Ben - 2003 Live Edit

Don Black and Walter Scharf wrote the seemingly tender ballad "Ben" for the 1972 movie of the same name. It was the sequel to a movie called Willard, which was remade in 2003 starring Crispin Glover. In Willard, Ben is a pet rat trained by a human named Willard who has learned how to make rats do his bidding. Willard has the rats kill for him, but at the end of the movie they turn against him. In the sequel, Ben, a young boy befriends the rat, but the rat turns evil and recruits other rats to attack humans. In the remake of Willard, Ben becomes an enormous super-rat. Despite the horror movie provenance, the lyrics are touching and sentimental, and make no reference to rodents. This made it a sturdy song about friendship: They don't see you as I do I wish they would try to I'm sure they'd think again if they had a friend like Ben Many listeners were quite moved by the song, which was marketed independently of the movie, never knowing it's about a rat.

According to the book Jacksons Number Ones, this was intended for Donny Osmond, but Don Black suggested Jackson, who got the song instead. Donny Osmond told The Huffington Post that he didn't record the song when it was offered to him because he was on tour and they had to finish the movie. He added: "Michael and I would talk about this all the time. It's funny, because we eventually ended up laughing at this one. I will never forget, we stayed up to like two in the morning, laughing about the fact that I had a hit about a puppy and he had a hit about a rat."

The song's co-writer Don Black has written many movie themes, including the hits "Diamonds Are Forever" (for the James Bond movie) and "Born Free." At his 2007 induction in the Songwriters Hall Of Fame, he said of "Ben," "When it came to writing about a rat, I said, 'You can't write about a rat.' I mean, I'm not going to use words like 'cheese.' I thought the best thing to do is write about friendship."