oh crikey, I've got zero mousepod listening time. What if the next one's here before I've listened to this one???


Slow down, Jesse. Isn't it time for one of those long sabaticals?

Here's a YouTube link for "All The Cats Join In"

Great show. When you move down here I'm going to teach you how to pronounce "tres". :p Maybe I'll teach Nat King Cole too. I was transfixed throughout Peter and the Wolf. Conried rules.

I'm only part way through. Makes excellent treadmill listening.

I hate to tell ya, iSm, but I have interviews recorded for at least four shows... the slowest I can do it is every other week...

Beautiful! Youtube isn't the best way to see the short, but if you don't already have it... it's a great way to check it out.

I love Conried, too.

And I hate to get defensive, but I do know how to pronounce "tres". Five years of high school Spanish, plus I lived in, like, Nueva York for most of my adult life until I moved to San Francisco (home of the mission burrito) 11 years ago. I forgive Nat Cole his accent (there's really no such thing as a "Spanish" accent, it's spoken natively in so many different places) and his pronunciation (have you ever heard him sing in English?). I think what was made his version of the song so great is the fantastic arrangement - so f**ing lush... I had instant regret when I made poor Dinah Shore follow him.

Nothing relevant to add, but on the topic of famous people in the wrong language, I point you to Laurel & Hardy redoing one of their shorts in Spanish.

(This isn't dubbed, back in the early days of sound it was common to do a movie in several languages with the major cast doing their phonetic best, more details here).

Aha, I HAVE seen All the Cats. It sounded familiar from the description and seeing this it is indeed the one I was thinking of. What a fabulous cartoon. Bringing the Fantasia/MMM theme full circle, it definitely brings to mind the Rhapsody in Blue cut from Fantasia 2000.

There's certainly an argument to be made that the only truly "bad" accent is one that is unintelligible...but Cole was in need of an intervention as he was clearly huked en fonicos (but I think the library lost the tape on how to pronounce "r"s). Nowhere, but nowhere, in the native Spanish speaking world is "tres" a homophone for Ms. MacNeille's first name. And as long as we're talking credentials, both of my parents are fluent and have been mistaken for native speakers. I was on the verge of fluency myself by the end of high school (sadly, due to lack of/failure to seek out opportunities to speak it at UCI, I've regressed pitifully in the ensuing decade).

It was indeed a beautiful piece of music, but Cole's brute force Spanish-by-numbers vocals were way too distracting to me and Dinah Shore was a refreshing change.

Rather than argue an unwinnable point, I will instead thank you for enjoying the musical choices as they stood, teaching me that second-guessing is a silly and pointless thing.

Now, if you told me you liked the visuals that accompany the Dinah Shore short in MMM, then there would be a more "lively" discussion.

What if I won the point instead? :evil:

Check this out. One of many online. At one point they say "the Spanish R sounds nothing like the English R". If you find me a pronunciation site that says otherwise, I'll eat my hat.