In this 50th episode of Synergy Loves Company, host Eric launches a new miniseries exploring the holy trinity of 1980s pop music: Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince.
In this episode, Eric delves into Madonna’s early life and career beginnings, including her formation and departure from the band The Breakfast Club and her slight connection to the hot mess that is Disney Channel's Mother Goose Rock and Rhyme. He also discusses the release of Madonna's early singles "Everybody" and "Burnin' Up," and the influence of her image on Disney's Totally Minnie TV special. The episode highlights the significance of the Minnie Mouse ears photo during the "Like a Prayer" era and Madonna's role in Disney’s Dick Tracy, along with the associated album "I'm Breathless." Eric explains the inspiration behind the hit song "Vogue" and Madonna’s starring role in Disney's Evita and its soundtrack. He touches on Madonna’s music featured in various Disney projects, including DTV and Marvel’s Deadpool and Wolverine, and shares the story of Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy’s pursuit of Madonna’s "Like a Prayer" for the film. Join Eric as he uncovers how Madonna's career interweaves with Disney’s magic, setting the stage for future episodes on Michael Jackson and Prince. Subscribe to Synergy Loves Company on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Thanks for enjoying Synergy Loves Company: How Disney Connects to Everything.
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00:04 --> 21:06 What are you looking at? We have this coterie of rich franchises. The company now that people want to engage with. I came here to try and continue what Walt Disney and his associates set in motion 50 years ago, which is to experiment with every new and innovative kind of entertainment possible. It's what we hope to do here to really develop something that, well, it's just more than an entertainment enterprise. It's something that contributes in many other ways. Hey, this is Synergy Love's company, where we explore how Disney connects to everything. Because there's so much magic out there beyond the Disney parks. Let's discover some together. I'm Eric, and today, in honor of the 50th episode of Synergy Loves Company, we are going to kick off a mini series. Yay. Last year, around this time, I ran a little series about only murders in the building. It was three episodes long, and I called it the only legend in the series. I tried to channel my best true crime podcast style while I exposed how Steve Martin was the only Disney legend of the core cast, even though Martin, short and Selena Gomez could also claim enough Disney work to be legends themselves. I really had a lot of fun doing that series, and I thought I could make it a late summer early fall tradition. Since last year's series, I have done quite a few musical shows. The Beach Boys, John Stamos, Taylor Swift, DTV on Disney Channel. Heck, on my episode comparing Disneyland and Walt Disney World, I talked about the parks in terms of musical albums. I love music and I want to keep the turntable spinning. So this series is going to explore the holy trinity of pop music from my favorite decade of pop music, the 1980s. If you love the eighties just as much as I do, you don't have to ask who they are. The holy pop trinity of the eighties. But in case you're not obsessed like me, we're talking about the queen of pop, the material girl, Madonna. The king of Pop himself, Michael Jackson and his royal badness, the Purple one Prince. Eighties pop royalty. So what are you looking at? Let's get into this first episode of this miniseries. Madonna and Disney. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Synergy loves company. You may know her as the material girl who is consistently burning up the charts, but we are crazy for Madonna, the true blue artist who should be cherished for the way she expresses herself through music, art, and a constantly evolving image. Today on synergy, Love's company, let's get into the groove and take a look at how Madonna connects to Disney. Madonna was born in Bay City, Michigan on August 16, 1958, and that's her real name, Madonna Louise Chacone. It's not a stage name, Madonna. Growing up, she took piano and ballet lessons and she really loved to dance. In fact, she got a scholarship to study dance at the University of Michigan. However, she dropped out in 1978 and decided to move to New York City. She started to find work as a backup dancer for some musical acts, and during this time she met musician Dan Gilroy and the two began dating and forming their own bandaid. The Breakfast club. No, not the movie. That would come later. In the eighties, the band was first and less popular. Madonna left the Breakfast club before they gained any traction, but they did go on to become a pretty decently sized band. But I do want to take a little break really quick and talk about the Breakfast Club and its co founder, Dan Gilroy. The Breakfast club actually did have some minimal success without Madonna, but later on, in 1990, Dan Gilroy starred as Gordon Goose in Disney Channel's mother Goose Rock and rhyme. Not totally Madonna related, but super Disney connected. So bear with me if you haven't seen Disney Channel's mother Goose rock and rhyme, it is quite the spectacle. The movie features nursery rhymes done in a fun, funky and fresh early nineties style, and it has an all star cast, including Gary Shandling, Woody Harrelson, Shelley Duvall, Little Richard, Bobby Brown, Cindy Lauper. There's just so many. It