Fun Fact: This is my little sister’s favorite film ever. As for me, it’s within my top five Disney films. As such, it’s surprising that this film has never seen a real soundtrack release since its initial record. Despite being beloved by many and an entry point for the Robin Hood mythos for many, many people over the years.
Notably, famed country music singer Roger Miller was brought in to voice the character Alan-A-Dale. He wrote and preformed many of the songs within the film,with a few notable exceptions.
Louis Prima, the voice of King Louie from The Jungle Book, made a record for Disney which served as a crossover between the two films. Louis would narrate and sings songs from Robin Hood as the character of King Louie. The album was called Let’s “Hear” it For Robin Hood and it included a few new songs as well.
Actually, unlike most movies in this marathon, Robin Hood is an animated adaptation of a live action film rather than the other way around. The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men was released by Disney almost two decades before their animated version, back in 1952.
There are no less then three different versions of this film. The restored two and a half hour long version, the widely distributed but edited down two hour version, and the horribly mangled for tv short version which cuts most of the songs. Of the three I would recommend watching the second 2 hour version. The restored version means well but it ruins the pacing of the movie and the short version is bare bones and cuts too much. The two hour version hits the sweet spot.
This is also notably the last film that the Sherman Brothers worked on before leaving the studio. All songs in the film are by them.
Many of the songs were present in the limited theatrical release only to be cut in later versions and then restored in the anniversary extended edition.
The Sherman Brothers wrote several songs for the film. However their deletion lead to them leaving Disney altogether in addition to their growing frustration with the new management.
There’s a Broadway Jr version of the movie called The Aristocats Kids. Which adds in whole new songs along with arrangements of the old ones. And it actually improves upon the story by giving Edgar a real motivation for getting rid of the cats as oppose to the film.
The Jungle Book, is the last film of the Bronze Age in Disney animation and the last film Walt personally supervised before his death.
All the songs in the film were once again written by the Sherman Brothers. Except for “The Bear Necessities”, which was written by Terry Gilkyson instead. However, the score was written by George Bruns.
Gilkyson wrote a whole other score before being replaced by the Sherman brothers. These deleted songs are more in line with the tone of the original novel.
Both an animated sequel as made and an audio play. both of which features new songs. The Jungle Book 2 features new songs by Lorraine Feather,Paul Grabowsky, and Joel McNeely.
More Jungle Book… Further Adventures of Baloo and Mowgli was an audio play LP that was meant to be a sequel to the film. Featuring all of the original voice cast, it’s most certainly worth checking out.
So there’s technically two stage productions of The Jungle Book. The first was a potential full fledged Broadway production. Yet it never made it past the workshop stage. Premiering only twice in Chicago and since then has been nearly wiped from history. The only thing that exists is some promotional material, no audio recordings for sale what so ever. The best I can gather, there were no original songs. Just the ones from the film and some added ones from the More Jungle Book album. Anyways here is what I could find.
The second production is a Broadway Jr version called Jungle Book KIDS.
