Movie summary by Michael The Moviegoer.
THE BOYS = ***
“Sibling Revelry”
The new documentary “The Boys” examines the life and career of the Oscar-winning songwriting brothers Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman. It’s been put together by cousins Jeffrey C. Sherman & Gregory V. Sherman as sort of a theraputic experiment. Jeffrey and Gregory grew up only seven houses apart and yet were never a part of each other’s lives until they decided to make this film. The reason being the sibling rivalry between their fathers Richard and Robert.
It’s never really made clear why these brothers became estranged from each other. But in the film’s darkest moments I began to see the irony in that these two tortured souls are somehow responsible for creating the happiest songs on earth.
You know their songs. Yes, you do. You can’t escape from a day at Disneyland without “It’s A Small World” stuck in your head. If you’ve seen “Mary Poppins”, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Tom Sawyer”, “The Slipper And The Rose”, they wrote ALL those songs!!!
As documentaries go, the Sherman cousins have made something that feels more like an episode of “VH1: Behind The Music”. This is a puff-piece that is better suited to the bonus features on a DVD of a Sherman Brothers musical rather than a theatrical release. But there probably isn’t anyone who wouldn’t be fascinated to learn about the people who created the soundtrack to their own lives. The Sherman Brothers’ songs just didn’t fall out of the sky. These two brothers wrote so many of the songs that we’ve all been singing since we were children.
There was a moment in this documentary that gave me chills. The cousins explain how Richard and Robert’s parents met each other. If one small thing had changed their fate, if their parents hadn’t met, and Richard and Robert were never born, we’d all have grown up in a world without singing “Chim Chim Cher-ee”, “A Spoonful Of Sugar”, “Let’s Go Fly A Kite”, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and so many other songs that have bonded children from generation to generation. It’s a small world after all.
DVD Watch: Celebrate the best of The Sherman Brothers by watching “Mary Poppins”, Walt Disney’s greatest achievement, starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke.
Michael The Moviegoer
