“Yodeling is an art!” Because his hypnotic singing is unappreciated by just about everyone, Alameda Slim rustles up some revenge.

Directors Finn and Sanford wanted Slim’s hypnotic soliloquy, the song “Yodel-Adle-Eedle-Idle-Oo,” to be one of the most colorful sequences in the movie; to take its place along such other Disney moments as “Pink Elephants on Parade” from Dumbo, and “Ev’rybody Wants to Be a Cat” in The Aristocats.

Lyricist Glenn Slater comments, “Songs are really a way of telling the story; a way of amplifying emotion and capturing character. This was a very difficult song to write because it’s the first time we meet Alameda Slim and we had to find a way to establish the mechanism of how his yodeling trick works, while doing it in a song that was also a big production number. Another thing I wanted to do with this song was to tap into that Disney tradition of nonsense word songs, like ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ or ‘Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.’”

Two expert, champion yodelers (Randy Erwin, Kerry Christenson) were blended with Randy Quaid’s own singing. Slater says, “What made recording this song such a complicated process was matching Randy’s singing voice to the voices of two incredible yodelers. When Alameda Slim does his thing, what you’re hearing is Randy’s consonants and the yodelers’ vowels spliced together in such a way that it sounds like a seamless performance.”

Background supervisor Cristy Maltese Lynch talks about the psychedelic yodeling scene: “We went kind of wild in that sequence because we wanted the audience to experience what the cows were feeling. They don’t know what’s going on. All this weird stuff is happening. They’re seeing the world through different eyes and they’re hearing music that is taking them away. They have no control over what’s happening.”

When Lynch first brought her background team together, she asked them to approach their paintings like a crafts project. She says, “I asked them to remember back to when they were in kindergarten, and they would cut colored paper, and glue macaroni and beans and sequins onto it. That was the approach we wanted, as opposed to a rendered painting. Our film is very graphic and textural. The backgrounds are not illustrations, or beautiful landscape paintings in oil, but something closer to a crafts project.”

Using a technique called “faceting,” the artists would lay down a flat plain of color, and then go back over that with other angular areas of color. Pieces of textured watercolor paper or differently-colored fabric might be layered on top of a painted area. This hard-edge faceting provided a unique, handcrafted quality for the skies, mountains and other background. When composited with the characters, it created an illusion of perspective with visible ruts, grains and textures.

In general, in the western film genre, the color palette tends to be brown and earth tone to highlight the dusty terrain. However, the bright colors in Home on the Range emphasize the intended joy and warmth of the movie. Art director David Cutler explains, “A great example of that is the frontier town where we have buildings that are purple, yellow and blue. We could have made the film more monochromatic, but we went for a more colorful and playful look. We were influenced a lot by the color stylist Mary Blair who had such a big impact on Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland.”