Walt Disney's "Fantasia" is released - November 13th, 1940

On this day in 1940, Walt Disney's "Fantasia" premiered at the Broadway Theatre in New York City.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio, Hello,
and welcome to This Day in History Class, a show
that raises the curtain on everyday history and lets it
take a bow. I'm Gabe Bluesier, and today we're celebrating
one of Walt Disney's greatest triumphs, a film that elevated

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the art of animation, redefined the theater going experience, and
introduced the world to the simple pleasure of ballet dancing hippos.
The day was November thirteenth, nineteen forty Walt Disney's Fantasia

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premiered at the Broadway Theater in New York City. It
was a full circle moment for Walt in his studio
and for their original star, Mickey Mouse. He had made
his debut in Steamboat Willie at that same theater twelve
years earlier, and while back then he was just a ragged,
shoeless mouse, as Walt had put it, he was now

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starring in one of the most ambitious projects ever committed
to film. Fantasia was the company's third full length feature film,
following their groundbreaking work on Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs and Pinocchio. It also proved to be their most
ambitious work yet, a lavishly produced concert feature composed of

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eight animated segments set to pieces of classical music. It
was a huge departure for a studio and for a
medium that had been built largely on lively music and
visual gags. But Disney and his team of animators had
spent the last decade experimenting with new techniques and styles
in the hope of broadening the scope of what animation

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could be. Their character designs and backgrounds became more detailed
and expressive, and they started devoting more time to plot
and character development instead of just gags. All those efforts
paid off with the release of Snow White in nineteen
thirty seven. The film earned critical acclaim and broke records
at the box office, but more importantly, it proved that

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animation was a viable medium for storytelling and artistry. Emboldened
by that success, Walt Disney became even more daring in
his next projects, testing the limits of the industry and
blurring the lines between high art and pop culture. Fantasia
would prove to be his boldest experiment in that regard, or,
as Walt put it, quote in a profession that has

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been an unending voyage of discovery in the realms of color, sound,
and motion. Fantasia represents our most exciting adventure. That may
be true of the final work, but in its earliest form,
the film was much more modest. In fact, it was
originally conceived as a single cartoon short. One of the

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Disney studio's most popular ventures at the time was a
long running series of shorts called Silly Symphonies, standalone carts
tunes based on nursery rhymes and set to music. In
the wake of snow White, Walt wanted to create a
more elaborate Silly Symphony using Paul Ducasse's The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
The music was inspired by an ancient legend later popularized

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by the German poet Gerta, which tells the story of
a mischievous young apprentice who enchants a broom to do
his work while the old master sorcerer is away. Walt

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envisioned the short as a comeback vehicle for his old pal,
Mickey Mouse. Once the most popular cartoon character in the world,
Mickey had begun to slip by the late nineteen thirties,
ceding the spotlight to the studio's more flamboyant characters Donald
Duck and Goofy. The Sorcerer's Apprentice was meant to make
audiences fall in love with the mouse all over again,

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so Walt knew it had to be something really special.
He had artist Fred Moore overhaul Mickey's design, shortening the
character's nose, adding his now signature white gloves, and giving
him pupils instead of just solid black ovals. Of course,
the backbone of any silly symphony was the music, so
to make sure this extra special one really sang, Walt

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went out in search of the best musical collaborator he
could find. He eventually zeroed in on Leopold Stokowski, the
acclaimed conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. As it turned out,
the orchestra leader was no stranger to Hollywood, having already
appeared in two hit films, The Big Broadcast of nineteen
thirty seven, in which he conducts the same back piece

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used in Fantasia and One Hundred Men and a Girl,
with the one hundred men being the Philadelphia Orchestra. With
Stakowski on board, Disney ramped up production on The Sorcerer's Apprentice,
pouring more and more resources into the project. Eventually, the
costs ballooned to more than three times the normal budget

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of a silly symphony, and it was decided that the
short would have to be part of a full length
feature in order to turn a profit. With the help
of musicologist Deans Taylor, Disney and Stakowski selected seven more
musical pieces for inclusion, bringing the total to eight. Additional
numbers were considered, but were ultimately set aside for future releases,

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as Walt thought they could reissue the film each year,
keeping some segments while also introducing new ones. Once the
final roster was decided, co story directors Joe Grant and
Dick Humor worked out story ideas and themes for each selection.
At first, the project was known simply as the Concert Feature,
but Stakowski later suggested Fantasia as a working title. In

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classical muse music, a fantasia is a free form composition
bordering on improvisation. The different styles and moods of the
various cartoon segments reminded the conductor of a free flowing fantasia,
and the name stuck. During production, Walt began to think
of Fantasia not just as a movie, but as a

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sensory film going experience. He toyed with the idea of
projecting one sequence in three D, and even considered pumping
scene specific smells into the theater, such as perfume for
the Nutcracker suite and gunpowder for the Sorcerer's Apprentice. In
the end, Wilt decided to just focus on the sound instead.

