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"You'll find out, before you're done,
music's fun for everyone!"

"Is everybody ready?"
"To sing along!"
"With Disney songs!"
"A Disney Sing-Along!"
Professor Owl and his students, the first lines of the original theme song

Disney's Sing-Along Songs is a Walt Disney Home Video series consisting of compilation clips from various Disney movies, shorts and TV shows. The series launched in 1986, and became one of Disney's most successful and long-running video series, the last volume appearing in 2006.

The series, as the name implies, centers around songs being played for the viewer and the viewer invited to sing along. The original set of videos usually featured one of three interchangeable hosts- Jiminy Cricket, the intrepid guide from Pinocchio, Ludwig von Drake, a rather ditzy inventor whose previous credit was hosting Walt Disney's Wonderful World in Color, and Adventures in Music Duology star Professor Owl, whose reasoning for showing the songs was usually teaching his class of young owls about the songs. As the series progressed, they would be dropped and often Mickey and Minnie were used in their stead.


This video series contains examples of:

  • Adaptation Expansion:
    • "Little Wooden Head" from Pinocchio gets a bridge, a second verse, and a slightly expanded first verse repetition over what was purely instrumental music in the film.
    • I Love To Laugh had a variant with "The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers"; in the Winnie the Pooh featurettes, Tigger only sings the first verse of the song, while here a new recording of Paul Winchell singing the entire song, including the second verse and bridge, is featured, set to footage from the featurettes.
  • The Artifact: Professor Owl and his students turned into this pretty quickly. It took all of three installments for Professor Owl to start delegating his hosting duties to a character for whom there is more available Stock Footage. At a certain point, they gave up on Professor Owl appearing even long enough to introduce the real host. And yet, the Professor Owl opening sequence is maintained for the overwhelming majority of the series.
  • Audience Surrogate: During the intro, Bertie Birdbrain is this for anyone who doesn't know all the songs, prompting Professor Owl's promise to "make sure they can't go wrong".
  • Berserk Button: As with his appearance in Melody, Professor Owl hates being interrupted during his lectures and finds himself forcing Panchito to stop singing "The Three Caballeros" for longer than he was supposed to in Heigh-Ho.
    Professor Owl: QUIET!!!!!
  • Big "SHUT UP!": Professor Owl in Heigh-Ho when Panchito presses his Berserk Button.
  • Bowdlerise: Happens to some of the featured songs.
    • In "The World's Greatest Criminal Mind" from Be Our Guest, an entire segment where Bartholomew gets punished for calling Professor Ratigan a rat is removed (likely as much because it was originally a very long segment where there was hardly any singing as because of its Mood Whiplash for the darker), as is a portion earlier on mentioning the drowning of widows and orphans and praising Ratigan for it and another portion featuring a harp solo from Ratigan.
    • "Topsy Turvy", from the video of the same name, cuts out Esmeralda's dance and rewrites the lyrics so that Clopin wouldn't mention religious concepts (as well as beer).
    • "Out There" completely skips right to Quasi's "I Want" portion of the song, removing Frollo's warning verse at the beginning completely.
    • In Flik's Musical Adventure, the lyrics to Walk The Dinosaur are edited heavily to be more family-friendly. For example: "I lit a cigarette, picked up a monkey skull to go" becomes "The Dinosaurs Could dance, and they were putting on a show"
    • Later releases of Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah altered "Following the Leader", changing "We're out to fight the Injuns" to "We won't be home `til morning". Oddly, the original line was restored when it was featured on a later volume, On My Way.
  • Christmas Episode: Very Merry Christmas Songs which has classic Christmas songs set to Stock Footage of Disney cartoons (except "Here Comes Santa Claus" which is set to live-action footage of a Christmas parade at Disneyland). Also, The Twelve Days of Christmas which has original songs sung by Disney characters.
  • Dunce Cap: Bertie Birdbrain wears one.
  • Follow the Bouncing Ball: A major interactive part of this series. It even features in its theme song! The majority of the songs use the "text changing color" form instead of an actual bouncing ball, including most versions of the theme song (which retains the mention). Usually the bouncing ball is a Mickey head, but occasionally other things are used (e.g. "The Little Black Rain Cloud" from The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh uses a bouncing Pooh on a blue ball, "Kiss The Girl" from The Little Mermaid (1989) uses a bouncing clam.)
