The Movies Rides Again

The past few years, on the day of the Oscars, I wrote the following, about a quest I've been on.

A long while back, I was on a mini-mission to get the Motion Picture Academy to open their Oscar broadcast with a particularly wonderful song that, though it had a bit of shelf-life in country music (reaching #10 on the country charts), I figured they wouldn't know.  I actually came close -- not to accomplishing my task, but having access to making the suggestion -- when my former boss at Universal Studios, Bob Rehme, years later was made president of the Academy.  Alas, I didn't have the contact information that would have helped and didn't make the effort -- which probably wouldn't have been too difficult, even it was before Google searches -- to track it down (hence never getting beyond being just a "mini-mission").

The idea time has long-since passed, since the group who sang the song, the Statler Brothers, have retired, and also some of the references in the song -- while many are still classic -- aren't all likely as impactful on today's audience.  Still, it's a very fun song with clever, overlapping references (as best as I can quickly count) to 51 movies, as well as a jammed-in handful of actors and characters, and would make an enjoyable number in the middle of the broadcast, sung by a cobbled-together group of movie stars singing.  And classic movies are just that – classic. 

(Hey, the Statlers themselves could even come out of retirement.  They did briefly a few years back for an event when elected into a country music Hall of Fame).

But no, it’s not likely to happen.  But it doesn't stop me from at least presenting the song on the day of the Oscar broadcast.  So, here it is -- one of the most affectionate and truly clever songs I've heard about movies. And it fits perfectly into the portfolio of "list" songs that the Statlers were so well-known for.

Indeed, the name of the song is "The Movies."

There's one change from the initial years.  For a long time, when I've posted the song initially, it was a video with Jimmy Fortune who had replaced Lew DeWitt who'd had to retire for health reasons.  But as I mentioned in 2021, I found a video with all four original Statlers, all the more notable since it was Lew DeWitt (on your far right, with the guitar and wearing tinted glasses) who wrote the song.  And that’s the version I get to post now.