'Hello, Dolly' lyrics get a fresh hearing

NEW YORK - Jerry Herman, eyes welling with tears, could hardly believe what he was hearing as he watched the new animated blockbuster

WALL-E

.

The composer of the Tony-winning musical

Hello, Dolly!

had licensed songs from the 1964 show to Pixar - Walt Disney Co.'s computer-animation arm - but he had no idea that his music and lyrics would factor so prominently in the story line of the sci-fi robot romance.

"I'm still blown away by the fact that two songs of mine that are close to 50 years old have been used as the underpinning" of the movie, Herman said in an interview from Los Angeles.

Writer-director Andrew Stanton used the tunes "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" and "It Only Takes a Moment" to express the psyche of the love-starved, trash-compacting robot WALL-E.

"My eyes were really wet at both the opening and the closing of the film, and just the wonderful way those songs were used to make him more human," Herman said. "That's really what they did."

Laughing, Herman said it was "so weird" that the songs would be used in a robot movie. But he said the theme of

Hello, Dolly!

- about a 19th-century widowed matchmaker who learns to live again - is relevant to the world of WALL-E, where chubby, unmotivated humans are pampered by robots in a giant spaceship before a wake-up call jolts them out of complacency.

"It's about a basic need for people to go on with life and not shut themselves away and to make the most out of the time we have on this planet," Herman said.

For a film with little human dialogue,

WALL-E

was the box-office champion in its opening weekend, nudging the Angelina Jolie thriller

Wanted

to second place.

WALL-E

opens with panoramic views of galaxies far away, using "Sunday Clothes" as a sunny soundtrack. But the song's exuberant lyrics - "Out there / There's a world outside of Yonkers" - take on new meaning when the scene shifts to the bleak atmosphere of Wall-E's homeland: garbage-ridden planet Earth.