in the movie, the beginning of the movie and you hear tremolo strings and then you hear feed the birds with a French worm.

And he looked at me and he said he's very tall man.

He was about 6 foot four.

And he said he looked at me and probably 5 foot 8 at the time.

He looks at me.

He says I used tremolo strings and then I brought in a French horn.

I mean, I was 14.

You know, it wasn't going to say necessarily the most intelligent, but you know, but also those days I was in high school marching band and I was playing the glockenspiel in those days, the bell wire, and they said any recommendations how I should play the glockenspiel?

He said sometimes, I said sometimes to get nervous because I'm the only bellboy in the entire marching band and it was a new experience for me.

He says it doesn't matter.

You know, it's so high up, nobody can tell.

He had a great sense of humor, costume, he was great.

Charlotte Schweb also, at least to me as I observe it, had a wealth of strings.

An airy, sort of, because it was outdoors, mostly an airy sound.

I mean, that's kind of like if Susan was about horns, Castle is about springs.

Do you think that that's true?

I mean, would you disagree with that?

Statement Well no, I wouldn't disagree.

I think that Castle and Disney films were very string.

In fact, my dad always says here comes those Disney strings.

They went all the way back.

They were very much a part of.

But it was like he said, a different kind of string use here then.

And also in Chitty.

The strings weren't always the same harmonic in Charlotte, maybe because it was Spider and the web.

There was just an airiness to it that was different.

I wish I had the musical skills that I could comment sufficiently on this, and honestly, this is something that there should be very technical dissertations written by masters and doctoral music students on this subject.

I'll seek them out because I'm just observing.

To do it.

I'm just observing here, but but you have facts though about the history of some of these songs and the background of them that are really fast.

So chin up, you know, the Sherman Brothers were famous for taking songs out of the trunk.

If I'm not mistaken, it was 1957, definitely the 1950s.

There was a song the Sherman Brothers had written called Chin Up, and we have in their lead sheets.

It's not the same song, but there's enough of it that you can tell that they basically reconstituted this song, never published.

So it was French to the movie, but it was like a country western song.

And if you think about Chin Up, remember, the first songs that Sherman Brothers ever wrote were Country Western.

Gold Can Buy Anything But Love was a country western song.

In fact, it was called hillbilly music in those days.

And it was the reason that my father and uncle ended up becoming affiliates with BMI and not ASCAP.

Because ASCAP was a bit Snooty about those things in those days, and because the Sherman Brothers were known for being country western songwriters back in the first half of the 1950s, and Chin Up was put on a country twang to the song Shana Shana.

Imagine Dolly Parton singing that song.

You can see where I'm going with that, and it's just interesting to sort of imagine that song.

There are other songs that have kind of a country western twang to them.

If you think In the Slipper in the Rose, Once I Was Loved could be a country western song I knew.

I was loved.

I flew through my days in fancy for ways.

You don't think of it because it takes place in Europe and it's a Cinderella story and it's.

But my dad, when he was teaching me songwriting, he would always point to country to Western.

Old school kind of said they knew how to tell a story in a song.

Very interesting thing.

And that's not Al Sherman because Al Sherman didn't really write country western.

That was the pop music of 1950.

And that's when the Sherman Brothers started writing.

Didn't become a hit in England by Bruce Forsyth.

Yes it did, because you know, he was famous for his big chin.

That's why.

If you look at the picture, because you know I have that Sherman Brothers Facebook page.

A little shameless advertising here.

Is it all right to shamelessly advertise?

That's what our guests are welcome to do.

Oh.

Well, you got to come to the and Greg is a if you're a fan of my father and uncle's work or my family's work, because we also do a song of the day of my grandfathers sons once a week.

We just do 1A day generally.

But what I love about our page is that we get people who really know their stuff.

We also get people who just are fans and who really enjoy it.

And so you go to Facebook, all capital letters, Sherman Brothers and occasionally I put one of my songs up there too, but people really come there for my dad and uncle stuff.

So that's what I try and focus on and it's wonderful.

We tell stories about all these folks.

And so if you get a chance, the Sherman Brothers page got over 10,000 members now.

But if you get a chance, please come in, join us.

Oh, and I know where it was Bruce Forth site.

If you look at the YouTube video that we hosted when we did that, his song of the day, you can see his face and got that big chin.

He was also in bed, knobs and broomsticks.

He played a serious role.

He was more of a comedian, but it was on The Muppet Show, but he played the guy who worked for Sam Jaffe.

Yeah, my dad was good friends with Sam and he was a guest over at our house many times for dinner.

My parents were known for their dinner parties and Sam Jaffe was a guest.

Oftentimes other songs.

Zuckerman's famous pig.

I've got a great story about that.

Shall I?

Yes, please.

