| "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" | |
|---|---|
| Song from The Sound of Music | |
| Published | 1959 |
| Writer | Oscar Hammerstein II |
| Composer | Richard Rodgers |
"Sixteen Going on Seventeen" is a show tune from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music.
Contents |
The lyrics of the song state that Liesl is a young girl at the beginning of her womanhood, and that she can depend on Rolf for guidance, because he is a good year older. Since the comparative maturity of the two characters in the story is the opposite of that expressed in the song, this is an example of lyrical irony.
In the motion picture version, the song was filmed in and around a gazebo which is still visited by hundreds of tourists each day doing "Sound of Music" tours around Salzburg though the gazebo interiors were filmed in Hollywood.
A reprise of "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" is also sung by Maria and Liesl when the Captain and Maria come back from their honeymoon and Rolf has rejected Liesl.
State Farm Insurance released an ad campaign featuring a remix of the show tune as a rock song produced by the audio production firm Modern Music.
This song was used twice on Family Guy. The song is heard in the episode "Family Gay"[1] and Lois sings the song to her daughter Meg in the episode "Peter's Two Dads," trying to guess how old she is.
The song was reimagined by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders in an episode of their sketch show French and Saunders where, as one of several sketches based on the movie, the two sit in the gazebo singing the lyrics "I am French/And you are Saunders".