Me ol' bamboo.

I've been thinking about sticks.

Our March storms damaged a lot of trees, and there are lots of sticks and branches still lying around. The one you see here at the curb was a big, healthy branch before the blizzard.

But I'm not aiming to complain about winter again today. No, I'm pointing out the upside of tree damage -- I get walking sticks. When I'm walking the big dog, Tralfaz, I can basically reach down anywhere and pick up a new hiking stick. Not so with baby dog Nipper, who tries to eat them while I'm walking with him.

Inevitably while walking with a stick I think of the opening verse of "Me Ol' Bamboo," a musical number from the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:

A gentleman's got a walking stick
A seaman's got a gaff
And the merry men of Robin Hood
They used a quarterstaff
On the Spanish plains inside their canes
They hide their ruddy swords
But we make do with an old bamboo
And everyone applauds!

It is, hands down, the greatest number ever written about sticks.

A lot of people hate Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but others love it. I've seen grown women get weepy over "Hushabye Mountain." Unlike Mary Poppins, this film allowed Dick Van Dyke to play an American, which was a good idea, as Van Dyke famously did some lousy British accents in Poppins. (In an interview on Gilbert Gottfried's podcast, Van Dyke did point out in his defense that Mary Poppins had a large cast of British actors, and not a single one of them bothered to tell him that he was doing a terrible job at being a cockney.) Benny Hill also appears as a toymaker in Chitty, which is good, but is underused, which is bad.

I like the movie all right, and it was adapted into a successful stage production. I did not care for the Fleming book when I read it as a tot, and I supposed it's probably just as well he died in 1964 and never saw the movie. He might have gotten as grouchy as P.L. Travers did (the real one, not the Emma Thompson one, who hated the Mary Poppins movie).

By 1968, with the exception of Oscar winner Oliver!, no competent musical was being filmed. I believe no one has made a decent musical since. The plot of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang doesn't make a lot of sense, and has some repellent aspects. As a child I was not entertained by the comical attempts at  spousal homicide by Baron Bomburst; this heartless man-child is perverse and disturbing. One scene that should have been the sweetest in the film, Van Dyke and Sally Ann Howes disguised as human-size toys as he serenades her, is ruined by being played for laughs. If Disney had made this film rather than MGM, they might have had a story editor to help the plot and fix these issues.

The song-and-dance bamboo number is worked into the movie poorly, but does advance the plot. Caractacus Potts's inventions usually go awry, as does his haircutting machine, resulting in him being chased through a fair. To escape his pursuer he jumps into a musical act. Were this a Jerry Lewis film he would have been put in the chorus and proceed to destroy the number, but as this is Dick Van Dyke, his character not only knows all the words and some tricky steps but winds up leading the number. He makes enough money in tips to buy the titular car. The number itself is well done, designed to highlight Van Dyke's gift for physical comedy as well as his dancing, while being appropriate for the period (c. 1910).

The Sherman brothers, Richard and Robert, wrote all the songs for the movie, as they had done for Poppins, and here provide music that is bouncy fun and lyrics that are terrific. I appreciate them better now through the magic of the Internet as I never knew what they all were, especially the repeated line in the chorus -- you can 'ave me 'at or me huh? Turned out to be bum-ber-shoo; i.e. bumbershoot, umbrella. The word bumbershoot is more American than British, says Webster's, but who cares? It perfectly fits the lyrics.

And some lines are quite sly -- A collier in the pits o' Wales / He leans upon his pick, for example. Not Goes mining with a pick or Fills his barrow with his pick or something; he leans on it. Did the Sherman bros. know that there was a miners' strike in South Wales in 1910? Or were they making a Teamsters-based joke on lazy workers? Hmm. In any event, as each stick is mentioned, it gives Van Dyke and the dancers an opportunity to play off the action described.

It's very singable if you can remember the words; being a catalog or laundry list song,the lyrics don't flow from line to line. In a song like Danny Boy the words build a picture, but a catalog song like Cole Porter's "You're the Top" uses bullet points, so to speak, to make its case, so it's easy to get lost. Being the helpful guy I am, I made a spreadsheet of the sticks mentioned in the song to help us all keep things straight.

It made me think that there might be a lot more things that could have been used, if you wanted to extend the song. Men have used sticks for all sorts of things, you know. Here's my extended list:

So, all these sticks: Phallic? I really doubt the Shermans were thinking that way. I'm sure the dancers would have made it clear about five seconds into the first rehearsal, though. But as my spreadsheets above make clear, sticks really are used a lot, not just for puberty level humor.

"Me Ol' Bamboo" has appeared the 1975 film Smile, in a UK episode of Big Brother, and in parody form on Family Guy, and possibly in horrible form in many school productions. I haven't seen any of them. But it shows the enduring popularity of the number. You don't see people singing "Truly Scrumptious" or "Toot Sweets," now, do you?

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the #10 film the year it was released, but marked a downturn in Van Dyke's career. I believe his battles with alcohol date to around this time, and a former acquaintance of mine was sure he appeared drunk in some scenes of this movie -- I don't see it, but I could be wrong. Soon Van Dyke would star in Garson Kanin's worst film, the horribly dated Some Kind of a Nut (if you haven't seen it, don't!) and a couple of years after that in Norman Lear's unwatchable Cold Turkey. The latter film has some defenders, but they are wrong. It is terrible, unfunny, and also horribly dated. But Dick Van Dyke was and is an astonishingly talented man, and has always found a way to keep coming back. 

All these thoughts proceeded as we walked along, buoyed by the cheery melody playing in my head. "Songwriter/lyricist Robert B. Sherman was inspired to write the song by his own use of a bamboo walking stick, which he used after a World War II knee injury," Wikipedia tells us, so it's not surprising that using a walking stick would make me think of the Sherman and his old bamboo. We gotta stick together.

I walked Tralfaz yesterday and found a great stick. As soon as we got home he chomped on the end and broke it. Hope he doesn't do that with me 'at or me bum-ber-shoo.