Perfect World
(Hartley, D / Sting) Performed by Tom Jones
There are despots and dictators
There are blue bloods with intellects of fleas
There are kings and petty tyrants
Who are so lacking in refinements
They'd be better suited swinging from the trees
He was born and raised to rule
No one has ever been this cool
In a thousand years of aristocracy
An enigma and a mystery
In Meso American History
The quintessence of perfection that is he
He's the sovereign lord of the nation
He's the hippest dude in creation
He's a hep cat in the emperor's new clothes
Years of such selective breeding
Generations have been leading
To this miracle of life that we all know
What's his name?
Kuzco, Kuzco, Kuzco... (Ad libs)
He's the sovereign lord of the nation
He's the hippest cat in creation
He's the alpha, the omega, a to z
And this perfect world will spin
Around his every little whim
'Cos this perfect world begins and ends with him
What's his name?
Kuzco, Kuzco, Kuzco... (Ad libs)
You'd be the coolest dude in the nation
Or the hippest cat in creation
But if you ain't got friends then nothing's worth the fuss
A perfect world will come to be
When everybody here can see
That a perfect world begins and ends
That a perfect world begins and ends with us
What's his name?
Kuzco, Kuzco, Kuzco... (Ad libs)
Kuzco, Kuzco, Kuzco
As I wrote last week, Dave and I are in Peru right now, and as I didn't think I'd be blogging from here, this is the song I cued up for this week's Tunesday: nothing insightful, just a wish that this world I've long wanted to visit is as perfect as I'd hoped.
I'll just note that Kennedy and I watched The Emperor's New Groove last week -- in a tongue-in-cheek attempt at cultural awareness, but even if it couldn't possibly serve that purpose, I always liked this movie anyway -- and in an even less apropos attempt to become prepared for our trip, we followed it up with The Road to El Dorado (Kennedy claims to love that movie, but I find it a little dumb). I promised her we could watch Alive after her Dad and I get back home; uneaten.
I don't even remember now what it was I was looking for while we were watching The Emperor's New Groove, but I searched the movie on Wikipedia and discovered some interesting facts about the music. This movie was apparently intended to be in the more serious vein of The Lion King (complete with a similarly ambitious pop soundtrack), but after the failure of a string of serious movies (Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Disney decided to rework everything on Emperor, from the storyline, to the voice actors, to the music.
Three interesting facts about the music:
- Sting agreed to be a part of the project if his wife, Trudie Styler, a documentarian, could film the entire animated-movie-making process. Her resulting film, The Sweatbox, so perfectly captured the stress and strife surrounding the numerous rewrites -- the power struggles between those executives who acted as "nerdy bullies" and those animators who cringed before them -- that Disney, who retained the rights to Styler's film, quickly buried it.
- After he presented the theme song, Perfect World, Disney asked Sting to perform it himself for the movie. He demurred, saying they should get someone more young and hip, so they went with Tom Jones -- who is fifteen years older than Sting. (Yet, I can't imagine anyone else singing this song.)
- In the original happy ending for Emperor, in order to spare Pacha's village, Kuzco decided to raze a nearby rain forest for his summer home. When a horrified Sting -- who has spent his entire adult life advocating for the rain forests and those indigenous peoples who live there -- first heard of this rewrite, he threatened to remove himself and his music from the movie. Of course they did another rewrite, but just how nutty were these Disney execs if they didn't foresee this conflict? Why would they have gone with razing a rain forest even if Sting hadn't been attached to the project?
That's all for this week; not my usual Tunesday post, but after all, this is not a usual week for me.