When Disney Said Eat Your Spinach

Fantasia Chases Rocky Road that Was "Good" Music

Do any two people, anywhere, listen to music the same? Means by which we hear it are infinite, preference as to how or when more so. Some listen alone, others in a crowd. There are those who loved music all their lives and never went to a concert, never cared to. So how did Fantasia presume to reach a mass audience and convert them to the classics? Walt Disney said it could be done and went down trying (negative cost: $2.3 million, says WD biographer Michael Barrier). Disney and associates imagined we might receive our music enrichment in a uniform way, even as reality suggests otherwise. Ask multitudes who tried: Classics for the masses never worked, chances less that they ever will. A book called Highbrow/Lowbrow, by Lawrence W. Levine, told of men in the nineteenth century who made the attempt. Theodore Thomas, who had a world class orchestra, toured the country with it. He tried to establish a Chicago Symphony, was met by “the indifference of the mass of the people to the higher forms of music.” Thomas would admit, after years trying, that few were “sufficiently advanced intellectually” to appreciate his kind of repertoire. Classical performance belonged to an elite after all (query: Is that now true of classic movies as well?), best success for music out of grab-bags, anything goes selection-wise. Choice could jump from Beethoven to minstrel tunes, snatches of Liszt ceding to patriotic marches or a pop ditty called The Railway Galop, where “a little mock steam engine kept scooting about … on the floor of the hall, with black cotton wool smoke coming out of the funnel.” For smart promoters, so-called classics were one more resource to draw from for an evening’s entertainment, no more venerated than Turkey In The Straw.

So wait --- hadn't this been Disney’s approach up to quicksand that was Fantasia? The Band Concert is instructive, as in here’s the way to do it, Mickey as conductor trying for uplift as Donald Duck interrupts with, yes, Turkey In The Straw. The Band Concert was a masterpiece in nine minutes, 1935 critics clapping hands raw, hands they’d largely sit on for two plus hours that was Fantasia. Disney had already unlocked the secret for making us enjoy classics, not needing Stokowski, Deems Taylor, or any of consulting conservatories to school him. Did Walt rely on egghead judgment rather than his own? Past Silly Symphonies and most of Mickeys were rife with recognizable themes. We’ve all of us learned more of classical music from cartoons than anyplace else that served it. Disney had been making bite-size Fantasias since sound came in, lemon drops to go down easier than a watermelon sans story, sense, or breath of life that best of cartoons were full of. First Disney short I had in 16mm was Mickey’s Service Station, its score a basis for much repeat viewing to follow. I can still hum the whole seven minutes (themes by Leigh Harline). Did Disney lack confidence in Harline or Frank Churchill, another of crack composers on staff, to let Fantasia be about them?

Disney tried adapting classical music to his purpose and got pilloried for it. One kind critic called Fantasia “a work of promise.” Another, less kind, said it was a “promising monstrosity.” All offered barbs, much I think, to show how cultivated they were, and who did Disney think he was, trimming symphonies to measure of dancing hippos? Seems the latest minted genius had fallen in the same trap as geniuses that went before, Griffith with Intolerance, Chaplin and Modern Times. Read contemporary reviews of those and wonder why the two even kept trying. Did Disney need a trim after Snow White? Humbling is first thing on a menu for any popular artist who becomes too popular. Walt could have lunched with Frank Capra on that topic, Lost Horizon and Fantasia topics A and B. Disney got to where he had to top himself each time out. At point of realizing folly in that, the money ran out. He built a new studio with Snow White profits … air-conditioned, milkshakes brought up whenever staff got hungry or felt lazy. They would thank him by going on strike and nearly wrecking the joint. Fantasia started out as one modest thing and ended up another Intolerance, or Lost Horizon, or whatever filmmakers do when too puffed up. Initial idea was to make a deluxe Mickey based on The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, clever if apace with well-received Popeye specials (Sindbad, Ali Baba, etc.), but Disney had misfortune to run into Leopold Stokowski at Chasen’s Restaurant in 1938, balloons inflated from there to pop-point.

Certain Silly Symphonies sort of warned there would be a Fantasia. The Old Mill was experimental, still-life beside rival cartoons, determined to be something different from what animation had been up to then, an announcement that art was achievable off drawing boards. Sillies had gone far as they could, were anything but silly anymore. The series was spent by the time Fantasia got loose, itself a definitive statement of philosophy the SS series had come to embrace. “Funny” cartoons at Disney were now the outliers, Pinocchio, plus Bambi in development, adopting a same drama-as-overlay to humor. Fantasia was in a way inevitable. Someone would surely head that direction eventually, but why exhaust patience with lending institutes to do it? (it was after Fantasia that Bank of America dialed back spigot to Disney) Classical music as backdrop to an animated feature was anything but a sure thing, and yet there was hint, if faint, of a wider public seeking to be enriched. Two-hour radio recitals earlier in the 30’s surprised NBC for warm reception they got. Stokowski had become a longhair star and momentary darling of movies as object of Deanna Durbin pursuit (she wants him to conduct her). Not altogether daft to think great music could/might connect with at least enough public to break even, but Fantasia, much as it now cost, had to do better than even Snow White to achieve that.

