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When people hear the name Disney, they usually reminisce over theme parks, characters, and full-length animated movies. Many people have praised Walt Disney for his innovation in full-length animation and imagination. But one movie, that is not talked about enough, takes innovation one step further and shows just how much ahead of his time Walt Disney and his creators were. I’m talking about Disney’s third full-length animated installment, Fantasia. So today, we’ll learn ten facts about this 1940 film.
1. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, A Short Film
The whole idea of Fantasia began as just a short film to boost Disney studio’s star character Mickey Mouse, who, at the time, was losing popularity. Walt Disney decided to feature the mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, based on the poem written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and match the animation to the orchestral piece by Paul Dukas inspired by the original tale. When the pitch was made to Leopold Stokowski, a famous conductor at the time, he was more than willing to take part. Upon animating for the short film, Fred Moore redesigned Mickey to include pupils to his eyes for the first time to achieve greater ranges of expression. Before that point, Mickey had black dots for eyes.
2. It Was An All Inclusive Effort For a New Kind of Film
Disney made story writers Joe Grant and Dick Huemer gather with conductor Leopold Stokowski, composer Deems Taylor, and the heads of various departments, to discuss their ideas of stories and music selections. Later, Stuart Buchanan held a contest at the studio for a film title, for it was still being called The Concert Feature. Almost 1,800 suggestions were given, with the favorite being Fantasia. This title had grown among the film’s supervisors from Disney expressing the greater importance of music in Fantasia compared to his past work, stating, “In our ordinary stuff, our music is always under action, but on this…we’re supposed to be picturing this music–not the music fitting our story.” Disney had the ideal that the film would bring classical music to non-classical listeners.
3. Walt Wanted It To Be A 4D Experience
We’ll get into how innovative the film already was later, but in early production, Disney had the idea of creating a dimensional sensation to viewers. Besides experimenting with a dimensional soundscape, Disney also had ideas like creating 3D visual experience for Toccata and Fugue in D Minor or releasing the smell of incense throughout the theater during Ave Maria. However, those ideas were scrapped pretty early on.
4. It Was The First Film With Stereophonic Sound
Before Fantasia, film scores would be a mono soundtrack (one track) played on speakers behind the projector screen. Disney wanted to recreate the sounds of the orchestra as if you were standing on the podium with the conductor. This was achieved through recording and mixing multiple tracks simultaneously and upgrading theaters with more speakers and other equipment. The innovative technology during its time would have different tracks channeling a left, right, and center speaker, in other words, the predecessor to surround sound (almost forty years before surround sound, and more than fifty before it became popular). This would be called “Fantasound.”
5. It Was Initially a Failure
Fantasia is regarded as one of the highest grossing films of all time, but due to the special equipment needed to show the film in its 1940 release, there was only showings in thirteen cities across the United States. People were so astounded by the production that Fantasia ran for 49 consecutive weeks in New York and nearly as long in Los Angeles, which set an all-time record back in 1941. Disney was not profiting much though, for the sophisticated “Fantasound” was about $85,000 to set-up per theater. When adjusting for inflation, that’s about $1.5 million today. Not only that, but the onset of World War II also created setbacks. Due to Fantasia’s pricey advancements and limited venues, not the reception, it would have been considered a commercial failure.
6. It Survived Through Its Longevity
For the next fifty years, there would be about nine more runs in theaters across the nation and many edits to the film. The runs from 1942 through 1963 would revert to the standard mono soundtrack and then stereo, as well as cut the film down from its whopping two hours and five minutes to between one hour and twenty minutes to one hour and fifty-five minutes. Fantasia began to make a profit from its $2.28 million budget after its return to theaters in 1969 by promoting the film as a psychedelic experience. When the film reissued in 1982 and 1985, Disney presented Fantasia with a completely new soundtrack with Irwin Kostal instead of Stokowski. This would have been the first time a film’s soundtrack had been digitally re-recorded in its entirety. For its fiftieth anniversary, Fantasia returned to theaters in 1990 in its traditional 1946 version including the live action scenes with Deems Taylor and the original negatives that had been in storage since 1946. This marked the first time since then that a release of the film had been processed from the original and not from a copy. The 1990 reissue of Fantasia went on to gross $25 million domestically.
7. It Took Fifty Years To Make It To Home Video
Fantasia has received three home video releases. This first, featuring the 1990 restored theatrical version on VHS, Betamax, and LaserDisc. The 50-day release prompted 9.25 million advance orders for cassettes and a record 200,000 for discs, doubling the figure of the previous record. Fantasia became the biggest-selling sell-through cassette of all time with 14.2 million copies being purchased, only to be surpassed by Beauty and the Beast in 1992. The film was released the second time along with Fantasia 2000 on DVD with 5.1 surround sound. Both films were reissued again in 2010 as a DVD/Blue-ray set that featured 1080p high-definition video and 7.1 surround sound.
8. It Has Had A Positive Reception From The Beginning
Fantasia was ranked fifth at the 1940 National Board of Review Awards in the Top Ten Films category. Disney and Stokowski won a Special Award for the film at the 1940 New York Film Critics Circle Awards. Fantasia was the subject of two Academy Honorary Awards in 1942; one for Disney and the RCA Manufacturing company for their “outstanding contribution to the advancement of the use of sound in motion pictures through the production of Fantasia, and the other to Stokowski “and his associates for their unique achievement in the creation of a new form of visualized music in Walt Disney’s production…as entertainment and as an art form.” Also in 1990, Fantasia was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
9. Controversial Stereotypes
In the late 1960’s four shots from The Pastoral Symphony were removed that depicted two characters in a racially stereotyped manner. One was a black centaur called Sunflower was shown polishing the hooves of a white centaur. The other, named Otika, appeared briefly during the procession scenes with Bacchus and his followers. The edits have been in place in all subsequent theatrical and home video releases.
10. Disney Envisioned Fantasia To Be an Ongoing Legacy
Disney wanted Fantasia to be an ongoing project, in a cycle with a new segment substituting one of the original segments and being released every few years. Even tough story material was already in development, the film’s disappointing initial box office performance and the USA’s entry into World War II brought an end to these plans. Roy E. Disney, Walt Disney’s nephew, co-produced Fantasia 2000 which entered production in 1990 and features seven new segments performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with conductor James Levine. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is the only segment retained from the original film. Fantasia 2000 premiered at Carnegie Hall on December 1999, followed by a four-month engagement in IMAX cinemas, as well as regular theaters.
All of this information was obtained using the Creative Commons site, Wikipedia. There are many more interesting facts that you can find on that site as well as others. If you enjoyed this article, please give it a like and share among others. If you have an idea for future music facts, you can either leave your comments below or contact us. Thank you and learn more next time.