New York, New York (On The Town)

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This article is about the song from the musical On the Town. For other songs of the same name, see New York, New York (song).

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"New York, New York" is a song from the 1944 musical and the 1949 MGM musical film On the Town. The music was written by Leonard Bernstein and the lyric by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. The first line of this song is, "New York, New York, it's a helluva town: the Bronx is up and the Battery's down." For the film version, the word "helluva" was changed to "wonderful" to appease the Production Code offices.

Note that it is not the same song "New York, New York" popularized by Frank Sinatra in the late 1970s. That song was written by John Kander and Fred Ebb for the 1977 Martin Scorsese film musical of the same name.

[edit] Cultural references

The song was parodied on The Simpsons episode "Boy-Scoutz N the Hood", when Bart Simpson and Milhouse sing about "Springfield, Springfield". Incidentally, another character rang in and started to sing "New York, New York," after which Bart and Milhouse pointed him in the direction of New York. It was also parodied twice on The Critic.

The song was parodied in the first issue of Sam and Max in which Sam sings the song with the third line "and the mimes are food for the bums underground," identifying it as from a musical "about a quaint French circus that comes to town and is immediately cannibalized by the local mole men."

It was also parodied on the Australian sketch comedy program The Late Show by Jason Stephens, Mick Molloy and Tony Martin, running through the streets of what was obviously the Australian city of Melbourne, aping the performances of the three original leads in full sailor uniforms, to the original soundtrack recording of the musical number.