In creating the film Fantasia in 1938, Walt Disney took a risk in marrying two seemingly incompatible mediaclassical music and animationin a feature-length production. In many ways, his approach was successful, but in some cases, it failed. Disney came up with the concept back in the 1920's (The Big Cartoon Database) and began using classical music backgrounds in cartoon shorts called Silly Symphonies (Aldred). Disney enjoyed the approach, so he used it in 1935 in his first cartoon made completely in color. It was called "The Band Concert"and starred Mickey Mouse as a band director (see Fig. 1) trying to conduct a concert featuring The William Tell Overture by Rossini, while being thwarted by Donald Duck and a tornado (Malone).
Disney was not just experimenting with a new kind of background music for his cartoons. He had a serious goal: making classical music more accessible to the general publicpeople who were unfamiliar with itand to introduce it to children.......
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