April 1, 2025
These days, with principal photography now completed for the first-ever Springsteen biopic (presumably hitting theaters before this year ends,) Bruce Springsteen himself must be feeling pretty supercalifragilisticexpialidocious about the film-industry once more. That good feeling wasn’t always the case, however, especially during a particularly lengthy behind-the-scenes attempt at film-music-licensing that was... ahem, not among his most successful endeavors.
As many Springsteen fans know already, a quarter-century ago, even after his artistic and commercial success with the first song he ever wrote specifically for a film soundtrack, “Streets of Philadelphia,” Bruce's song “I’ll Stand By You” was rejected for inclusion in the soundtrack of the first Harry Potter film. Eventually, almost two decades later, he finally would get to re-record the song for inclusion in the Blinded By The Light soundtrack, but in many of those years between Harry Potter and Blinded By The Light lies a tale of Springsteen's legendary career that very few fans have ever heard before...
“At some point I'd like to get ['I'll Stand By You'] into a children's movie of some sort, because it was a pretty lovely song," Springsteen said back in an October 2016 BBC interview. Yet according to Ed Catmull, retired president of both Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, Bruce’s 2016 comments to the BBC about “I’ll Stand By You” understated extremely just how strong his desire had been for the song to end up in a kids’ flick.
In an exclusive, recently conducted Letters To You interview, Catmull - now serving as an advisor to the Emmy-winning interactive animation team at Baobab Studios - revealed publicly for the first time ever that a year or so after the Harry Potter pitch didn’t get greenlighted, Bruce began setting his sights on Pixar/Disney. “Every night for years, I’d pray that I’d never hear another pitch for that friggin’ song. Now I know why they really call Bruce ‘The Boss.’ Man, can that guy get pushy! The first time the phone rang was back in late 2002, just as we were beginning to wrap Finding Nemo. Bruce very excitedly told us that he had re-written his song for our film as ‘I’ll Swim By You.’ We said, ever so politely and respectfully, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’
“Then a coupla years later, Bruce hears that we’re working on Cars. Not only does he want to re-pitch ‘I’ll Stand By You,’ but now he’s offering to sing it as an actual animated car-character in the film...some character he apparently made up himself called, uh... ‘Pardner Sonny,’ an old street-racing buddy of Lightning McQueen.
He even brought in a few concept drawings by some artist he hired on spec. Anyway, here’s hopin’ that Bruce didn’t pay this artist very much, if anything. I mean you just can’t put fuelie heads on a big block-engine like a 396. Doesn’t everybody know that?!
“Bruce also knew that Randy Newman was scoring Cars for us, and that we often work with Randy. I remember Bruce saying, ‘Listen, Ed...Randy and I are tight. You ever hear ‘My Life Is Good’?’
“Finally there was the infamous WALL-E pitch in early 2008. That time he tried pitching us a rewritten ‘I’ll Stand By You’ as a love theme for WALL-E and EVE. It actually gave me a new personal definition of hell: being in a pitch-meeting with Bruce Springsteen, having to watch and hear him sing ‘I’ll Stand By You’ in his ‘WALL-E voice,’ and having to stifle every single giggle and guffaw bubbling up inside of me.”
Years later, none of that laughter needs to be stifled anymore, especially with all of those awkwardly unsuccessful movie-soundtrack pitches long gone in Springsteen's rear-view mirror, and a much-improved relationship with Disney these days, while his latest documentary streams on Disney+/Hulu. As Ed Catmull told us, "We truly can look back on this and it all seems funny... now, that is."
-“Pardner Sonny” concept art by Stephen Winchell
-Special thanks to Carrie Potter Devening for permission to use the image of Bruce Springsteen in his Mickey Mouse shirt. Check out Carrie's awesome book For Music's Sake: Asbury Park's Upstage Club and Green Mermaid Café - The Untold Stories.