YMMV / The Music Man

• Award Snub: Despite the the film getting a Best Picture nomination, Robert Preston's iconic performance was not nominated.
• Awesome Music: The whole movie, but special mention goes to the opening song, which is rife with Mickey Mousing.
  • "(Ya Got) Trouble," especially when sung by Robert Preston, is a classic of the American musical, as well as “Seventy-Six Trombones”.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: While "Shipoopi" does have a plot purpose since Marcellus is causing a distraction, it falls into this trope due to the frankly odd lyrics, which nobody questions or addresses.
• Broken Base: "Shipoopi" is the show's most divisive number. Some dislike it for being a completely inane song that adds nothing to the plot. Other enjoy it because it's so bizarre.
• Cant Unhear It: Robert Preston's distinctive voice and stellar performance has helped him reign as the definitive Harold Hill ever since he originated the part.
• Covered Up:
  • How many of you knew that The Beatles' hit "'Til There Was You" originated in this musical?
  • Most people associate "Shipoopi" with Family Guy rather than this show.
• Designated Hero: Downplayed with Harold Hill. While his charm and good deeds are genuine, Hill is a conman who goes from town to town convincing the citizens that they are in trouble and the only way to get out of it is to form their kids into a band with himself as the leader. He then sells them instruments, uniforms and instruction books, but he doesn't actually know anything about music and skips town with their money.
• Designated Villain: Charlie Cowell, the anvil salesman who hates Hill and wants to expose him as a fraud. He's a little sleazy, hitting on Marian, and even when he tries to help people it's for selfish reasons and he acts like an ass while doing so. But he ends the play having probably lost his job and watching Harold Hill get away with everything.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The song "Gary, Indiana". When The Music Man first debuted in 1957, the song was unintentionally funny due to Gary's reputation at the time as a bustling factory city (U.S. Steel) famous for vice dens of gambling and prostitution. In the present day, Gary is just another dying Rust Belt factory town with large numbers of abandoned buildings.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The salemen on the train are essentially rapping! This concept actually came full circle during the 2014 Tony Awards, when LL Cool J and T.I. performed the song with Hugh Jackman.^note Though In the Heights was the first time rap was performed at the Tonys.
  • After having a whole song dedicated to the town, the future King of Pop Music was born in Gary, Indiana the year after the musical debuted.
• Magnificent Bastard: "Professor" Harold Hill is a Con Man who convinces towns into buying instruments and uniforms with the promise to form a boy's marching band before leaving with the money. When arriving in River City, Iowa, he starts his con by convincing the town that the recent pool table in the billiards parlor will corrupt the youth and the only way to save them is by forming the marching band. When Mayor Shinn or the school board try and ask for his credentials, Hill manages to distract them by leading them in barbershop quartets. He also manages to win good will of the librarian Marian Paroo after the band helps her brother Winthrop overcome his self-consciousness. The interactions in River City, as well as his relationship with Marian, start to convince Hill to abandon his life of crime and go legit. At the end of the musical, the good will the band brought convinces the townsfolk to overturn his arrest, and Hill manages to find his conscience because of the band.
• Narm:
  • The TV movie's version of "Ya Got Trouble". Ordinarily a high energy number that continues to grow as Hill gets the whole town worked up. But Matthew Broderick delivery sounds so bored and lifeless it becomes comical that he can convince even a single soul that pool spells disaster for the town.
  • "Shipoopi" can count due to just being downright weird. Where the Hell did that word come from? Buddy Hackett's high pitched performance singing voice in the film only adds to this. However...
• Narm Charm: "Shipoopi" actually has fans partially because it's so out there. Nonsensical lyrics aside, the energetic music is quite fun, it's a great showcase for some dancing, and a good Marcellus can make the most of his very odd solo.
• Parody Displacement: Quite a few people think that "Shipoopi" originated on Family Guy.
• Questionable Casting:
  • While she's long since proven her musical theatre chops, Sutton Foster being chosen to play Marian Paroo opposite Hugh Jackman's Harold Hill raised a few eyebrows. The reason for this being that Marian is a classical soprano, a sound that can't truly be replicated by a mezzo like Foster. The actress herself even admitted she never dreamed of playing the part because of the difference in voice type. Surprisingly enough, unlike most examples of this trope, the general reaction to the casting was positive, even if there were people naming sopranos besides Foster who could've played Marian without lowered keys. Because she is Sutton Foster, though, most people seem willing to at least give her a chance.
  • Matthew Broderick as Harold Hill in the TV Movie whose portrayal stands out as quite awkward and lacking in any of the manly grit and charm that Harold is usually played with. Which is frankly bizarre when you consider that he quite famously knocked the role of a charismatic con artist out of the park earlier in his career. Exacerbated by the fact that though *Kristin Chenoweth played a pitch-perfect Marian in the same film, Broderick had no chemistry with her and their singing voices didn’t blend.
• Retroactive Recognition: Ron Howard, during his stint in The Andy Griffith Show. However, Howard was already an old-hand at being a child actor at the time.
  • The ill-fated 1980 Broadway revival featured another future teen star as Winthrop: Christian Slater.
• Signature Song: "(Ya Got) Trouble".
• Values Dissonance: Mrs. Paroo is clearly not disturbed (actually enthusiastic) about Marion telling her a strange man was following her home and chides her for being too stubborn to open up to him, and that she will end up as an Old Maid if she keeps it up. These days (given how being older and single isn't the worst thing in the world, the awareness about stalking and respecting boundaries especially those of women) if Mrs. Paroo were to say and do something similar she'd be Too Dumb to Live at best and a Evil Matriarch at worst.
  • In the piano lesson scene, Mrs. Paroo outright tells Marian that other women shouldn't listen to her advice because she isn't married. Definitely a little uncomfortable nowadays.
  • Harold Hill describes several theoretical circumstances in "Trouble" that a pool table would supposedly lead the kids of town to, which are meant to be mundane yet which elicit strong moral panic amount the small-town folk Harold sings to. While most things feel even more quaint today (see the below trope for clarification), one of his warnings is about kids having nicotine stains. Unlike most of the song, this would if anything be seen as more concerning today than the town residents act like, due to increasing awareness of the dangers of nicotine.
• Values Resonance: Given that "Trouble", a song where Harold Hill convinces a town that a pool table is going to corrupt the youth, is a massive joke at the expense of overly-paranoid Moral Guardians, the joke only gets more hilarious the more dated the "edgy" things Harold Hill warns about become.

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