even has both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. But not Simon and Garfunkel. They're not performing together. Don't think it's a reunion or anything like that. No, no. Art Garfunkel is Georgie Porgy, a bartender at a club where the stray cats perform as cats. Because that's the thing. I almost didn't think this was real. I vaguely remembered something like this from when I was a kid, but I thought it was like an amalgam of a bunch of stuff I'd seen. But no, it's totally real. It is a nineties pop culture fever dream and it's definitely something you should check out. But let's get back to Madonna, though. She left the breakfast club and decided to go out on her own as a solo artist in 1980. After recording a demo and hanging out at all the popular New York dance clubs, she finally got a few of those clubs to play her music. In 1982, she released her first single, everybody, and not everybody liked it. In fact, some of the early reviews were not very kind at all. One of them said she sounded like Minnie Mouse on helium. Not a great first Disney reference, but stay with me. Her next single, burnin up, was a bigger hit, and her album had a number of big hits on it, including Holiday and Lucky Star. And from there, the hits kept coming. With her next album, 1980 five's Like a Virgin, she started to become the biggest pop diva in the world. Fans started to dress like her to sold out concerts all over the world. Everyone was obsessed. It was kind of like swifties planning their outfits for Taylor Swift concerts today. But like the original version, Madonna was kind of a big deal. She created the modern female pop star mold that would be repeated for years to come. At the height of Madonna's eighties popularity, when everyone wanted to be like Madonna, Disney even got into the game with 1980 eight's Totally mini tv special. Totally Minnie was the first project to put Minnie Mouse front and center. It was her first starring role in the special. She shows off how cool she is while performing songs with Elton John and helping Suzanne Summers teach Robert Carradine how to be cool. Because Minnie is the it girl of the eighties, just like Madonna. Madonna's picture is even featured on the wall of the Minnie Mouse center for the totally unhiptained, implying that Madonna has learned how to be hip from Minnie Mouse and Suzanne Summers. I don't care what you say. The fact that Disney gave Minnie her first leading role for the first time in 60 years and that it was as a pop star, hip it girl in the 1980s, this is a direct result of the impact Madonna had on pop culture at the time. She was becoming one of the biggest pop stars in the world at the time and redefining what it meant to be a woman in pop music. All of this while MTV was super important. And she took advantage of the music video medium, which made her even more of a star and gave her some big silver screen breaks. By the end of the decade, Madonna released her album like a prayer. It was a statement, it was controversial, it was serious art, and you could dance to it. And at this point, critics were calling her one of the most compelling voices of the eighties, a little different than how they started out talking about her music at the beginning of the decade. In 1987, during a photoshoot, rockstar photographer Herb Ritt snapped a picture of Madonna wearing a Minnie mouse ears headband. This was her little way of poking fun at those early remarks that she sounded like Minnie Mouse on helium. She used that photo as the COVID of the single to dear Jessie from the album like a prayer. The song Dear Jessie has a psychedelic lullaby feel, and the lyrics have a lot of fantasy imagery. It's not one of those dance floor jams, the music video for Dear Jessie invokes even more Disney. It starts with a dreaming child and moves into an animated dream world where Madonna is an animated fairy looking pretty much like Tinkerbell in the video. The Tinkerbell, Madonna magically makes the child's toys come alive and she visits the worlds of the artwork on the kids bedroom wall. But that stuff's all only Disney like. So let's get to the real Disney and Madonna stuff. Throughout her career, Madonna did a lot of movie roles, small roles with cameo parts and big starring roles. She had been establishing herself as a movie star as well as a music superstar. In 1992, Madonna starred as breathless Mahoney in Disney's Touchstone's Dick Tracy. I was a total Dick Tracy fan as a kid. I thought the villains looked creepy and cool. I really wanted that communicator watch, and I was even Dick Tracy for Halloween. I was all in in the movie. Madonna's breathless Mahoney was a showgirl lounge singer who plays a major role in the story. No spoilers. Go watch the movie. But the role of breathless and the 1930s style of the movie inspired Madonna to record a whole album of songs from and inspired by Dick Tracy. It was called I'm breathless. Get it? Her character was breathless Mahoney. I'm breathless. Anyway, it was one of the soundtrack albums for the Dick Tracy movie. Dick Tracy was kind of all over the place because the title star producer Warren Beatty, he wanted the movie to kind of be a little bit of everything. The movie was scored by Disney legend Danny Elfman, and even though it wasn't a musical, they got the Steven Sondheim to write original songs for the movie. And Madonna sang a few of them that were also on the I'm breathless album. Sooner or later more and what can you lose? Which was a duet with Mandy Patinkin. She added a slew of other