Fantasia
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50 free Fantasia trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Fantasia is Walt Disney's 1940 concert film: eight animated segments set to classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski, introduced by critic Deems Taylor, and played through Fantasound, the first commercial stereo system in cinemas. It grew out of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a lavish Mickey Mouse short that cost so much the Disneys decided to build a feature around it. This quiz covers the music and the making of it: the Chasen's restaurant meeting where Stokowski offered to conduct for free, the September 1938 story meetings where The Rite of Spring was picked for dinosaurs, Oskar Fischinger's abstract designs, Art Babbitt's Three Stooges mushrooms, Bela Lugosi posing for Chernabog, the Hays Office garlands on the centaurettes, the 33-microphone recording at the Academy of Music, and the Ave Maria shot that had to be filmed four times. It also covers the roadshow release, the wartime losses, the psychedelic 1969 revival, the Irwin Kostal re-recording and Fantasia 2000. Fifty questions, four options each, with a short explanation after every answer. Play on your phone or print it for a Disney or classical-music quiz night.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Fantasia's mushrooms dance to which ballet score?
The Nutcracker
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.
Q 02Whose Toccata and Fugue in D minor opens Fantasia as a play of abstract shapes?
Johann Sebastian Bach
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.
Q 03Deems Taylor appears throughout Fantasia in what role?
The on-screen host
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.
Q 04In The Sorcerer's Apprentice, what does Mickey bring to life to carry his water buckets?
A broom
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.
Q 05Who composed the music for The Sorcerer's Apprentice?
Paul Dukas
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.
Q 06What is the name of the sorcerer whose apprentice Mickey plays?
Yen Sid
Yen Sid. Read it backwards: the animators named the stern sorcerer after their own boss, a tribute hidden in plain sight.
Q 07Which Snow White dwarf was floated as the sorcerer's apprentice before Walt insisted on Mickey Mouse?
Dopey
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.
Q 08What did animator Fred Moore add to Mickey Mouse's design for Fantasia?
Pupils in his eyes
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.
Q 09Which German poet wrote the ballad that inspired The Sorcerer's Apprentice?
Goethe
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.
Q 10What was Fantasia's working title during development?
The Concert Feature
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.
Q 11Which ballet score, discussed for Fantasia but left out, finally became the finale of Fantasia 2000?
The Firebird
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.
Q 12What sound drives the demons of Bald Mountain back to their graves at the end of Fantasia?
A church bell
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.
Q 13Which surrealist painter began the short Destino with Walt Disney in the 1940s, a project rediscovered while Fantasia 2000 was being made?
Q 21What is the name of the giant devil in Night on Bald Mountain?
Chernabog
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.
Q 22Which horror star was brought in to pose for the devil on Bald Mountain?
Bela Lugosi
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.
Q 23Which composer's Ave Maria closes Fantasia?
Schubert
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.
Salvador Dalí
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.
Q 14Which piece replaced Pierné's Cydalise for the mythological segment?
Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony
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.
Q 15What did Fantasia's animators drape on the female centaurs after the Hays Office warned against bare breasts?
Garlands
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.
Q 16Which Roman god's festival is interrupted by Zeus's storm in Fantasia's mythological segment?
Bacchus
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.
Q 17Whose opera La Gioconda includes the Dance of the Hours?
Amilcare Ponchielli
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.
Q 18Which Dance of the Hours ballerina wins the heart of the alligators' leader?
Hyacinth Hippo
Hyacinth Hippo. Her dainty steps were copied from real ballerinas filmed for the animators, among them the ballerina Tatiana Riabouchinska.
Q 19What is the lead alligator in Dance of the Hours called?
Ben Ali Gator
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.
Q 20Which Looney Tunes character introduces the music in A Corny Concerto, the 1943 parody of Fantasia?
Elmer Fudd
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.
Q 24What does Fantasia show to the music of The Rite of Spring?
The early Earth and its dinosaurs
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.
Q 25Which German pioneer of abstract film worked on Fantasia's Toccata and Fugue but left before it was finished?
Oskar Fischinger
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.
Q 26Which comedy act is said to have guided animator Art Babbitt's dancing mushrooms in Fantasia?
The Three Stooges
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.
Q 27How were the snowflakes of Fantasia's snowflake fairies animated?
Stop-motion cut-outs on revolving spools
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.
Q 28Which Debussy piece was recorded for Fantasia but dropped before release?
Clair de Lune
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.
Q 29Who composed Night on Bald Mountain, the music for Fantasia's gathering of demons?
Modest Mussorgsky
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.
Q 30Which ensemble performs most of the Fantasia soundtrack?
The Philadelphia Orchestra
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.