Post by Natalie on Jul 27, 2006 13:51:24 GMT -5
Information and pictures courtesy of Tara from the Officially Unofficial Hercules Site
Directed by: Samuel Armstrong, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Hamilton Luske, Jim Handley, Ford Beebe, Norm Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson
Writted by: Joe Grant (segment "orchestra sequences") & thingy Huemer
Released on: November 13, 1940
Running Time: 125 minutes
Budget: $2.28 million
Box-Office: $361,800..."Ouch"...although since then through many re-releases it has amassed $76 million in the U.S.
Note: The film was originally a box office flop during it's release in 1940, but received a following in the late 60's. The film was re-released in 1946, 1956, 1963, 1969, 1977, 1982, 1985, and 1990, before being finally released on video in 1991.
SEGMENTS
"Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565" by Johann Sebastian Bach
"L'apprenti sorcier" by Paul Dukas
"A Night on Bald Mountain" by Modest Mussorgsky
"La Gioconda: Dance of the Hours" by Amilcare Ponchielli
"Ave Maria" by Franz Schubert
"The Rite of Spring" by Igor Stravinsky
"Nutcracker Suite Op. 71a" by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
"6th symphony in F, Op.68 'Pastorale'" by Ludwig van Beethoven
It started out as a rescue mission. Towards the end of the 1930's Mickey Mouse (being rapidly eclipsed by Donald Duck in popularity) was beginning to lose his lustre with the public and Walt Disney sought to recreate his alter ago and give his career a boost by starring him in a musical two reeler cartoon as the naughty apprentice of a powerful sorcerer.
When Mickey's laziness and curiosity gets the best of him he steals the bosses's magical hat to create a singleminded army of insanely stubborn brooms to do his work and...well...you know the rest. When The Sorceror's Apprentice ran way over budget it was suggested that Walt create a whole suite of cartoons set to various pieces of classical music and release it as a major feature. Thus was "Fantasia" born.
INTERESTING FACTS :
-This is the longest of all Disney animated movies, with a running time of 120'. Possibly to counter-balance this, the 64-minute Dumbo was released a year later -the shortest Disney animated movie to date!
-The Sorcerer (in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice") is named "Yen Sid", which is "Disney" spelt backwards.
-The demon in "Night on Bald Mountain" was supposedly modeled on Béla Lugosi. It was named "Chernobog" after the god of evil in Slavonic mythology.
-A segment featuring Claude Debussy's "Clair de Lune" was animated but cut. It was later used in the "Blue Bayou" scene of "Make Mine Music!"
-In the "Pastoral Symphony" segment there was originally a scene showing black centaurs shining the hooves of white centaurs. It was not until the 1969 re-release that this was thought objectionable, and all subsequent releases until 1980 had an abrupt cut at this point. The current video release includes the scene, but with the frame cropped to show only the face of a white centaurette.
-Pressure from the Hays Office led Disney to put flower bras on the centaurettes, who had been designed bare-breasted. In later releases (including the video release) the two Nubian/zebra centaurettes who attend Bacchus have been edited out (except for a brief glimpse when the trip enters) along with a pickaninny centaurette who shines the others' hooves. Disney was able to call the Video release "complete and unedited" because, under US Law, a studio can edit their own film for video and still call it "complete and unedited".
-For the premiere, the Broadway theatre in New York was equipped with "Fantasound," a stereophonic sound system that used a total of ninety speakers. Only twelve theaters across the United States could reproduce the "Fantasound", which required banks of 96 speakers at a cost of $85,000 per theater!
Walt Disney and Leopold Stokowski received an honorific statue at the 1940 Academy Awards.
