J On The Spectrum - Disney's 100th Anniversary - Immersive Sound Comes To Hollywood

Disney's 100th anniversary is this year, and to celebrate, I'm going to tell the story of this legendary animation company over a yearlong period.

With Snow White on his resume, and Pinocchio in production, and Bambi in the planning stages, Walt Disney prepped for his most ambitious feature yet, with the working title The Concert Feature, which would be a collaboration between him and Leopold Stokowski to craft an animated feature of what it would be like if a concert had images that went so well and synced with the music. Almost like the birth of the modern music video.

They were very selective in choosing which music would end up in the movie, music which is still played and spoofed and studied to this very day, much like artwork and frames of this film. The most notable accomplishment of Fantasia was Mickey Mouse's comeback. Fred Moore, one of the top animators of the studio, and the inspiration for what Lampwick would look like in Pinocchio, redesigned Mickey Mouse to be more childlike. He made Mickey Mouse the Mickey Mouse that we still see today.

This film marks a series of firsts for Disney. It marks the first time true color live action was ever used in a Disney movie, and for a studio that acts as the ultimate family brand you see today, the first ever onscreen kill, when the T-Rex kills the stegosaurus during the Rite of Spring sequence. It would also be the first movie ever to have immersive stereo sound, most likely to conjure the feeling that you were in a concert hall.

However, only one theater had the sound equipment necessary to play Walt's vision for the film, and it did not resonate well with audiences at first, because they were not used to a non-traditional structure in a major motion picture, and I believe some of them thought that Walt Disney brought back the silent film, since the animated scenes contain no talking or dialogue. Walt was ahead of his time, and the film, being so artsy, has gained newfound appreciation among critics and fans as being one of Walt Disney's great animated masterpieces. Continuing this weak performance of box office after Snow White, Walt still intended to make animated movies. Yet a day of reckoning was about to come to him in 1941.

Next week, not only does the circus come to town, but a completely different kind of circus forms outside the Disney studio marking one of the darkest chapters in Disney history.

Here's the book I was talking about in the video: https://archive.org/details/waltdisneytriump0000gabl