I'm still blown away by the fact that two songs of mine that are close to 50 years old have been used as the underpinning,
-Jerry Herman
In high school, Wall-E" director Andrew Stanton played the shy Yonkers store clerk Barnaby in the Jerry Herman musical Hello, Dolly!" Decades later, two of the show's lesser-known songs would play a pivotal part in the critically acclaimed Disney/Pixar animated hit.
Though Wall-E" does feature a new song, Down to Earth" by Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman over the end credits, the two tunes that factor in both the film's themes and plot -- the bouncy Put on Your Sunday Clothes" used over the opening titles and the uber-romantic ballad It Only Takes a Moment" -- were penned by Herman for the classic 1964 Broadway musical.
At the time that I chose them I was consciously thinking this is the weirdest idea I ever had," said Stanton, who also directed the Oscar-winning Finding Nemo."
Originally, noted Stanton, he was hoping to use 1930s French swing music for the opening scene in the film about a robot left alone on an abandoned Earth who falls in love with a sleek new research robot named Eve.
I just loved that Wall-E fell in love with old-fashioned and romantic music," he explained. So the idea always was to have something that showed the audience that Wall-E had romantic tendencies."