The Sherman Brothers with Irwin Castle, probably more Irwin Castle in fairness, because he was the music supervisor had hired the very famous Buffalo Bills, who were the singers probably best known who were in actually seen on screen in The Music Man from about 12 years earlier.

They were the barbershop quartet, but they apparently couldn't sing the song Zuckerman's famous pig, the barbershop quite in tune.

And you have to understand the microphone is like a microscope and it picks up every little imperfection.

So there was a real problem.

They probably was just one of the singers or two little, you know, and by the way, it wouldn't have been the same lineup as 12 years earlier.

There would have been one or two or more changes to the lineup of just like the Dapper dance at Disneyland aren't the same four guys every time you see them.

There would have been a different lineup so they couldn't get them to sing in tune.

Well you know studio time is expensive time and so they ended up having to get 4 studio singers who literally came in.

They sight read the piece and apparently they got it in one take according to my dad.

Well, I know Gene Merlino told me he was one of them.

Probably Bill Lee, because he's in the credits.

Very possibly Paul de Court, who was the music supervisor and produced the album, and he was a singer.

And I'm not sure who the 4th was, but I do wonder if the barbershop quartet had anything to do with Bill Hannah also, because he was a lifelong member of that organization, you know, the the Society for the Preservation of Barbershop.

Oh yeah.

He loved barbershop singing.

You know, I never heard stories about Hannah.

I that one story I know about Barbera was my dad went to meet them and Barbera apparently had an office with leather bound books, wall filled with leather bound books and all the works of Shakespeare, Dick in, you know, whoever the greats were.

And my dad went to reach to one of the books and it didn't come out because it was just the heads of the books.

And my dad thought that was hilarious.

I mean, you know that that's a great character piece.

You know, if you're writing a character, that's a great way to describe a character, which is a funny thing.

We should definitely talk about the brilliant talent of those wonderful performers like Agnes Moorhead and Paul Lynn.

Our fair is a bearable smorgasboard.

August board.

August Board.

After the gates are shot each.

Night when the lights.

Can be mount on the ground all around.

I mean, two people couldn't be more different in personality, and yet the color that they brought to those characters of the goose and Templeton the rat, it just amazing.

And you had the wonderful Pamelan Ferdin, too, perhaps her favorite project ever.

She loved this role, you know, her love of animals and animal protection.

She said this had a lot to do with that.

The other thing about Charlotte's Web was it wasn't a ginormous, but it was a success and it made money for Paramount and it was one of the first, yeah, anime feature films to be on VHS.

There weren't that many because Disney at the time wasn't going to put any on except Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland, when they rolled out Pinocchio, that was a real big deal.

And that wasn't until the 80s.

But in the 70s and early 80s, Charlotte's Web was the one everybody rented and it was on CBS several times.

It got into a lot of people's lives because it was accessible and a lot of people grew up with it in 19.

94 McDonald's had some sort of a Happy Meal deal or something where you could get one of three movies on VHS.

I guess it would have been do you remember this since 94 Charlotte's Web was one of those 3 movies and 21 years after the movie was released in theaters, it was the number one that I think, or certainly was in the top ten.

I think it was #1 though top grossing films of that season.

Is it the top 10?

For sure.

It wasn't a Disney film.

It was, you know, we're already talking time of Lion King.

And here was this VHS tape of a film that was 2D animation and was paramount.

And yet it was very well appreciated.

It shows you that the cream rises to the top.

There's so much great quality in this movie.

I'm so glad I again, I, I know I'm repeating myself, but I'm so glad that you're doing this.

You know, my father was nominated and my uncle, they're both nominated 9 times for Oscars, and the one film that my father always felt deserved to be at least nominated for an Oscar was this film.

Yeah.

How can you not take a song like Mother Earth and Father Time and not nominate that for Best Song of the year?

Yeah, OK, quite not have won because, you know, but how can that not be on the top five?

My show A spoonful of Sherman and the wonderful Emma Williams was in our first cast and you can hear it on Spotify again.

Shameless advertising.

It's about 11 years ago now.

She's an Olivier nominated singer and.

She was truly scrumptious in the original London cast of Judy.

Yes, very good.

Wow, good call.

You're right.

And she and my dad became very good friends as well.

And Emma sang the song for us and you can hear a pin drop.

When she would perform it live, she wanted to do something different than was than Debbie Reynolds had done.

And I wasn't really for it.

And she did it.

And I was never more happy to be wrong than listening to Emma Williams sing this song.

And it was just breathtaking.

Mother and Father time.

But you know who hated that song more than anybody who EB White?

He hated it because for years, for years, he would go and he would do readings for children at libraries.

He talks about this.

There's a line in the book where he says something to the effect of And then Charlotte didn't move again or didn't move anymore and everybody cries.

Well, my dad and uncle did something that they also did with PL.

Travers and that is they out wrote them.

PL.

