Walt had to do something to put and keep Mickey in the forefront of animated foreplay so just as WWII was about to erupt Walt instituted his own version of D-Day by producing the Mickey Mouse comeback kid fantasy film, “Fantasia” Although not well received at the time, this $2.5 million extravaganza was more popular in it’s re-release in 1968 as the American post-Summer of Love rucksack gen of runaways and societal dropouts were purple hazed and double dazed communing with nature while at the same time being inducted into the cadre of boomers kneeling at the altar of fantastic animation replete with dancing brooms, wood nymphs and a sorcerers apprentice. Disney’s 1940 foray into fantasy, “Fantasia” had officially stepped through the Psychedelic Sixties looking glass and was an instant stoner classic along with Easy Rider and Reefer Madness. Move over mad hatters, Mickey Mouse had become Timothy Leary!
More than a mere cartoon with a cacophony of chaos, mayhem and stooge-like action, “Fantasia” was set to symphonic scores that acted as a background backdrop drop cloth to the action. In point of fact the music score was so important to the creative mix it was the first film produced in and shown in stereophonic sound. It was a high five for Hi-Fi recorded in multiple audio channels that was dubbed “The Fantasound Process” to give it that extra PR push at the boffo box office.
Fantasound however was no match for the gathering Nazi storm clouds about burst over Europe as overseas distribution was cut off which in turn cut into the Sorcerers profits. The fact that prod costs were more than eight miles high didn’t help matters much, but mostly it was brought down by audience perception. The movie going public felt Walt had gone “high-brow” and Mickey was now a member of the House of Lords and no longer the Disney darling of the Depression Era. Mickey had left the cartoon Skid-Row auditorium and was now playing Carnegie Hall! (If you’re a number cruncher..crunch this. The film was produced for just over 2 million in Disney pocket change with the recording tech eating up half a mill alone.)
Disney went into full salvage mode over the years to fix his fantastic Fantasia fuck-up. Some footage as well as audio were doctored and some deleted and changed until it no longer resembled the original creation. It was a cadaverous experiment that had all the surgical earmarks and scars of Frankenstein’s Monster.
The musical compositions themselves are crucial and include Toccata and Fugue, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, the Dance of the Hours and the Ave Maria. The Nutcracker Suite, the twenty-five minute Rite of Spring (the longest segment in the film) and the Pastoral Symphony is shortened from Beethoven's complete forty-minute original. There are also small internal omissions in Night on Bald Mountain.
The Age of Aquarius burst on the anthropological horizon as blinding as an acid flashback on Orange Wedge. It was the fast times changing fast lanes from the complacent cool, groovy cold war Fifties to the placenta of protest that erupted in an orgasm of light and color and lava lamps and light shows and psychedelia along with enough hallucinations from the vaginal vortex of the groin of the baby boomer gen to transform Mickey Mouse into the poster child of the emerging submerged underground drug counter culture.
Fantasia was released and unleashed on a gen brought up on Snow White and Dumbo and Hi-Ho it’s off to work we go dwarves, but now our imaginations were fueled by chemicals and the flames were fanned by visions of dangerous dancing dinosaurs, macabre mops, beastly brooms and flying flaming fairies all set to a musical backdraft that put you into a blue moody mood of moody blue hue where pink floyds descend from a Jimmy Page stairway to heaven. Fantasia mesmerized our gen as the flash from an atomic detonation or a Family Dog light show at the Fillmore Auditorium listening to Inna Gadda Da Vida on purple double dome. Amphetamines and marijuana danced a fandango while mescaline and acid did a mental tango, and “Fantasia” was the daring darling of the altered states of america. Snow White turned into a pile of cocaine and Sleeping Beauty took a hot shot of heroin, while Mickey joined the SDS on LSD and took to the streets of Chicago in ‘68 with a gang of dancing brooms that eventually met their demise on the campus of Kent State a few years later. The Seven Dwarves became the Chicago Seven Dwarves and went on trial for Fucking up Beethoven...and Donald Duck was banned in Sweden for not wearing pants. The Revolution was on...It was time for Mickey to turn on and drop out...and remember...you don’t need a weatherman or a mouseketeer to know which way the wind blows!