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He and Stokowski wanted to give audiences the rich kind
of sound that you really only find at a live concert,
so they made the decision to use a complete symphony
orchestra for all of the recordings. They even recorded the
music on Stakowski's home turf, the acoustically perfect Academy of
Music in Philadelphia. But in order to reproduce the fullness

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of the sound in a theater, they had to develop
a new speaker system, which they dubbed phantasound. It was
one of the earliest forms of stereophonic surround sound and
was meant to create the illusion of listening to a
live orchestra as the movie played. The New York Times
praised the effect and its coverage of Fantasia, saying, quote,

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the music comes not simply from the screen, but from everywhere.
It is as if a hearer were in the midst
of the music. As the music sweeps to a climax,
it froths over the proscenium arch, boils into the rear
of the theatre, all but prances up and down the aisles.
In nineteen forty, Fantasia was first released as a theatrical

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road show, complete with an overture intermission and a printed
program just like you'd find it a formal concert. It
played exclusively at thirteen select theaters, all of which had
agreed to update their equipment to the Phanta sound system.
This involved installing additional speakers all around the auditorium instead
of just behind the screen, as well as new projectors

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and sound reproduction machines. The Broadway Theater, for example, added
ninety speakers ahead of the film's premiere, with the average
cost of these upgrades estimated at eighty five thousand dollars.
There was a lot riding on the success of Fantasia,
and Walt and his team left nothing on the table
in their attempts to meet those expectations. An unprecedented amount

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of effort went into the film, and not just in
terms of sound and scope. For example, the animators brought
in real life models to study their movements and to
add further realism to the characters. Horror icon Bela Lagosi
was one of several actors whose gestures informed the fearsome
demon Churna Bog in the film's climactic night on Bald

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Mountain sequence, and the graceful steps of world famous dancer
Irina Baronova inspired the character of Mademoiselle Upa Nova, the
stridge ballerina who shares a stage with Hyacinth Hippo and
ben Ali Gator in the Dance of the Hours segment.
That same level of care was put into the other
sequences as well, from consulting with paleontologists on the dinosaurs

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and prehistoric animals seen in the Rights of Spring, to
studying the patterns of stained glass windows to achieve the
look of the forest and the Ava Maria finale. The
studio put it all on the line with Fantasia and
then held its collective breath to see if the experiment
had worked. In terms of artistry and entertainment value. It
was an unqualified success. Fantasia was adored by audiences and

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critics alike, and it went on to win two special
awards at the Oscars, one for outstanding contribution to the
advancement for the use of sound and motion pictures, and
one for widening the scope of the motion picture as
an art form. In terms of box office receipts, however,
the film fell far short of its massive two p

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point three million dollar budget. Fantasia's high concept and sophisticated
subject matter likely made it feel less accessible than the
studio's earlier films, and being restricted to the handful of
theaters with Phanta sound didn't help either. One of the
biggest hindrances to the film's success, though, was the start
of World War II, which effectively closed European theater markets

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that had previously accounted for nearly half of Disney's revenue.
On the bright side, Fantasia did have legs, going on
to run for forty nine consecutive weeks in New York
and nearly as long in Los Angeles. Walt's next film, Dumbo,
was a return to form in terms of profits, as
it was much simpler and less expensive to produce. Unfortunately,

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the sting of Fantasia's initial flop scared him away from
ever attempting the sequels he had planned. Nonetheless, the Walt
Disney Company continued to re release Fantasia in the decades
that followed, and in nineteen sixty nine the film finally
turned to profit, thanks in large part to a successful
psychedelic ad campaign aimed directly at counterculture teens. Then, in

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nineteen ninety one, the strong sales of Fantasia's first home
video release convinced Disney executives to dust off Walt's plans
for a follow up film. His nephew, roy E Disney
spearheaded the project and made sure it didn't fall through
the cracks a second time. The result was nineteen ninety
nine's Fantasia two thousand, a worthy successor that, while not

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as groundbreaking is the original, still delivered on the lofty
promise of music you can see and pictures you can hear.
Fantasia two thousand also carried the original spirit of innovation,
becoming the first commercial full length feature to be released
in Imax, decades ahead of its time. Fantasia was and

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still is, the art of animation at its finest, and
if you've never had the pleasure of watching the whole film,
I urge you to correct that. Don't let the two
hour runtime or the highbrow music scare you away, because,
as Walt himself once put it, perhaps Bach and Beethoven
are strange bedfellows for Mickey Mouse. But it's all been

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a lot of fun. I'm Gabe Lucier and hopefully you
now know a little more about history today than you
did yesterday. If you have a second and you're so inclined,
considered keeping up with us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
at TDI HC Show. You can also rate and review

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the show on Apple Podcasts, or you can get in
touch directly by writing to This Day at iHeartMedia dot com.
Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thank
you for listening. I'll see you back here again tomorrow
for another day in History class.