The late Richard Sherman was a delightful man who, alone and with his brother, wrote delightful songs, mainly within the awesome purview of Disney — Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book, many rides at the Magic Kingdom, etc. For a number of years, I always seemed to be at parties where he was present and there always seemed to be a piano and he always seemed to be willing, maybe even eager to serenade the guests. He would perform selections from his vast and vaunted repertoire and the number of tunes he was willing to perform varied between two and All of Them. No matter how many he favored us with, everyone present loved every note he played, every word he sang.
Right above this paragraph, I just put a photo from one of those parties. This one was at Leonard Maltin's house and left to right, we have Ian Whitcomb (the British pop star), Richard Sherman, me and Stan Freberg. If you don't know who Stan Freberg was, you have no business reading this blog.
At such parties — including this one, I think — one of the songs Richard performed was "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" from Mary Poppins. If you recall the movie, there's a point in it where Julie Andrews has to pronounce that word backwards. This is not easy to do. Here are some folks making valiant attempts…
At the parties of which I write, Richard would perform the song and in the middle of it, he would call on someone he knew to say the word in reverse. For some reason, it's pretty easy to say it forwards but tough to say it backwards if you don't know the secret, which is to not try to pronounce it backwards. I actually found the secret of pretending to say it backwards on the Internet and I apologize if me putting this word in this post is causing your screen to format oddly. WordPress is bad at hyphenation, especially of words it doesn't know.
As viewers of Mary Poppins know, "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" is a word that's… that's… well, it's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. And there's a song about it. And in that song, Mary Poppins says that you could also say it backward, and does so. But how she does so is different between the film and stage versions.
In the recent stage musical, which opened in 2004 in London, and in 2006 on Broadway, Mary does what you might expect: she pronounces the word the way one would if its spelling were reversed. The backward version is suoicodilaipxecitsiligarfilacrepus.
In the 1964 film, however, only the syllables are reversed, with the exception of the first/last syllable. So, super-cali-fragil-istic-expi-ali-docious becomes docious-ali-expi-istic-fragil-cali-rupus. Our guess is that "rupus" was used instead of "super" because it sounded better.
The word does not appear in any of the Mary Poppins books by P.L. Travers.
So one day at the Magic Castle, I ran into Richard and we got to talking. It turned out that the following evening, we were both going to be at a party and Richard expected he would be asked to perform and, of course, he would. Among the songs he would perform was you-know-what. He asked me if I could say it backwards. I said, "No, can you?" And he did. He pronounced it the way Julie Andrews did and then he told me to learn it before the party. He said, "I'm going to call on you at the party to say it backwards and you'd better be prepared."
But he didn't tell me the secret way to do it…so I went home and tried to learn it and unfortunately, I am very, very bad at foreign languages and this, of course, was the most foreign of foreign languages — so foreign as to be non-existent. I might not have even been able to become proficient in saying it the Julie Andrews way but I sure couldn't learn to really say it backwards. I didn't have a video of the movie to study just then.
I gave it my best, which in this case wasn't very good, and at the party, Richard performed the song and at the proper point, he stopped playing, pointed to me in the audience and shouted out, "Mark Evanier, say it backwards!" And I just stammered and fumbled and I don't know what the heck came out of me but it was not a word — not even a made-up word — backwards or forwards or inside-out or sideways or whatever. It was just awful and everyone laughed at my ineptness. My pal Will Ryan, who happened to be standing near me, stepped up and did it properly.
I was shamed.
I thought of immediately leaving the party, going directly home and getting into bed — or maybe under it — and never leaving for the rest of my life. A few caring people assured me that wasn't necessary but I felt great guilt until I learned the syllable trick. Every so often, I brush up on it in case the ghost of Richard Sherman ever turns up and gives me another shot at it. I know that's not likely but I want to be prepared anyway.
What made me recall this story is that I came across the video below. It features Cantor Azi Schwartz, who was among the vocalists in this video I posted here for Hanukkah. Mr. Schwartz doesn't pronounce any of the words backwards. He instead sings the entire song — from right to left…