When Beetlejuice Beetlejuice hit theaters in late summer, nobody knew if it would connect with audiences like the 1988 original, now a beloved classic. Director Tim Burton and star Michael Keaton didn’t want to make some cheap nostalgia-bait sequel, and waited until they had a new story they felt was worth telling. Luckily for everyone involved, it worked. The film was one of the biggest hits of 2024, grossing over $450 million worldwide and reinvigorating audiences’ love for the characters. But as much as the creative team didn’t want to repeat themselves, some elements from the first film were probably destined to carry over. One such element comes from one of the first movie’s most memorable moments: the supernatural lip-sync number.
In the original, the invading Deetz family is possessed into singing and dancing to Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” by the recently deceased Maitlands (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) in an attempt to scare them out of their home. Over time, the scene has become iconic in its own right, and elevated Belafonte’s take on the Jamaican folk song into the realm of the classics. So for the sequel, Burton had to go bigger. Enter “MacArthur Park.”
‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s Big Musical Number
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s answer to the original’s lip sync sequence is indeed bigger and more elaborate in pretty much every way. The scene comes around the midpoint of the film, after Lydia (Winona Ryder) agrees to go through with the marriage to Betelgeuse that she had narrowly avoided in the first film, in return for his help getting her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) out of the afterlife. Betelgeuse concocts an elaborate wedding ceremony reluctantly attended by Astrid along with Lydia’s mom Delia (Catherine O’Hara), presided over by the intense priest Father Damien (Burn Gorman). Before long, everyone’s singing and capering about against their will to the strains of “MacArthur Park.”
Such a comically absurd scene needs a comically absurd song to go with it, and “MacArthur Park” is an inspired choice. The song was written by Jimmy Webb in 1967, a time when pop music was growing more elaborate and ambitious by the day, a standard set by the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that year. Webb wrote it as part of an ambitious, 20-plus minute cantata, which he offered to psych-pop band the Association, who had a couple of big hits with songs like “Windy” and “Cherish” around that time. The band turned it down, and Webb thought that was the end of it.
Until later that year, when he met actor Richard Harris at an LA fundraiser. The acclaimed Irish actor was fresh off his second Oscar nomination for playing King Arthur in the movie version of Camelot, and he was interested in trying his hand at a music career. He and Webb collaborated on a full album, and “MacArthur Park” was released as a single in April 1968. Harry Potter fans will no doubt recognize Harris as the original Albus Dumbledore from the first two films, before his 2002 death required him to be replaced by Michael Gambon.
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“MacArthur Park’s” Strange Afterlife
“MacArthur Park” was an unusual choice for a single. At over seven minutes long, it was more than twice the length of the average pop single, and longer songs usually didn’t do well on pop radio. Despite this, the song was a left-field smash, reaching as high as number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968 and becoming one of the biggest songs of the year. While its success didn’t exactly launch Harris into the realm of pop stardom, he continued to release music along with his acting work for many years.
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But this wasn’t the end for “MacArthur Park.” Plenty of other artists, from Waylon Jennings to the Four Tops, tried their hands at it in subsequent years, and it even got the parody treatment in “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Jurassic Park” in 1993. 10 years after its original release, the song went to the top of the charts with disco legend Donna Summer’s version in 1978. Harris’s version is used for the lip sync, but Summer’s version plays over the film’s end credits.
Over the years, “MacArthur Park” has developed a reputation as one of pop’s great “bad songs,” an overwrought slice of ’60s cheese with some bizarre and impenetrable lyrics about cakes melting in the rain. It was even used to memorable effect in a Season 4 episode of The Simpsons, when one of Bart and Lisa’s classmates regales bored parents with a rendition played on a tabla during a talent show.
This reputation is undoubtedly part of why Burton chose the song for the film’s big musical moment; it’s fitting that Beetlegeuse would pick such an absurd song to cement his marriage to Lydia. According to Cinemablend’s Mark Reyes, when he asked Burton why he chose the song, the director said that it wasn’t written into the script, but that it came from his own personal mental playlist and felt like a fitting choice for its operatic, strangely grandiose atmosphere. Regardless of whether “MacArthur Park” can be considered “good” or “bad,” it’s an undeniably memorable song that made an ideal soundtrack for one of the year’s most memorable movie moments.
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