One Song to the Tune of Another — Page 2

Somehow I never put that together about the Smetana piece, but you're absolutely right.

Man, I love that melody.

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Seems like Cy Coleman really mined Seesaw for City of Angels. Another example, "Nobody Does It Like Me" from Seesaw is virtually the same song as "You can Always Count On Me" from City of Angels.

Surprised no one's mentioned these two before, because they're pretty well known, but 76 Trombones and Goodnight My Someone have the same essential structure.

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There are some web sites that list song pairs with similar melodies.

https://soundsjustlike.com/ contains a bunch of songs I never heard of that sound like songs I also never heard of.

I also found a discussion board that lists several Broadway tune soundalikes:

The chords from Gershwin's I Got Rhythm also fit the theme to The Flintstones.

Music of the Night from Phantom of the Opera duplicates “Fish Heads,” by Barnes and Barnes: “Fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fish heads.” For that matter, part of Music of the Night sounds like an aria from “The Girl of the Golden West.”

76 Trombones and Goodnight My Someone are the same except that Goodnight My Someone is 3/4 slower.

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The absolute best one for this is Red and black from Les Miserables to the tune of Do Re Mi from The Sound Of Music, because it works really well in both directions without any messing with the scansion.

(Red the blood of angry men / Do a deer a female deer
Black the dark of ages past / Re a drop of golden sun
Red a world about to dawn / Mi a name I call myself
Black the night that ends at last / Fa a long long way to run)

There Is Nothing Like A Dame from South Pacific and Somewhere That's Green from Little Shop of Horrors pair well.

(We got sunlight on the sand / In a matchbox of our own
We got moonlight on the sea / With a fence of real chain link
We got mangos and bananas you can pick right of a tree / A grill out on the patio disposal in the sink
We got volleyball and ping pong and a lot of fancy games / A washer and a dryer and an ironing machine
What don't we got we ain't got dames / A tract house that we share somewhere that's green)


Somewhere Over The Rainbow from The Wizard Of Oz sounds good to the tune of Summertime from Porgy and Bess if you extend the vowels a bit and give it some soul.

(So-omewhere / Summertime
O-over the rainbow / And the livin' is easy
Wa-a-ay / Fish are jumpin'
Way, way up high / And the cotton is high
There's a land / Your daddy's rich
A land that I dreamed of / And your momma's good lookin'
Once u-upon a / So hush little baby
Lu-ullaby / Do-on't you cry)

And assuming you can style out the slight syllabic drift at the end of each line then singing The Internet Is For Porn from Avenue Q to the tune of All That Jazz from Chicago is a crowd pleaser.

(The internet is really really great / Come on babe why don't we paint the town
-- For porn! / And all that jazz
I got a fast connection I don't have to wait / I'm gonna rouge my knees and pull my stockings down
-- For porn! / And all that jazz
There is always some new site / Start the car I know a whoopee spot
And I browse all da-ay and night / Where the gin is cold but the pia-ano's hot
Feels like I'm surfing at the speed of light / It's just a noisy hall where there's a nightly brawl
-- For porn! / And all that jazz)

And you have to really stretch to make If I Was A Rich Man from Fiddler On The Roof match up to The Lonely Goatherd from The Sound of Music, but it's worth the attempt just for the joy of singing the yodels to the tune of the deedles and vice versa.

If anybody has any others (Showtune-to-Showtune rather than Showtune-to-Random-Song) then I'd love to hear them. I do a regular quiz at my theatre and one of the questions is trying to identify both songs when I sing one song to the tune of another, ISIHAC style.

"Rah-Rah, Tip-Top" from THE PIRATE QUEEN and "The Prince is Giving a Ball" from CINDERELLA.

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