(Author’s note: Portions of this piece, specifically quotes provided by George Wilkins and Kal David, previously appeared in the article “The Biggest Little Star in the Galaxy: Sonny Eclipse” which I wrote for Celebrations Magazine, Issue 53, which was released in May of 2017.)
The American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow once said, “Music is the universal language of mankind.” It’s a lovely sentiment but doesn’t quite seem sweeping enough. After all, we’ve seen plenty of evidence that the love of music extends well beyond humanity. Who can forget Experiment 626 (aka Stitch) and his adoration of Elvis? Or the swinging sounds of Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes on Tatooine? And, of course, there are the melodious sounds of the Biggest Little Star in the Galaxy: Sonny Eclipse, the resident musician at Cosmic Ray’s Starlight Cafe in the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland.
The funny little alien from the planet Zork has been entertaining Guests at the Magic Kingdom since 1994, performing an act that would be just as comfortable in a Las Vegas lounge or aboard a cruise ship. Alternating between songs and corny jokes, Eclipse performs on his “amazing Astro Organ” and is accompanied by an invisible group of backup singers known as the Space Angels. He’s like an extra-terrestrial version of Wayne Newton or Bobby Vinton, with just a hint of Esquivel thrown in to give his music a space-age bachelor pad feel.
But how exactly did Sonny Eclipse come to inhabit his spot in the Most Magical Place on Earth? To understand that, we’ll need to take a trip back to the past.
The Tomorrow That Never Was
When Disneyland opened in 1955, Walt Disney described Tomorrowland as, “A vista into a world of wondrous ideas, signifying man’s achievements … a step into the future, with predictions of constructive things to come. Tomorrow offers new frontiers in science, adventure, and ideals: the Atomic Age, the challenge of outer space, and the hope for a peaceful and unified world.”
The area would be a place to peer into the future and experience the cutting edge of human innovation, from journeys into outer space to the home of tomorrow. The problem, as Walt once declared, was that “Tomorrow is a heck of a thing to keep up with.” Technological progress rapidly transformed what once seemed science fiction into fact, rendering views of the future obsolete, or exposing them as wildly inaccurate predictions.
Journalist Hendrick Hertzberg wrote about the problem as far back as the 1980s, when he said that the area, “was the only [land] I had really wanted to see as a kid, because it was supposed to show what the future would be like. But this is 1981, and if Tomorrowland is any guide, the future has seen better days.”
Author Lindsay Mott described the dilemma in her Celebrations Magazine article “Tomorrowland: Bringing the Future to Life Through Imagination”. In the piece, she notes that Tony Baxter began considering the conundrum as he worked on Disneyland Paris. In fact, he stated outright, “We are faced with [the fact that Tomorrowland] is out of date. We’ve gotten locked into the idea that the future was white stucco and gleaming glass.”
Because of this, the area was re-imagined in the 90s. In 1994, the New Tomorrowland debuted at the Magic Kingdom, embracing a retro sci-fi style that could best be described as depicting “the tomorrow that never was”. The new aesthetic resembles the future as depicted in comics like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon and television shows like Lost In Space and The Jetsons.
With all of this in mind, it’s not a stretch to say that Sonny Eclipse is essentially the musical embodiment of the land’s new ethic. His musical styling is anachronistic, sounding more like some hi-fi recording of the Rat Pack than whatever we might perceive as the “music of tomorrow”.
We Choose to Go To The Moon
The Space Age officially began in 1957 with the Russian launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. It reached its peak during the Apollo program, which lasted from 1968-1972, and saw the first human land on the moon. As noted by NASA, “Sputnik’s launch caught the United States by surprise and led to the creation of NASA. The Space Race was inaugurated between the two countries, as each superpower sought to achieve superiority in space. The competition led to the rapid development of space capabilities by both countries, first putting animals and then humans in space and sending automatic probes to the Moon and planets.”
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave his famous, “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech, detailing his plans to send a man to the moon. In it, he stated, “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people…But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal?…We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”
The preoccupation with space was not only political, it became a cultural craze. That same year, the Jetsons debuted on ABC, depicting a family of the future. They inhabited a Googie-style home, had a robot maid, and commuted to work in an aero car. Three years later, the show Lost In Space would debut, taking the premise of the classic adventure novel “The Swiss Family Robinson” and re-imagining it for the Space Age.
As the New York Times noted, “An effect was much more than simply a spillover from the silvery streamlining of the space program. It was an increasing preoccupation with the future and technology that helped change not only the country’s look in the 1950s and ’60s but also, in some ways, its very conception of itself as if seen anew from space.”
During this same time period, a few new musical genres began to flourish. Easy listening, lounge music, and space-age pop all came into being. Frank Sinatra had become the leader of the Rat Pack in 1957 (the same year Sputnik launched), after the passing of Humphrey Bogart. Along with performers like Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford, the group became synonymous with Las Vegas (which introduced its iconic ‘Welcome To Fabulous Las Vegas’ sign in 1959).
As noted in a 1996 Chicago Tribune article, “In the late 1950s and early ’60s, it was a scene glamorized by Hollywood and countless albums that functioned as aural travelogues of exotic locales, from Hawaii to outer space. In this idealized, stylized version of the high-life, the lounge was the place where Sammy and Frank, and Dino hung out and shared a martini or three while chiding the squares to “Just swing, baby!””
Juan Garcia Esquivel, typically referred to simply by his last name, was another key innovator in the genre. NPR even went so far as to describe him as, “the man who practically invented 1950s lounge music.” He is, perhaps, best known, as the leading figure in the space age pop movement, a curiously hard-to-define genre. The webpage Space Age Pop writes, “This music might be characterized most easily by what it isn’t. It’s rarely simple enough in structure and instrumentation to be called rock (and certainly retains enough of a sense of humor to be disqualified as art rock). It’s not serious or straightforward enough to be called jazz. It’s often too esoteric or extreme to be called pop. It’s in some middle ground between all of these, which means it’s populated with the outcasts from other well-established genres. As a result, Space Age Pop is full of brilliant, bizarre, and exciting sounds, which are particularly striking to ears accustomed to the stereotypes that populate the more familiar genres.”