Travers wrote a lovely bird woman and she's a metaphor for the upside down world that we live in and blah, blah, blah.

What did my dad and uncle do?

They wrote Feed the Birds.

They take this beautiful moment, but then they go deep into it and that's what they did with Mother Earth and Father Time.

I mean, that's one of the most breathtaking songs that the Sherman Brothers ever composed.

And of course that was the year.

It's not a coincidence.

My dad might have said, no, what are you talking about?

We wrote it two years before, but I still think that there's some truth to it, whether he would admit it or not, that that was sadly the year that both grandfather and grandmother passed away.

It was 1973 was my grandfather and then 74.

And of course they were getting older at that point.

My grandmother had actually suffered an operation that had gone wrong in 1969.

And she spent the last six years of her life in essence in a coma.

And she actually lived a year longer than my grandfather.

And my grandfather used to go and visit her in the hospital.

I, I didn't really know my grandmother Rose and Al would go there and he was very much a romantic.

And he looked at her and he'd say, as the story in my family would go, she's as beautiful as the day I met her.

And they'd been married for 50 years.

And there's, of course, that beautiful piece that's, in essence, the verse that introduces the title piece, Charlotte's Web.

And it's called Deep in the Dark.

Now is the hour when frogs and thrushes praise the world from the woods and rushes sleep, my love, sleep deep in the dark.

Oh.

Boy, Oh my.

I have, I choke you up a little bit here, you know, And that's, I'm sure that my father's observation, would he admit it?

I don't know if that generation admitted such things, but on some level it had to play into the, didn't it?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

And so the children, when he would read the book, would expect the song at that point.

I think that EB White had his party piece and that was reciting Charlotte's Web.

And here the most powerful moment was made even more powerful by these songwriters.

There's a book called the Annotated Charlotte's Web.

I don't know if you've ever seen it.

It's worth getting.

And he rails on it.

He's not shy about his, you know, he goes to all the symbolism, everything he was talking about.

And EB White says they said they should have just gotten some Mozart for that moment.

How could they ruin that moment?

And I'm sorry, EB White, you wrote a brilliant story, but the Sherman Brothers enhance your moment.

Believe me, for the next 50 years, you'll hear a whole bunch of mediocre songwriters not do justice to literature.

You lucked out having the Sherman Brothers.

But like Travers and like Roald Dahl, they tend to not be pleased when this piece of writing that they're the closest people to in the entire universe, see someone else's idea of it and it doesn't match.

And some knives never get over it.

Novelists are not team players by nature.

They sit in a room for a three years writing their piece.

They're not used to dealing with an executive telling them, you know, we ought to have a love interest or something like that.

You know, by the way, you know, my dad got on grade with Rawls All.

Rawls all was the screenwriter for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

And he added so much to this.

Not in the beginning.

Rawl and my dad did not get on at all.

And if anybody wants to read my daddy's book Moose Chapters from My Life, which I was the editor of, read the chapter on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

I think he'll be kind of shocked by the way Rawls behaved with my dad and my daddy's response to him.

Yeah, he wasn't a peppy guy an.

Unsavory character in some ways, but we ended up forging A fascinating friendship, which is worth more analysis because my dad did not suffer Roald Dahl's type of personality really.

But Rawl was very apologetic for the things that he said to my dad when he first met them.

They bonded over a lot of things, including the war and including Scotch whiskey.

One of the things that you had told me in the book interview was, and I found this very touching and significant too, was that, and this is in Moose, the outcome of Walt's passing and the way they were treated by some people.

A lot of things changed when Walt, but their position at the studio changed and you said they never felt more like they were back with Walt and where they were welcomed at Hanna Barbera and welcomed into the story process again.

They were definitely involved in the work with Hanna Barbera and felt very much a part of the integrated song, musical storytelling.

It's so important and this is one of the things my father would shout from the mountaintops.

Not that he shouted much for mountaintops, but was the idea of being there early, being involved in the script treatment?

You know, the first treatment for Mary Poppins was written by the Sherman Brothers.

And it allows you to do a thing my dad would call song spotting.

My uncle called it that, too.

That's finding those perfect spots for a song.

You think it's almost obvious, but the problem is, is that people tend to go for the obvious.

And it's not always about the most obvious thing that you would write a song for.

There are a number of times where my father and uncle writes this amazing song, and I remember they were working on a show called Busker Alley in 1994 in New York, and they'd just written a song called.

Takes a bit of getting used to love this song.

It was such a catchy song.

They'd just written it.

I was shadowing my dad and we got into the limo that picked us up for the rehearsals is on Broadway, what's now the Nederlander Theatre, but it was used for rehearsals in those days.

It had been kind of, it wasn't yet renovated the way that it is now.

And we went down there and I was in the car and I said, I love that song yesterday.

I can't get out of my head.

And my dad and uncle chuckled to each other.

