That's What Friends Are For (The Vulture Song) That's What Friends Are For (The Vulture Song) "That's What Friends Are For (The Vulture Song)" is a song in the Walt Disney film "The Jungle Book" from 1967. It was sung by a quartet of "mop top" vultures who are making friends with Mowgli, the main character of the film. The song was written by Disney staff songwriters, Robert and Richard Sherman, and sung primarily by J. Pat O'Malley, Lord Tim Hudson, Digby Wolfe, and Chad Stuart. Bruce Reitherman and George Sanders both made cameo appearances in the song singing as Mowgli and Shere Khan the tiger, respectively, in
The Jungle Book (1967 film) with "One Hundred and One Dalmatians" and "The Sword in the Stone". However, after the disappointing reaction to "The Sword in the Stone", Walt Disney decided to become more involved in the story than he had been with the past two films, with his nephew Roy E. Disney saying that "[he] certainly influenced everything about it. (...) With "Jungle Book", he obviously got hooked on the jungle and the characters that lived there." Peet decided to follow closely the dramatic, dark, and sinister tone of Kipling's book, which is about the struggles between animals and man. However, the film's writers