Where to Find and Use Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Lyrics
If you're trying to track down the lyrics from the 1968 musical film, they're scattered across a handful of songs with some variation between the stage version and the movie. The most commonly requested ones are "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," "Hushabye Mountain," "Truly Fantastic," and "Me Excites Me." You can find them on sites like AZLyrics, Genius, and LyricFind. I usually go with the official soundtrack lyrics sheet rather than fan uploads because the user-submitted versions often have typos in the phonetic nonsense words. The title song goes something like this: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a magic car you see
Ran away from the old bidda-bidda-bidda-whee
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang went to town
With a little bit of help from me
And Hushabye Mountain: On Hushabye Mountain, hidden from the rain
Lives a gentle Bandicoot with his friends inside a tin town
There they sing and dance the Baa-lalayaka
A-ha-ha-ha-ha Those nonsense syllables trip people up. The original script uses them deliberately but they're often mangled in reproduction. I've seen "bidda-bidda" written as "bida-bida," "vroom-vroom," and even just "brap-brap-brap" depending on which transcription you're reading.
How to Actually Work With These Lyrics
Getting the right version matters more than you'd think. There are at least three distinct sets of lyrics floating around: the 1968 film soundtrack, the later stage adaptation which added and changed material, and various lyric books published over the decades that disagree with each other. If you're doing something like learning the songs or preparing for a performance, the book Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Songs by Ian Fleming and the Sherman brothers is probably the most reliable single source, though it's out of print and runs $30-50 used. I ran into a real problem a while back when I was compiling a reference document and noticed that "Me Excites Me" exists in two slightly different forms depending on whether you're looking at the film or stage version. The stage version has extra verses that weren't in the movie. If you're quoting these for anything public, you need to know which version you're pulling from and label it. I learned that the hard way after someone called me out for mixing the two.
Get the Full Details
What People Usually Miss
The lyrics aren't just filler. The Sherman brothers packed a lot of narrative into the songbook that most casual listeners skip over. "The Ballad of Itchywitch" is a proper storytelling piece with its own arc, and "Count on Me" does actual emotional work for Caractacus Potts' character development. Beginners treating these as just a collection of catchy tunes miss that the lyrics track a specific emotional journey from wishful thinking through crisis to resolution. Another thing nobody really points out: the car's nonsense language (the "bidda-bidda-whee" and similar) isn't random. The Sherman brothers worked out a consistent phonetic system for it. It comes through more clearly in the recordings if you listen closely, but it's never been formally documented anywhere. That's why every printed transcript differs slightly — people are hearing the same sounds and spelling them differently.
Quick Reference for the Main Songs
Here's what tracks you're actually looking for: "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" - Caractacus introduces the car "Hushabye Mountain" - Vincent Price as the Grand High Witch sings this one, it's the main villain piece
"Truly Fantastic" - The opening number with the racing scene "Me Excites Me" - Caractacus gets excited about the car "It'll Be Fun" - Family moment, fairly short
"The Ballad of Itchywitch" - A darker storytelling number "Never Say Never" - Resolution song The complete official lyrics run about 4,000 words across the film. Most websites break them up by song so you don't get everything in one scroll. I recommend bookmarking the film soundtrack version specifically rather than the stage version unless that's what you need.