    Sing along, one and all
    Follow the bouncing ball
  • Montage Ends the VHS: Starting with the original release of The Bare Necessities in 1987, a promo covering other volumes was a regular feature of the series. A more traditional montage hosted by Ludwig Von Drake appeared starting on Be Our Guest. Starting with Topsy Turvy, the tapes no longer ended with a montage (this one instead has a preview for the other videos, narrated by Mark Elliot instead of Ludwig Von Drake, appear before the main program).
  • Mood Whiplash:
    • Near the end of Colors of the Wind, it can be pretty jarring to go from the whimsical nonsense of "Higitus Figitus" straight into lines like "You think I'm an ignorant savage" from the title song. The intro by Ludwig Von Drake (which involves him throwing his guitar at offscreen stagehands and freaking out over a diffraction, mistaking it for rain) doesn't help to smooth things over.
    • There's also the heartwrenching Someone's Waiting For You immediately before a reprise of Under the Sea on the VHS of the same name.
  • Oddball in the Series: Pongo and Perdita (1996) had no words to the songs displayed on screen. Strangely, the video is closed-captioned.
  • Painting the Medium: The onscreen lyrics do this sometimes. For example, The Backwards Я pops up during the Russian puppet's verse of "I've Got No Strings" in You Can Fly.
  • Pan and Scan: The videos cropped every clip from a movie or short animated or filmed in widescreen. Unfortunately, this practice continued even after 16:9 TVs became the norm.
  • Recut: This too has happened to the videos from time to time, with "Yo-Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me)" and "The Siamese Cat Song" from Heigh-Ho, "He's a Tramp" from You Can Fly, and "Little Wooden Head" from Be Our Guest getting cut from most later reissues of the same volumes. note 
  • Rhymes on a Dime: Sometimes, Professor Owl or Jiminy Cricket will do this during their host segments.
  • Running Gag: Sometimes in the early videos, Professor Owl will respond to a correct response to his queries from his students by smacking Bertie Birdbrain right on the dunce cap as he exclaimed, "Rrright!"
  • Stock Footage:
    • The theme song and host segments with Professor Owl come from the two Adventures in Music shorts, Melody and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, as well as new animation from the Disney anthology episode carrying the latter's title. The theme song for the revival's videos instead use footage from a random assortment of Disney movies.
    • Jiminy Cricket cutscenes used clips from either the Disney anthology series or from educational shorts created for The Mickey Mouse Club. In addition, the introduction to "Figaro and Cleo" from The Bare Necessities used a clip from Fun and Fancy Free.
    • Ludwig von Drake cutscenes used clips from the Disney anthology series, as well as A Symposium on Popular Songs.
    • The songs themselves have even more examples, listed on the videos' Recap pages.
  • Title Sequence Replacement: When Disney updated the logo in 1994, they also attached it to re-releases of older volumes.
  • Variations on a Theme Song: Friend Like Me, Circle of Life, Honor To Us All, and the Collection of All-Time Favorites use a remixed theme song that doesn't appear on any other tapes from the original series save for a reissue of Heigh-Ho.
    • This also happens in From Hercules (released only internationally) which also used the remixed theme song.
  • Vocal Evolution: Professor Owl's voice noticeably changed during the twelve years despite Corey Burton remaining consistent as the character's voice actor. It becomes much closer to his original voice provided by Bill Thompson in the Adventures in Music Duology, and less high and nasal than it was in the early Sing-Along videos. This becomes jarring in the Collection of All-Time Favorites miniseries where Professor Owl served as the off-screen narrator, with his voice sounding noticeably different compared to how he sounded in the opening theme.
  • A Wild Rapper Appears!: The version of "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" recorded for Disneyland Fun features a rap verse about Splash Mountainnote :
    Well, you know it is a thrill when you go down hill
    'Cause your riding on a mountain of your own free will
    And you're zippin' in a flash on a daring dash
    Down a waterfall so rapid that you go splish splash
    ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP
    ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP
    ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP DO DAH
    ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP ZIP DO DAH DAY
  • With Lyrics: Under the Sea features "Never Smile at a Crocodile" from Peter Pan with the unused lyrics included (as in the finished film it was only heard in instrumental form).

Alternative Title(s): Sing Along Songs

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