Use in Films and Television
The song has been sung in several films. It was performed by Elvis Presley in Viva Las Vegas, and by Luciano Pavarotti in Yes, Giorgio. It can be heard in the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera. The end of the song is chanted by David Kessler and Jack Goodman as they are walking in the rain in the English countryside in An American Werewolf in London. The song is sung a cappella very briefly in Frostbite.
On television, an off-key rendition by Don Knotts as Barney Fife was performed on The Andy Griffith Show, in the episode "The Song Festers" as the feature song of the Mayberry choir "sent off to New York" for its annual spring concert. In the Hogan's Heroes episode "The Pizza Parlor", Hogan and his team recruit Major Bonacelli to be their contact in Italy. To lure him, they contact Garlotti's Pizzeria in Newark, New Jersey. Garlotti provides the men with a pizza recipe and the words to Santa Lucia which he gladly sings in full voice. In the Tom and Jerry episode "Cat and Dupli-cat," Tom is singing the first verse of this song in the beginning of the cartoon.
Marisol sang "Santa Lucia" in the 1960s Spanish film "Un rayo de luz" (A Ray of Light).
In the third episode of the second season of "Lost in Space," ('The Ghost Planet', 1966), the Robot (Bob May, voice of Dick Tufeld) sings two verses of "Santa Lucia," accompanied by Will Robinson (Billy Mumy). The Robot's voice suddenly drops off at the end of the second stanza, rousing Dr. Zachary Smith (Jonathan Harris) from his daydreams. "You bubble-headed booby! I was about to land on the isle of Capri; now I'll never get there!" Smith exclaims, berating the Robot. The problem, Will explains, is that the Robot's tapes are wearing out. Dick Tufeld did the actual singing on this sequence, as Billy Mumy played his guitar. In real life, Mumy is an accomplished musician.
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Famous quotes containing the words films and/or television:
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
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