That's Amore
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"That's Amore" is a 1952 song by composer Harry Warren and lyricist Jack Brooks. It became a major hit for Dean Martin in 1953.
The song first appeared in the soundtrack of the Martin and Lewis comedy film, The Caddy, released by Paramount Pictures on August 10, 1953.
The track that was used for the single released by Captiol Records was recorded on August 13, 1953 (Session 3098; Master 11694-6), with the orchestra conducted by Dick Stabile, at Capitol Records' studios at 5505 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, California. On November 7, 1953, Martin's record of the song, with "You're The Right One" (which was recorded at the same session as "That's Amore") on the flip side, peaked at #2 on the Billboard charts. The song was kept from the #1 spot when Les Paul and Mary Ford's Capitol Records single "Vaya Con Dios" returned to the #1 spot after being knocked out by Stan Freberg's Capitol Records single "St. George And The Dragonet", which had been #1 for the past four weeks, after "Vaya Con Dios" had been #1 for the nine previous weeks.
The song remains closely identified with Dean Martin; That's Amore was used as the title for a 2001 video retrospective of Martin's career, and Ricci Martin entitled his 2002 biography That's Amore: A Son Remembers Dean Martin.
The arrangement of the 1953 hit was scored primarily for mandolins. The lyrics affectionately ridicule the Italian-American ethnic stereotype, with lines like "When the moon hits your eye/Like a big-a pizza pie/That's amore", "When the stars seem to shine/Like you've had too much wine/That's amore", and "When the stars make you drool/Just like pasta fazool'/That's amore." Martin did not attempt to deliver the lyrics in an authentic Italian accent, but used the accent of an American trying to mimic Italian pronunciation.
Since the verse starts "In Napoli/where love is king," the setting of the song is Naples, Italy. That is evident in the lyrics (cited, above) that contain what may be called jocularly either the best or the worst rhyme in the history of popular music--that is, the bilingual rhyme of "drool" and "fazool," the Neapolitan dialect word, fasule, for the Italian fagioli--beans.
The song is quite popular even in Naples and the rest of Italy, in general. There are no Italian or Neapolitan lyrics, so Italian performers sing the original English text and, essentially, ridicule an English language lyric that ridiculed them in the first place.
The song was introduced to a new generation when Martin's 1953 version was played as the opening theme song for the award-winning 1987 movie, Moonstruck, starring Cher, Nicholas Cage, Olympia Dukakis and Vincent Gardenia.
Spider Robinson's 1993 book, The Callahan Touch, featured many bad puns on the lyrics, such as "When you swim in the sea/And an eel bites your knee/That's a moray", and "A New Zealander man/With a permanent tan/That's a Māori". The popularity of the book led to the creation of such puns becoming a recognized joke form in some circles. An example from the prepress industry: "When a screen hits your eye/With a strange dpi/That's a moire".
On the show Strangers With Candy, the structure of the song was mimicked in a poem entitled Packing a Musket ("When they're beggin' you please/To get down on your knees/Near their 'groinage'/'Scusa me,/But you see,/Don't you touch where they pee/Without 'coinage'.")
Canadian folk rock band Spirit of the West also frequently cover the song in concert, with drummer Vince Ditrich taking the lead vocal.
The song usually plays as the opening theme music for Pizza, the Australian comedy series on SBS.
On The Simpsons, Krusty mentioned that he used to fly with Dean Martin in his private plane. He then says that one time, the "moon hit his eye like a big pizza pie". They wrote a song about it which ended up infringing on "on one he recorded years before". In one episode of Muppets Tonight the same parody is sung by Clueless - short after that he's hit by a huge pizza. In another episode of the Simpsons (HABF02 - S17E08 - The Italian Bob) a gondolier sings a parody of the song about Homer and Marge (the refrain is "that's immoral").
The song was also performed by John Daker, whose performance appeared on Web Junk 20.
An NES quiz on Zipperfish.com uses the following phrase as one of their indicators of a wrong answer, "When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, your a-wrongo." This is sung by Mario, of Super Mario Bros. fame.
