50 Fun Facts About Fantasia

Fantasia's mushrooms dance to which ballet score?

The Nutcracker. Today it means Christmas, but when Fantasia opened in 1940 the full ballet had never been staged in America; that had to wait for San Francisco in 1944.

Whose Toccata and Fugue in D minor opens Fantasia as a play of abstract shapes?

Johann Sebastian Bach. It is the film's one abstract segment, and when Fantasia was trimmed for general release in 1942 it was the number cut out entirely.

Deems Taylor appears throughout Fantasia in what role?

The on-screen host. Walt and his conductor both knew Taylor's voice from his intermission talks on New York Philharmonic radio broadcasts, so they gave him the same job between the film's numbers.

In The Sorcerer's Apprentice, what does Mickey bring to life to carry his water buckets?

A broom. It works too well: Mickey dozes off and wakes to find the cellar flooding, with no idea of the spell that would make it stop.

Who composed the music for The Sorcerer's Apprentice?

Paul Dukas. Walt had secured the rights to the music before he had anyone to conduct it; a chance meeting in a Hollywood restaurant then produced a famous maestro who volunteered.

What is the name of the sorcerer whose apprentice Mickey plays?

Yen Sid. Read it backwards: the animators named the stern sorcerer after their own boss, a tribute hidden in plain sight.

Which Snow White dwarf was floated as the sorcerer's apprentice before Walt insisted on Mickey Mouse?

Dopey. Putting the silent dwarf in the sorcerer's hat was an early suggestion, but Walt was adamant that his showpiece short should star Mickey, who was redrawn for the occasion.

What did animator Fred Moore add to Mickey Mouse's design for Fantasia?

Pupils in his eyes. Mickey had gone his whole career without them; the facelift, which also made him chunkier and cuter, was meant to give him a wider range of expression.

Which German poet wrote the ballad that inspired The Sorcerer's Apprentice?

Goethe. His ballad of a pupil whose borrowed spell gets out of hand inspired the orchestral piece, which in turn gave Walt the Mickey short that grew into Fantasia.

What was Fantasia's working title during development?

The Concert Feature. The name said what it was: one Mickey short had grown too costly to pay for itself, so Walt surrounded it with other pieces to make a film-length concert.

Which ballet score, discussed for Fantasia but left out, finally became the finale of Fantasia 2000?

The Firebird. Walt's planners kept returning to it for the first film and its hoped-for follow-ups, but it reached the screen only in the sequel, as a forest sprite's brush with a volcano.

What sound drives the demons of Bald Mountain back to their graves at the end of Fantasia?

A church bell. Its tolling at dawn sends the spirits slinking back to their graves and the great devil back into the mountain, and the film moves straight into a quiet candlelit procession.

Which surrealist painter began the short Destino with Walt Disney in the 1940s, a project rediscovered while Fantasia 2000 was being made?

Salvador Dalí. Work stopped after a few months and the storyboards sat in the vaults for decades, until Walt's nephew Roy had the film finished in 2003 and it earned an Oscar nomination.

Which piece replaced Pierné's Cydalise for the mythological segment?

Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. The fauns and centaurs were first planned to a French ballet score, and the film teases its replacement: the players swing one of its themes in a jam session after the intermission.

What did Fantasia's animators drape on the female centaurs after the Hays Office warned against bare breasts?

Garlands. The censor had written to the studio a year before release, and animator Ward Kimball recalled a whole stack of memos on how the centaurettes could and could not be drawn.

Which Roman god's festival is interrupted by Zeus's storm in Fantasia's mythological segment?

Bacchus. The wine god's party is rained off when Zeus, purely for sport, starts hurling the thunderbolts that Vulcan forges for him, playing darts with the guests.

Whose opera La Gioconda includes the Dance of the Hours?

Amilcare Ponchielli. In the opera, dancers stand for the hours from dawn to night; Disney kept the morning-to-night plan and handed every hour to a troupe of very unlikely ballet animals.

Which Dance of the Hours ballerina wins the heart of the alligators' leader?

Hyacinth Hippo. Her dainty steps were copied from real ballerinas filmed for the animators, among them the ballerina Tatiana Riabouchinska.

What is the lead alligator in Dance of the Hours called?

Ben Ali Gator. His swagger had professional help: ballet dancer and choreographer David Lichine was brought in to work out how the alligators should move.

Which Looney Tunes character introduces the music in A Corny Concerto, the 1943 parody of Fantasia?

Elmer Fudd. In round glasses and tails he introduces two Strauss waltzes while fighting a starched shirt front that keeps rolling up into his face.

What is the name of the giant devil in Night on Bald Mountain?

Chernabog. The winged giant grew out of a pencil sketch by Albert Hurter, a Swiss artist the studio kept on simply to draw ideas for its animators to work from.

Which horror star was brought in to pose for the devil on Bald Mountain?

Bela Lugosi. The screen's Dracula struck poses for the camera, but animator Bill Tytla wasn't inspired by them and had the segment's own director act the demon out instead.

Which composer's Ave Maria closes Fantasia?

Schubert. Disney had new English words written for it by Rachel Field, and the closing shot was finished so late that it reached New York only hours before the premiere.

What does Fantasia show to the music of The Rite of Spring?

The early Earth and its dinosaurs. The ballet is about a pagan sacrifice; Disney swapped that for the planet's birth and a fight in the rain between a Tyrannosaurus and a Stegosaurus.

Which German pioneer of abstract film worked on Fantasia's Toccata and Fugue but left before it was finished?

Oskar Fischinger. Used to complete control over his own films, he watched his designs reworked to look less abstract, and he walked out of the studio without a screen credit.

Which comedy act is said to have guided animator Art Babbitt's dancing mushrooms in Fantasia?

