Disney Sing-A-Long Memories

 Michael Wermuth- Today I'm going to write about my memories of the Disney Sing-Along Songs video series. For those who don't know, Sing-Along Songs was a collection of videos focusing on Disney songs, with lyrics appearing on-screen. Many of these featured clips from various Disney productions, including films (both animated and live action), shorts, featurettes, The Mickey Mouse Club, Walt Disney's anthology series, and various specials. But quite a few of these were also live-action, often with the theme park walk-arounds. I haven't seen very many of those live-action ones. 

 Most of the videos spotlight a different Disney movie. The early volumes spotlighted movies that were celebrating their anniversary, but later ones spotlight recent theatrical releases. The movie that's being promoted is represented with two songs, one of which is reprised at the end (one exception is I Love to Laugh, which has three songs from Mary Poppins). The title of the first song is usually the title of the video, and the cover focuses on whichever film is being promoted. And many of the videos seem to follow a theme. For example, The Bear Necessitiesis full of songs about animals, You Can Fly has songs about flying, Friend Like Me is about friendship songs, and so on. 

 The videos have an opening sequence with Professor Owl, reusing footage from the characters two shorts. The series has rotating hosts, including Professor Owl (who introduces the other hosts when he doesn't host), Ludwig Von Drake, and Jimminy Cricket. The linking footage reuses existing footage of those characters. I must say that if not for these videos, I probably wouldn't be too familiar with Professor Owl or Ludwig. I haven't seen any that have come out since 1996, but I've read that the later ones don't have hosts or linking footage. 

 Oh, but this is about my memories of watching the videos. I can't remember which one I saw first. I remember that. around the same time period, I watched Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah in school, rented The Bare Necessities, and got copies of Under the Sea and Disneyland Fun for Christmas, but can't remember which of these came first. In 1994 I was actually a bit obsessed with the series and whenever I had enough money would typically buy the videos (or rent them when taken to the video store). The last video I saw was 1996's Pongo and Perdita, which promoted the live-action 101 Dalmatians but is all live-action and doesn't have any song clips. From what I can remember this one wasn't as good as other ones. 

 The series began at the end of a period when The Walt Disney Company was rereleasing it's animated features in theaters every few years, and as a result actually had a list of films to NEVER release on video, so for many kids, these videos included songs from many movies that were not yet released on video. It was through this collection that I first heard of The AristoCats, among other productions (of course, Son of the South remains unreleased in America). For years I was surprised that songs from The Mickey Mouse Club were presented in color, when the whole (original) series was in black and white (I later learned that Walt Disney had all of his television productions produced in color, even before it was possible to broadcast them in color). 

 Videos in this collection that I have watched are Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, You Can Fly, The Bare Necessities, Under the Sea, Disneyland Fun, I Love to Laugh, Be Our Guest, Circle of Life, and Pongo and Perdita. It's been a long time since I last watched any of them (though I still have copies of most of the ones I have) or had a desire to see the ones that I haven't seen, but this article is making me want to see them again.