Movie Music Monday – Mrs. Doubtfire

It was on this day in 1993 that Mrs. Doubtfire premiered in theaters. Sally Field, Pierce Brosnan, and the late Robin Williams all starred in this funny, yet serious film. Robin Williams is SO good in this movie.

Desperate to see his children after a divorce, Robin’s character disguises himself as Mrs. Doubtfire, a nanny, to help with the kids. If you’ve never seen it, you really should. It is a fantastic film.

One of my favorite scenes in the film is when there is a montage of Mrs. Doubtfire doing various things while Dude Looks Like a Lady is playing underneath the scenes. Robin dancing with a vacuum or a broom is cinema magic.

The song was written by Desmond Child. Songfacts.com spoke with him about the song’s use in the film: “Desmond Child told us, “It’s funny, because they used that song in Mrs. Doubtfire, and then it was like every four or five-year-old child in America was able to sing that song. It was like; do you realize this is about a tranny?”“

Songfacts also shares:

While Aerosmith is a very heterosexual band, they were secure enough to sing about wanting sex with the “Dude” even after they discover he is a man. They weren’t concerned about their masculinity, but were worried about offending the LGBT community – they didn’t want to come off as jackass rock stars making fun of someone different.

Desmond Child was the one who pushed it through. He told us, “Joe (Perry) stepped in and said, ‘I don’t want to insult the gay community.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’m gay, and I’m not insulted. Let’s write this song.’ So I talked them into the whole scenario of a guy that walks into a strip joint and falls in love with the stripper on stage, goes backstage and finds out it’s a guy. But besides that, he’s gonna go with it. He says, ‘My funky lady, I like it, like it, like it like that.’ And so he doesn’t run out of there, he stays.

If you think about how far back that was, it was a very daring song to sing, and everyone went with it. It’s not like the polarized society we have now, because that was before gay people really started fighting for their rights and nobody cared about it and everyone thought that they could make fun of us. So they accepted the lyric, and not only that, went for it. (Laughs) I don’t know if anyone has looked deep enough into the song, but it’s a very accepting song, and it has a moral that says never judge a book by its cover, or who you’re going to love by your lover.”

If you’d rather just listen to the song – here is the official video from Aerosmith: