There’s a stupid game that my brother and I sometimes play.  It’s called the Sherman Brothers Game.  In this game, the idea is to come up with a new title for a Sherman Brothers song by throwing nonsensical syllables into the song title.  As long as it rhymes, it’s a winner.  It’s really more of a Disney song game than it is a Sherman Brothers game (the Shermans were certainly not the only song writers to do this), but they’re the most famous, so they get stuck with it.  For instance, see if you can guess the fake Disney song among the real ones:

Higgitus Figgitus
Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah
Chim Chim Cheree
Oo-de-Lally
Supercalifragilisticsexpialadocious
Yo Ho Yo Ho
Heigh Ho
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Bibbity Bobbity Boo

Come to think of it, this actually a really lame game.  I have no idea why we play it.

But I do have a point I would like to make regarding something pretty clever in Pirates of the Caribbean. It has to do with the ceiling, which is made to look like a nighttime sky.  When crafting a lead-in, I was down to either a witty Chicken Little reference, or the idiotic Sherman Brothers Game.  I went with idiotic.

But only because of their song about Chimneys!

Have you ever noticed just how vast that sky/ceiling truly is?  Those are some big rooms we’re sailing through, and a lot of times the sky has to span three or four show scenes before we can find a natural break, like a bridge to pass under that gives us a transition to the next room.

Think about it from a practical standpoint.  Something has to be holding up all that dark night sky above you.  Yeah, this may be a magic kingdom, but there are real construction problems at play here.  There’s no mythological figure or giant turtle with the world on its back.

That means some engineer had to either design the Disney World equivalent of the Hoosier Dome, or come up with an elegant way to hide the support beams.  It can actually be a fun game trying to spot them (but not much more fun than the Sherman Brothers Game, I guess).

My favorite occurs in the last giant room, in the section of town that is burning down.  Of course there’s tons to look at here.  The Stable Singers, the Pirate of Many Hats, the Infamous Hairy Leg.  But if you look deep into the recesses of the burning village, you’ll spot a building with a chimney rising up out of it.  Nothing unusual about that, and if you just glance at it all you’ll see is a chimney with a column of smoke coming out of it — exactly what you would expect in a burning village.

Well, that black column of smoke is made of iron, and takes a distinctive I-beam shape as it joins with the cloudy sky.  I don’t know why I like this so much, but it just seems so ingenious to turn a smoking chimney into a roof support.  Very difficult to spot because of the dark lighting.  There are other ones like this scattered throughout the other show scenes.  Have fun spotting them all.

Oh, and by the way, it was a trick question.  All of those songs above are real songs, but Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is not a Disney song.  It is, however, a Sherman Brothers song.  And so is Brungle Duggle Snork Snork.