Not only is this a beautiful song, but it also gives me the rare and unexpected opportunity to write about pre-historic animals and Walt Disney in the same blog post. So let’s jump right in.
Because woolly mammoths are one of those long-extinct species that appear in museums alongside dinosaurs, it’s easy to forget that they haven’t been gone that long. Herds were living in Siberia as recently as 1700 BC, by which time the Pyramids at Giza were at least a thousand years old.
In fact, they are so freshly extinct, and some remains are so well-preserved in permafrost, that there is a serious movement to use biotechnology to “de-extinct” them.
Part of me thinks that the time and expense and person-hours required to bring back an animal that probably wouldn’t flourish in a 21st-century climate is just plain silly (especially when that time and expense could be used to help save animals that are still here), but part of me is fascinated by the possibility.
It’s a very typically human idea: motivated by nostalgia, we love resurrecting things. Pulling the past into the present.
Joe Gremel, who makes dreamy, nostalgic beats as Funkmammoth, could hardly have picked a better name as an artist who digs into the permafrost of popular music to unearth the samples that give his music their flavour.
The sample that gives “Sherwood Stroll” its flavour is from the soundtrack to the 1973 Disney animated feature Robin Hood, a film that, in a way, was an extinction story in its own right.
By the late 1960s, the Disney golden age was ending. After Walt Disney died in 1966, critics noted a drop in quality, despite continued box office success. Disney’s brother, Roy, who took over the company after Walt’s death, died himself in 1971, and the company was scrambling to finish its version of “Robin Hood”, which was far behind schedule and struggling to stay relevant as audience tastes moved away from animated movies.
When “Robin Hood” was finally released in 1973, it enjoyed a lukewarm reception from critics, some of whom noticed that it had re-used some scenes from “The Jungle Book” as a way to cut corners. Gene Siskel called it “80 minutes of pratfalls and nincompoop dialog.”
But somewhere between pratfalls and nincompoopery, there’s a scene where Robin Hood and Maid Marian go for a stroll in Sherwood Forest and get lost in each other’s eyes. The song that underscores the scene is “Love”, which earned an Oscar nomination before slipping into obscurity while Disney’s animation studios underwent a generation-long slump.
Disney animation was brought into “de-extinction” by its run of legendary films in the 1990s, and then, in 2018, Funkmammoth chose the long-forgotten song from “Robin Hood” as the foundation for this wonderful, nostalgia-rich track.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The hushed vocals, performed in the original Disney version by Nancy Adams, whose husband wrote the song.
2. The smooth, easy percussion provides the low frequencies that were missing from the sample.
3. Although the lyrics are cut up a fair bit, one phrase is intact: “Life is brief / But when it’s gone / Love goes on and on.” Which is just about the most poetic description of “de-extinction” that I can imagine.
Recommended listening activity:
Putting together an outfit comprising all your oldest articles of clothing.