Me Ol' Bamboo

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Dick Van Dyke as Caractacus Potts in the 1968 musical film, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang dancing and singing "Me Ol' Bamboo" written by Robert and Richard Sherman.

Me Ol' Bamboo is a song written by the Sherman Brothers for the motion picture Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was originally written to be choreographed as a morris dance for the film by Marc Breaux and Dee Dee Wood (Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music) and adapted for the stage by choreographer Gillian Lynne who also created the choreography for Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.

• Performed by Dick Van Dyke and about nine or ten other dancers, it is widely regarded as one of the most popular musical numbers in the film.^{[citation needed]}

• On Remembering Chitty Chitty Bang Bang with Dick Van Dyke, Van Dyke says that Me Ol' Bamboo was one of the most difficult dancing acts he ever undertook.

Michael Ball (far left) as Caractacus Potts in the 2002 London production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang performing "Me Ol' Bamboo".

• In the film, Caractacus Potts does the dance to escape an angry victim of his malfunctioning hair-cutting machine. The dance involves the use of bamboo sticks as props. At the end of the dance, Potts collects enough money to buy Chitty.

• The song is a light spirited song about different men and their various usages of cane-like apparati. Songwriter/lyricist Robert B. Sherman was inspired to write the song by his own use of a bamboo walking stick. Sherman was wounded in the knee in World War II which is why he walks with a cane.

[edit] Source

• Sherman, Robert B. Walt's Time: from before to beyond. Santa Clarita: Camphor Tree Publishers, 1998.