The Three Stooges. The comic shuffle of the littlest mushroom, the runt who trails the rest of the troupe, is said to be borrowed from one of the trio.

How were the snowflakes of Fantasia's snowflake fairies animated?

Stop-motion cut-outs on revolving spools. Drawn snowflakes would have wobbled, so real snow-crystal diagrams were traced, cut out and run along toy-train-sized rails hidden under black velvet.

Which Debussy piece was recorded for Fantasia but dropped before release?

Clair de Lune. The moonlit swamp sequence was cut because the film ran too long, then resurfaced in 1946 in Make Mine Music with a pop ballad, Blue Bayou, in place of Debussy.

Who composed Night on Bald Mountain, the music for Fantasia's gathering of demons?

Modest Mussorgsky. He never heard it performed: the piece became famous only after his death, in a reworking by Rimsky-Korsakov that Fantasia's arrangement also drew on.

Which ensemble performs most of the Fantasia soundtrack?

The Philadelphia Orchestra. Its home hall had served for years as its conductor's recording laboratory; only The Sorcerer's Apprentice, recorded earlier in Hollywood with hired players, is by another band.

Which two films preceded Fantasia as Walt Disney's first animated features?

Snow White and Pinocchio. Both told fairy tales; the third feature dropped story for a programme of music, and it opened just as war cut the studio off from its European markets.

Why was the film stock for Fantasia's recording sessions kept in a truck outside the concert hall?

Fire risk. The recording film was highly flammable and the old hall is built of wood, so the city's fire marshal would not allow the reels to be stored or loaded inside it.

Disney's Fantasound system made Fantasia the first commercial film released with what?

Stereophonic sound. Speakers placed around the auditorium let the music follow a character across the screen, but the equipment was so elaborate that only a handful of specially fitted theatres could play it.

Which company supplied the eight oscillators Disney ordered to test Fantasia's sound equipment?

Hewlett-Packard. Disney's sound engineer saw the new firm's first oscillator at work, asked Bill Hewlett to modify it, and ordered eight of the resulting model.

Which actor plays the sorcerer in Disney's 2010 live-action film inspired by Fantasia's Mickey Mouse segment?

Nicolas Cage. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer stretched the short cartoon into a full-length New York adventure, and one scene pays extended homage to Mickey's spell going wrong.

In Fantasia 2000, which Gershwin piece is drawn in the style of caricaturist Al Hirschfeld?

Rhapsody in Blue. The segment follows a handful of Depression-era New Yorkers, and the animators hid Hirschfeld's trademark in it: his daughter's name, Nina, on a tube of toothpaste.

Where did Fantasia open on November 13, 1940?

The Broadway Theatre. Under an earlier name the same New York house had introduced Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie twelve years before, and Fantasia stayed there for about a year.

Which birds open Fantasia's Dance of the Hours as the dancers of the morning?

Ostriches. Their leader was modelled on the ballerina Irina Baronova, one of several real dancers filmed so that the animators could copy how they moved.

Where did the proceeds from Fantasia's opening night go?

The British War Relief Society. The premiere was a benefit held weeks after the Battle of Britain, and the same war soon shut Disney out of the European markets he depended on.

In Allegro Non Troppo, the 1976 Italian parody of Fantasia, which piece accompanies life evolving from a cola bottle?

Ravel's Boléro. Dregs left in a bottle by visiting astronauts grow into a parade of creatures that march through evolution in step with the music, until a city of skyscrapers rises and overruns them.

Fantasia's 1969 reissue drew a new young audience who embraced the film as what?

A psychedelic trip. Three decades after it had struggled at the box office, the film was taken up by teenagers and students, and it stayed in almost continual re-release afterwards.

For its 1982 reissue, Disney replaced Fantasia's original soundtrack with what?

A new digital recording. Conductor Irwin Kostal re-recorded the whole score in Dolby stereo, but the change did not last: the 1940 performance was cleaned up and put back for the fiftieth anniversary.

Which character, a black centaurette shown polishing another's hooves, was cut from later releases of Fantasia?

Sunflower. The little servant figure was a racial caricature; she was edited out of a 1963 television repeat and then out of the film itself for its 1969 reissue.

Which composer, the only living one in Fantasia, called its performance of his score execrable?

Igor Stravinsky. He complained in print that the conductor had shuffled the order of his piece and cut its most difficult passages, though accounts differ on how he took the film at the time.

Which animated series parodied The Sorcerer's Apprentice in a cartoon-within-a-cartoon?

The Simpsons. Scratchtasia is an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon in an episode set at a theme park billed as the violentest place on Earth, a dig at Disneyland's own slogan.

Fantasia 2000 was the first feature-length animated film released in which format?

IMAX. After a concert-hall premiere with a live orchestra, the sequel played only on the giant screens for its first four months before it reached ordinary cinemas.

Which studio, Disney's regular distributor, took over Fantasia's release in 1941 and cut it down for ordinary cinemas?

RKO. Disney had roadshowed the film himself because its sound needed special equipment; RKO switched to ordinary single-channel prints and in 1942 cut it to about 80 minutes.

Whose National Film Registry added Fantasia in 1990?

Library of Congress. Its registry was only in its second year, and the honour arrived just as a two-year restoration from the original negative put the film back in cinemas for its fiftieth anniversary.

Which Disney video release of 1992 broke Fantasia's record as America's best-selling videocassette?

Beauty and the Beast. Fantasia was on sale for only a limited time in 1991, and the rush to buy it pushed sales past 14 million tapes, a record the newer film beat within a year of reaching the shops.

In Fantasia 2000, which Disney character plays Noah's assistant in Pomp and Circumstance?

Donald Duck. He herds the animals aboard the ark to Elgar's graduation march, loses track of Daisy, and is reunited with her only when the voyage is over.