songs with a 1930s prohibition era lounge sound to these Sondheim numbers from the movie and made a whole album where all the songs sounded like a 1930s album recorded in the 1990s. That is, all of them but one. While working on the movie and exploring thirties, speakeasies and golden age Hollywood movie stars, Madonna wanted to write a song that would fit the feel of the era but still be played on the nineties radio at the same time, she saw dancers at the clubs in New York performing a style of dance where they would strike a pose inspired by fashion models on the COVID of a magazine. It was called voguing. The Dick Tracy inspired modern song was Vogue. It was Vogue. That's why she lists all those golden age Hollywood celebrities in the middle of the song. Don't just stand there, let's get to it. Strike a pose. There's nothing to it. Vogue, all right. It's not in the movie itself. Vogue was released though on I'm Breathless, that Disney soundtrack of music from and inspired by Dick Tracy. And Vogue was inspired by Dick Tracy, a Disney Touchstone film. Dang, that was tons of Madonna Disney history right there. That's a big one. And there's more of it on the way. In 1996, Madonna got to grace the Disney Silver screens once again in Hollywood pictures. Evita Evita is a musical by composer Andrew Lloyd Weber and Disney legend lyricist Tim Rice. In 1976, they started the project as a follow up to their smash success musical Jesus Christ Superstar. Evita started as a studio recorded concept album about beloved argentinian first lady Eva Perrone. It was about her rise to popularity and her premature death from cancer at the age of 33. Next, in 1978, the musical hit the stage with a full production. In 1996, after Tim Rice had worked on Disney projects like Aladdin and Lion King, Disney decided to give Rices musical the movie treatment starring Madonna as Eva Perrone for the movie version of the musical. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote you must have loved me. Madonna performed the song in the film and it won the Academy Award for best song in 1996. Madonna had two other hit singles from that soundtrack, don't cry for me, Argentina and Another Suitcase in the hall. In addition to starring in Disney movies and recording music for the soundtracks, Madonna's music has been tied to many Disney projects, soundtracks that she did not appear in movies for. Her music's been in projects like Amphibia on Disney Channel, Bill Nye, the science Guy and DTV. They've all featured her music. But most recently and in a very big way, Madonnas music played a very important role in Marvel Studios Deadpool and Wolverine. Just like the Guardians of the Galaxy, music plays a big role in the Deadpool movies. And when they were writing and staging the film Deadpool and Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy knew they needed Madonna's song like a prayer for the movie. It's the finishing touch on some important scenes in the movie. And like we said, Madonna treats her work as an artist and letting just anyone use it for any purpose could cheapen her art, especially specific songs that hold a special place in her heart like a prayer. Ryan Reynolds and Sean Levy knew they couldnt just submit a request to Madonnas people to secure the song. Oh, no. They had to ask her in person. They had to explain what they wanted and make an appeal to Madonna in hopes that she would grant them the permission to use her most perfect work of art for their film. They got a meeting set up with Madonna and made their pitch. They showed her what her song could do to enhance the scene they had already filmed. Madonna actually really liked what she saw, except for a few notes that she had about the scene. In a few different interviews, one with Andy Cohen, another on Live with Kelly and Mark Ryan, Reynolds tells the story that Madonna had some directors notes about the scene, and apparently they were spot on. Her instincts were right and Reynolds and Levy agreed with her. They went back, did some reshoots to Madonna's notes, and they got to use like a prayer to great effect in the movie. I wish I could tell you what she asked to be changed, but we don't exactly know what changes she offered. Reynolds and Levy won't say what they are, but they tell us that they took her advice and the movie is better for it. Madonna's impact on the Walt Disney Company is probably the most high profile of our eighties pop star royalty. She got headline billing in some big budget movies for Disney, one of which won an Oscar. She was inspired by her work with Dick Tracy to write one of her biggest hits of all time. That brought an international resurgence to voguing a dance that was actually dying out at the the time. Madonna, the queen of Pop, was an actor, an artist, a performer who worked with the Walt Disney company and was inspired by Disney projects in her own work. But she wasn't necessarily a Disney fan like you or me. In fact, for a brief moment in the eighties, she dated Michael Jackson. I know, weird, right? They were not a compatible match at all. And one of the things that they butted heads on was her refusal to go to Disneyland with Michael. Michael Jackson loved Disneyland so much, he even tried to replicate it for himself a few times over the years. At least that's what the rumors say. But I'm getting ahead of myself because next time on Synergy loves company. Super duper Disney Parks fan, the king of Pop, Michael Jackson and Disney. Don't miss that episode. 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