Harline & Washington’s When You Wish Upon a Star

Abstract

When Leigh Harline and Ned Washington penned “When You Wish Upon a Star” for Walt Disney’s 1940 film Pinocchio, the song came like a bolt out of the blue. Like Judy Garland’s rendition of “Over the Rainbow” from The Wizard of Oz one year earlier, vaudeville veteran Cliff Edwards’s recording “When You Wish Upon a Star” comes on the heels of the Great Depression and just shy of America’s sudden jolt into a second global conflict. But fate stepped in and “When You Wish Upon a Star” has since taken a peculiar and dynamic life of its own. It is a corporate logo. It is a jazz standard. John Williams even put it at the center of his score to Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The tune seems to be everywhere. Yet despite its popularity, “When You Wish Upon a Star” has largely kept its story to itself. This book pulls focus to the song’s origins and original context in Pinocchio, the way it works, the work it’s been made to do in the world, and the lives of those who orbited it over the last eight decades. The biography of the song “When You Wish Upon a Star” helps us better understand how our ears attune to the possible and what Harline and Washington’s creation can teach us about the world to come.