They said, do you want to tell them or shall I?

I was in my early 20s.

Yeah, We scrapped it.

And I said, why?

It was such a great song.

And my dad said, Robbie, it was too on the nose.

Lesser songwriters in Mary Poppins, instead of A Spoonful of Sugar helps the medicine go down would have written a song called Let's Clean Up the Nursery.

2 On the nose, though, brothers write a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.

You don't need to say what you see.

And that was something that was taught to them by Walt.

Yeah, my dad would speak about that as well.

You know, one other thing about Charlotte's Web, and I don't know if I've mentioned it on the podcast before, but I think we've discussed it is in the director's commentary for the remake of Charlotte's Web, which was quite nice.

You know, that was CG and the live action.

The director said it when it was tested.

The test audience has continually said, after the movie, where was the smorgasbord song?

And they had to lengthen the sequence, you know, in the garbage at the fair just to compensate for the fact that the song was not there.

So the fact that people remembered, it's like saying Pygmalion without, I could have danced all night, you know, they're both great.

But you do kind of like say, well, where is it, you know?

It should be there, but again, you have to remember you have these forces which is the original owner of the underlying work, the underlying intellectual property.

EB White and Mary Poppins is PL.

Travers why did the Sherman brothers not get asked to write the new songs for Mary Poppins 20 years ago when it came out on the West End and then on Broadway is because PL.

Travers demanded that the Sherman brothers not be asked to do it.

There's a tremendous either jealousy or let's be charitable and say they just didn't see eye to eye.

It shows the brilliance of Cameron McIntosh as a producer who produced Mary Poppins stage musical because what did he do?

He said, look, you can't do Mary Poppins without these now iconic songs.

Unfortunately, Charlotte's Web didn't enjoy the same commercial success as you pointed out that Mary Poppins.

You know, we could do three podcasts just on why musicals died in the 1960s and 70's.

The Sherman Brothers were really the last fully employed musical writers.

They didn't realize it at the time, but if you think about the other big musicals of the 1960s, when musicals still seem very vibrant, a lot of them have been stage musicals before.

Whether it's Hello Dolly, Oliver, West Side Story, Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, they were stage musicals only.

Disney was still doing a musical every year.

The Shermans continued even after Disney stopped, so they wrote more probably brand new Hollywood musical scores in that era than anybody else did.

That maybe they wrote more musical film scores than any other set of songs, or any.

There you go, that's.

Sure.

Yeah, they were working.

They released three films a year in the 60s.

You know, that was not uncommon.

From Sherman But the most important thing about everything we've spoken about, including Hanna Barbera and Charlotte's Web and the work of the Shermans, whether it was Disney or or not, is this is stuff that people took to their hearts forever and will continue to.

And that's really the most important thing.

And you've written musicals of your own and what's your website so people can look into those?

Because what was Bumble Scratch?

And there was lovebirds.

And then I did the tribute to my father, uncle and grandfather and a couple pieces of mine, and that's called a spoonful of Sherman.

That's actually played on three continents.

It's played in Singapore, it's played several places in America, it's played 25 City tour in the UK and Ireland.

Yeah, it's done very well.

The reason I include my own songs, beside fact that, you know, I've got to get one or two in there, is because I didn't want it to be a sad story.

I wanted it to be something that was, you know.

The story continues.

And you've also got an album that everybody can find on the various streaming services, the Robbie Sherman Songbook, if you want to get a sort of a primer into all these songs.

You know, Speaking of the tongue twisting lyric, I'm very partial to crunchy crackers.

Oh, yeah, that's sung by, of course, Cracker Addicted Parrot, because that's what a parrot would be.

And he says I'm sort of wacky for my crunchy crackers.

Whispy crispy crunchy crackers.

Snappy for the soda snackers.

Snappy, crispy, crunchy crackers.

Breakfast crunch or lunch or dinner every way.

Fun piece of winter.

How I can even say the flavored salty toasty taste, the saver.

Every cracker as I chew it makes me wonder how they do it.

I love crackers I spend a million crackers for and the scotchy crackers.

Crunchy crackers.

And you can find all of that at shermantheatrical.com.

Click on Music and you'll see there's a whole bunch of videos from the Robbie Sherman Songbook and you can get my sheet music digitally.

Well, Robbie, thank you.

I think everybody listening thanks you.

Your father thank you.

Your mother thanks you.

We're so delighted that you spent time with us.

These were two extraordinary people from an extraordinary family.

So thank you so much for being with us, Robbie.

Thanks SO for having me.

And thank you all for listening.

Thank you for your review.

When you push star and you go listen and save.

And every time you do that or say a nice comment, it just means tremendously to all of us.

This is truly a labor of love.

And until the very next time that we get together, bye bye.

I hope you enjoyed the fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera with Greg Airborne.

Please join us again and Many thanks for listening.