Me Ol' Bamboo
"Me Ol' Bamboo" is a song written by the Sherman Brothers for the motion picture Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was originally written to be choreographed as a morris dance (although the dance has much more in common with the Căluşari) for the film by Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood (Mary Poppins, The Happiest Millionaire, The Sound of Music) and adapted for the stage by choreographer Gillian Lynne who also created the choreography for Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.
- The song and dance are performed by Dick Van Dyke and about fifteen other men.
- On Remembering Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with Dick Van Dyke, Van Dyke says that Me Ol' Bamboo was one of the most difficult dancing acts he ever undertook.
- In the film, Caractacus Potts does the dance to escape an angry victim of his malfunctioning hair-cutting machine. The dance involves the use of bamboo sticks as props. At the end of the dance, Potts collects enough money to buy Chitty.
- The song is a light-spirited song about different men and their various usages of cane-like apparati. Songwriter/lyricist Robert B. Sherman was inspired to write the song by his own use of a bamboo walking stick. Sherman was wounded in the knee in World War II which is why he walks with a cane.
In popular culture
- The song has been parodied in Family Guy episode 420 as "A Bag o' Weed".[1]
- In Big Brother 10 (UK) contestants had to memorize and perform the dance routine from this song in order to earn a luxury shopping budget during the third week.
- In the 1975 film Smile directed by Michael Ritchie, the Young American Miss Pageant contestants sing a very off key version over and over while Michael Kidd tries to choreograph the number.
References