The Ugly Bug Ball

One of my fellow writers in the GBE2 group sent out a welcome to all new members that included a reference to the song "Ugly Bug Ball." I swear I am one of the only people in my generation who has any idea what this song even is.

It is sung by the great Burl Ives and appears in the Disney movie Summer Magic. When I was a kid, we subscribed the The Disney Channel. That was in the good ole days when you paid for the channel and quality programming was available. You got to watch all of the classic movies and TV shows and none of the crap that exists on the free channel today.

My family often recorded a lot of the movies to VHS tapes so that we could watch them again and again. My parents didn't want to spend money on movies, because we were paying for the premium channels. We all loved Hayley Mills and had many of hers recorded. One of them, of course, was Summer Magic.


A nutshell recap of the movie: Hayley Mills and her family are forced to move out to the country and start over after the death of her father. They are accustomed to a fashionable life; but their father made a bunch of bad investments and left them nothing when he died. They are thrust into a new way of life and a web of seemingly innocuous lies concocted by Burl Ives' character. It's full of family values, comedy and music. I can't tell you how many times my sister and I watched it.

What was almost as amusing as the movie itself was the fact that my father always seemed to walk into the living room from the store at exactly the same point in the movie, no matter when we had started it. And it was every time the song "Ugly Bug Ball" came on. It became such a running joke that I swear he was purposely listening for it just so that he could walk in!




I love this movie to this day and watch it whenever it is on. I do not have it on DVD, and I do not know why.




I also am a huge fan of Burl Ives in general, thanks to this movie. Most people don't seem to know who he is, or at least only associate him with the Christmas movies. But he was so much more. Check him out and relive childhood memories.