Jet Set Pop followed in the sixties, featuring artists like Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, while composer John Barry wrote the smokey, evocative music of James Bond. Albums like Stan Getz and João Gilberto’s 1964 release ‘Getz/Gilberto’ introduced wider audiences to Bossa Nova classics like “The Girl from Ipanema”. In 1966, Sergio Mendes would release a cover of Jorge Ben’s ‘Mas Que Nada’.
While all of these musical forms had their own idiosyncrasies, what they had in common was a mood. They were leisure music, the type that you might listen to while wearing a smoking jacket and sipping a martini. Though the style would eventually be supplanted by rock and roll, for a brief time it represented the good life for the hi-fi generation, who still believed that technological progress would be the cure for mankind’s woes.
It was this very trust in the promise of the future that Walt tapped into with the creation of Tomorrowland, an optimism that would slowly disappear in the coming years with the chaos of the Vietnam War, the terror of the Cold War, the War on Drugs, and the AIDS crisis.
With all of that in mind, it makes sense that Disney would attempt to tap into this bygone sense of unbridled optimism when creating “the tomorrow that never was”.
The Biggest Little Star in the Galaxy
Longtime Disney composer George Wilkins–who also wrote music for The Living Seas, It’s Tough to Be A Bug, and other classic Disney attractions– wrote the music for Sonny Eclipse with the help of Imagineer Kevin Rafferty.
Wilkins’s journey through the music industry started in the 50s when he performed with Patti Page. In the 60s, he formed a group called the Doodletown Pipers, who played with such luminaries as Count Basie and Bing Crosby.
Back in 2017, I had the good fortune to interview Wilkins for an article in Celebrations Magazine. At that time, he told me, “I started with Walt Disney Pictures in 1979 as a staff composer. I worked with Buddy Baker to start with and then got very busy writing and producing music for Epcot and Disney Tokyo.”
In his book “Magic Journey: My Fantastical Walt Disney Imagineering Career”, Kevin Rafferty recalled, “George Wilkins and I wrote eight original songs for the character. I thought it would be fun for Sonny to sing different types of music, from ballads to rock to blues to “Bossa Super Nova” so we wrote in all those styles. I penned the lyrics and jokes to reflect Sonny’s outer space perspective.”
According to the official backstory that was created for the character, Sonny played mall openings, bar mitzvahs, and weddings prior to getting hired at Cosmic Ray’s. Rafferty even stated, “He’s a big deal on his planet, but on our planet, he’s really down to earth.” That planet, for the record, is called Zork. And Sonny’s hometown is the city of Yew Nork.
In speaking with Wilkins, he told me that the original concept had been for Sonny to sing inverted versions of jazz standards, transforming songs like ‘How High the Moon’ into things like ‘How Low the Moon’ but the idea was quickly abandoned after licensing costs were taken into consideration. Instead, the following songs were composed:
- My Name is Sonny Eclipse
- Out in Space
- Hello Space Angels
- Gravity Blues
- Starlight Soup and Salad
- Bright Little Star
- Planetary Boogie
- Yew Nork, Yew Nork
“Because Sonny is a nightclub act he had to have a girls back up trio,” Wilkins said. “Since that would have been impossible money-wise, we made them ‘invisible space angels’ that he could call upon wherever and whenever. As far as the Astro Organ went, we knew a performer who had a MIDI setup very much like we needed that could do anything from musical instruments to sound effects.”
The smooth crooning voice for Sonny was provided by bluesman Kal David. He broke into music in 1962 when he formed Kal David and the Exceptions. Over the course of his career, he performed with legends like Etta James and as lead guitarist for John Mayall. His first contact with Wilkins came about at a lounge where Kal and his band were performing.
“He was friends with some of the members of my band,” David said. “I guess he liked us because he returned several times.”
The two worked together on a song for Epcot’s Wonders of Life Pavilion in 1989, with David singing “Unhealthy Living Blues” in the Goofy About Health Area. He later auditioned for the part of Sonny and was brought into the project.
According to David, “George played all the music that you hear on Sonny’s tracks on synth…but the only thing the synthesizer cannot emulate is the guitar. So he had me play the parts.”
The part of the Space Angels was performed by a group known as ‘The Brunettes’, one of whose members, Lauri Bono, is David’s wife.
“The Brunettes are Lauri Bono, Amy Weston, and Patti Brooks,” David said. “They sang in my larger band and I was musical director for them and the leader of their band. When George was casting the Space Angels, we told him about Amy and Patti and he like the idea of the self-contained group as opposed to hiring three individuals. Also, they are great singers with a natural blend. In order to justify the existence of the Space Angels we wrote a song that tells how they came to exist.”
The resultant show runs around 25 minutes long and has developed something of a cult following among Magic Kingdom devotees. In his book, Rafferty even notes, “I can’t tell you how thrilled I was the first time I saw Guests responding to him with their fingers snapping and toes tapping–and some of them even danced to his musical stylings. Imagine my surprise when I read a newspaper article about two Disney park fans who fell in love while dancing to “their” song, “Bright Little Star” by Sonny Eclipse!”
Nearly 30 years have passed since Sonny debuted in Tomorrowland, and his performances continue to delight and entertain visitors to the Magic Kingdom. His smooth, cool voice and groovy melodies still transport Guests out of today and into the world of yesterday’s tomorrow. Not bad for a little Zorkie from Yew Nork.
Make Mine Music 