June 25

Johnny Mercer dies of brain cancer in Los Angeles, 1976. Aside from the three words of the title, “Hooray for Hollywood” often stumps people who try to remember the rest of Mercer’s clever and gently cynical lyrics. With music by Richard A. Whiting, the unofficial anthem of motion picture’s mecca was first heard in the Busby Berkeley-directed musical Hollywood Hotel (1937) as performed by Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Johnny Davis and Frances Langford.

The Savannah-born Mercer got his start with bandleader Paul Whitman as a singer and songwriter, eventually beginning his movie career in 1933 by composing “Lazy Bones” with Hoagy Carmichael for the Jean Harlow picture Bombshell. Over the following four decades, he co-wrote such standards as “Blues in the Night,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive" (all with music by Harold Arlen) and “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” (music by Harry Warren).

In terms of Academy recognition, he didn’t do half bad: 16 nominations and 4 wins for Best Song. His Oscars were earned for “On the Atcheson, Topeka and the Santa Fe” (music by Harry Warren) for The Harvey Girls (1946), “In the Cool, Cool of the Evening” (music by Hoagy Carmichael) for Here Comes the Groom (1951), “Moon River” (music by Henry Mancini) for Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and “Days of Wine and Roses” (music by Mancini) for the 1962 film of the same name.

Three by Mancini

For those familiar with the jazz elements of composer Henry Mancini’s myriad film scores, it should come as no surprise that he began his professional career in swing, first working with Benny Goodman then joining the Glenn Miller band following World War II (minus Glenn Miller, a member of the Army Air Force who went missing in action in 1944). In 1952 Universal hired Mancini to work on the score of Lost in Alaska, an Abbott and Costello feature. It would be the first of hundreds of assignments with various studios, with his more lauded compositions gracing the soundtracks of Touch of Evil (1958), Experiment in Terror (1962), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), Charade (1963), The Great Race (1965), Two for the Road (1967) and Victor Victoria (1982).

Here are three of Henry Mancini’s most famous creations—resilient, instantly recognizable elements of the composer’s legacy.

“The Pink Panther Theme” was first used over the animated credits for, naturally, The Pink Panther (1963) and went on to grace all but two of the 12 films in the series as well as countless animated shorts.

Recorded by dozens of artists, “Moon River,” with lyrics by Johnny Mercer, was first sung by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and won the Oscar for Best Original Song.

Perhaps Mancini’s most unexpected hit was the goofy and almost annoyingly catchy “Baby Elephant Walk,” a bit of incidental music to underscore a scene involving baby elephants out for a walk in the film Hatari! (1962). [Bonus: John Wayne “speaks” German!]