Fantasia’s opening was built to intimidate, as wrong-head an intro as serious music ever got from movies. We are five minutes at least getting the orchestra seated, then comes Deems Taylor as headmaster with everything but a switch for bad lads not listening, all grimly lit like Mario Bava arrived early with Wurdalaks. For me seeing Fantasia first in the mid-seventies, it was like Get Out Now While You Can. No matter the respect conveyed, critics were insistent on a barbecue. To praise Fantasia was to admit incipient philistinism. First off, the rejiggering of music. Here, for extreme instance, was highest falutin’ pan re Disney’s rendition of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue, which to The Nation’s B.H. Haggin’s mind, “did not even remotely represent the substance and organic development and structured complexity of Bach’s music or exert anything remotely comparable with the power of the music’s formal eloquence.” Play Beethoven intact or not at all, many said, Disney knowing that had he done that, there would be no one else on the program but Beethoven. Someone who should have known better announced that Fantasia would have us “seeing music and hearing pictures,” to which modern vulgarism WTF might ideally apply. Reviewers wanted to show off taste elevated past Disney and his cartoonists. Latter had less celebrated Great Music than profaned it. So far as animators whose “imaginations were applied” to classical themes, it would take a Michelangelo to do that proper justice. Disney wanted to rescue music from ingrained snobbery, and instead got buried in it by a critical establishment the biggest snobs of all. Enough to make even a genius like Walt retreat back to Steamboat Willie drawing boards.

There was further innovation, also underappreciated, “Fantasound” a would-be engulfing sound process way ahead, as in too ahead, of its time. Thirteen venues wired up at great expense, not as though they could use Fantasound for future product, so any loss was dead loss so far as equipment went. Otis Ferguson, more mercifully inclined toward Fantasia than most (if referring to it as “hollow fakery” is a kindness), questioned if Fantasound was worth the “cumbersomeness,” which for all of sound coming “from everywhere,” was “still mechanical in effect.” Fantasound may actually have done more to emphasize the absence of a live orchestra than to suggest presence of one. Word spread that Fantasia told no story, except briefly when Mickey Mouse came round, so the very mass Walt sought stayed away. Spoofs had to come, and would, with a vengeance. Other cartoon shops particularly had fun at Disney expense. Warners addressed classics with all tongues in cheek, Bugs, Elmer, the lot. Tom and Jerry disrupted one another at concertos. Ridicule seemed a forever thing, to thrive for long after Fantasia itself went into hibernation.

Fantasia came back in 1946 to $535K in worldwide rentals, a help toward making up initial loss, even as marketing, prints, distribution ate up much of that. 1951 was another try, $110K in domestic rentals this time. Would audiences change even if Fantasia did not? Disney hoped so, and aimed mid-50’s dates at “Bopsters, Longhairs, Hi-Fi Addicts, and Juke-Box Fans,” not a bad scattershot, for such splinters did emerge from mainstream viewership, or more accurately, a listening public, few knowing Fantasia for anything other than having come and gone years before. Fantasound was sold as full stereo now (1956), none I'm aware of calling foul. Disney made bite servings of it for TV and outreach to schools. I had twenty minutes of 16mm dinosaurs called A World Is Born, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice finally went out as the glorified Mickey Mouse it always was. Fantasia seemed by now in perpetual release, fresh paper prepared in 1958, 1963, 1970, whenever spirits moved Buena Vista marketers. A perhaps cynical serve was to hippie niche that might take Fantasia to hearts, if not addled minds. At least here was first occasion for exhibitors to worry about rogue substances being snuck into a Disney screening. Fantasia seemed always available to theatres ready to roll dice, an art film the whole family could avoid. A few of us drove from college to Charlotte in 1974 for an empty matinee. I kept praying each segment would be the last. Disney later tried putting new stuff with the old stuff for an update. I’ve no idea if that did more good than harm, or harm than good.

Best not to second guess artists, particularly those who did their art eighty years ago, and who am I to propose a better idea than Disney had, but … here goes. To have made Fantasia right, at least right to my reckoning, would not involve classical music at all, celebrating instead late 30’s-and-into-40’s locomotive that was jazz at its popular peak, specifically swing, that summit attained by the new form which everyone danced to and jammed theatres to hear. No stuffy Deems Taylor, tut-tutting his musicians when they dare improvise a spritely tempo (a moment to best illustrate why Fantasia was a fundamentally wrong idea). The Fantasia done right would bring wide mosaic of musicians to the fore, each hosting segments, or better, doing distinctive stuff w/o resort to intros or set-ups, their sounds speaking for themselves. Swing had well-achieved status by 1940 --- think of Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall in 1938. Imagine him and a dozen other headliners combined with Disney cartoon favorites, a songbook to really let loose animators ideally age appropriate to interpret fresh forms of music. Let first-run theatres bring in a name band to open live, changing the bill throughout extended engagements. Allow kids to dance in the aisles if so moved (a coming rock-and-roll era would usher that in). Include Latin sounds starting to get a US foothold, a head start on Saludos/Caballeros that Disney introduced a few years later. From this could emerge a critic-proof Fantasia, for with music so modern and wide-appealing, who’d pay attention to critics? Here then is the Fantasia of my dreams, a time capsule to open again and again, if only Walt Disney had run into Benny Goodman that fateful day at Chasen’s instead of Leopold Stokowski.