Happy Birthday to You
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Happy Birthday to You", also known more simply as "Happy Birthday", is a song that is traditionally sung to celebrate the anniversary of a person's birth. According to the 1998 Guinness Book of World Records, "Happy Birthday to You" is the most recognized song in the English language, followed by "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." The song's base lyrics have been translated into at least 18 languages.
Copyright issues and public performances
Royalty amounts sought
One of the most famous performances of "Happy Birthday to You" was Marilyn Monroe's rendition to U.S. President John F. Kennedy in May 1962.
The Walt Disney Company paid the copyright holder U.S. $5,000 to use the song in the birthday scene of the defunct Epcot attraction Horizons.
The documentary film The Corporation states that Warner/Chappell charges up to U.S. $10,000 for the song to appear in a film. Because of the copyright issue, filmmakers rarely show complete singalongs of "Happy Birthday" in films, either substituting the public-domain "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" or avoiding the song entirely. Before the song was copyrighted it was used freely, as in Bosko's Party, a Warner Brothers cartoon of 1932, where a chorus of animals sings it twice through. The entire song is performed in tribute to the title character of Batman Begins, a Warner Brothers film.
In the 1987 documentary Eyes on the Prize about the US Civil Rights Movement, there was a birthday party scene in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's discouragement began to lift. After its initial release, the film was unavailable for sale or broadcast for many years because of the cost of clearing many copyrights, of which "Happy Birthday to You" was one. Grants in 2005 for copyright clearances have allowed PBS to rebroadcast the film as recently as February 2008.
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