Similar Examples From Elsewhere
Members of the Barmy Army, devoted fans of the English cricket team, are known to mock Australian cricketers and fans by singing the Australian national anthem to the tune of the nursery rhyme "Mary Had a Little Lamb", and vice-versa.
The Australian television comedy programme The Money or the Gun featured a different artist performing "Stairway to Heaven" every week. The Beatnix performed it to the tune of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and "Twist and Shout". The B-52s tribute band The Rock Lobsters performed Stairway to the tune of "Rock Lobster". Elvis impersonator Neil Pepper performed it to the tune of "Viva Las Vegas".
The Australian television comedy programme Spicks and Specks features a segment "Substitute", where a panelist sings a well-known tune substituting words from an unrelated text (usually a technical text like "Datsun 180B Service Manual" or "2004 Australian Government Tax Pack"), and the remaining team-mates attempt to guess the name of the song. The host, Adam Hills sang the Australian National Anthem to the tune of the Rock and Roll classic, Working Class Man, in one case accompanied by the latter's singer, Jimmy Barnes. In a 2008 stand up comedy tour, Hills performed the Dutch national anthem Het Wilhelmus to the tune of Bohemian Rhapsody.
The Scared Weird Little Guys, an Australian comedy duo, perform a similar vein of songs weekly on The Cage, the breakfast show on Triple M in Melbourne and Sydney. In their segment, "Stump the Scardies", listeners email in suggestions of songs to sing in another tune and the duo get about five minutes preparation time — usually just enough to find the guitar chords and lyrics online. This segment occurs weekly at 0845 AEST on Tuesdays.
In 1989 "Weird Al" Yankovic recorded "Money for Nothing/Beverly Hillbillies*", the lyrics of "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" (theme from The Beverly Hillbillies) to the music of the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing".
A serious example of the principle behind this game was Cliff Richard's "Millennium Prayer", in which he sang the Lord's Prayer to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne" (the Clue team retaliated in the 1999 Christmas special by performing "Auld Lang Syne" to the tune of "Bachelor Boy" and vice versa). Also in recent popular culture bootlegging and bastard pop have taken is a step further, employing the practice of laying down vocals from one track over the music from another.
Both "The Star Spangled Banner" and "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" are both examples of taking a song and writing new lyrics for the tune.
Read more about this topic: One Song To The Tune Of Another
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