My Top 2000 Songs #1130: Sha-La Love You

Am I including this song on the list merely because we are due for a song from a band of live-action chimpanzees featured in a 1970 Saturday morning kids' show?

Hell yes!

Man, growing up in the early 70s was pretty great.

Still, it's a fine song, perfect bubblegum charm, albeit wholly interchangeable with the Archies--which is ok, because the Archies were also great (and criminally omitted from this list to date, but we're getting there). While most of the other tracks from the show--collected on the undeniably entertaining 1970 album Lancelot Link & The Evolution Revolution--were written by the show's in-house production team (mainly a guy named Steve Hoffman, who also sang them)--this particular track was written by the team of Harvey Price and Dan Walsh, who also wrote songs for 60s/70s kinda real/kinda fake pop band The Grass Roots (most notably the excellent "Temptation Eyes," later covered by the Blake Babies and the Replacements, which is some serious validation). Indeed, this was originally offered to the Grass Roots, but they turned it down.

The whole album is pretty fun and I coulda picked pretty much anything, but this is probably the catchiest.

Each episode of Lancelot Link, a Get Smart-styled children's spy show (again, starring chimpanzees) ended with the band playing a song (like The Monkees, of course). Alas, this seems to be the one song they didn't play on the show. But here's a video with the rest:

And for those who didn't grow up in this golden age of Saturday morning children's television shows, here's a sample episode.