Word: beethoven
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Hitler's impact went beyond his willingness to kill without mercy. He did something civilization had not seen before. Genghis Khan operated in the context of the nomadic steppe, where pillaging villages was the norm. Hitler came out of the most civilized society on Earth, the land of Beethoven and Goethe and Schiller. He set out to kill people not for what they did but for who they were. Even Mao and Stalin were killing their "class enemies." Hitler killed a million Jewish babies just for existing...
...brought cartoons into the age of psychiatric help, 5[cents] at a time. Reflective, neurotic and deadpan, they were to their predecessors what Bob Newhart was to Moe Howard. They were children of postwar prosperity, a time when Americans could afford to have anxieties instead of fears. They played Beethoven; they parked in front of the TV; they cradled security blankets. (They played baseball too, but they weren't exactly good at it.) Our Gang could have taken them without breaking a sweat...
...jazz, world music, the Beatles, Andrew Lloyd Webber; finally they stuck with the Old Masters. Among the candidates (some of which had been proposed for Walt's "organic" Fantasia): Flight of the Bumblebee; the Mozart piece that incorporates Twinkle Twinkle Little Star; Brahms' First Symphony; Dvorak's Ninth; even Beethoven's Ninth. Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini had a nifty concept (a nightmare and a dream struggling for a sleeping child's soul), but it fell through, as did the revival of a segment prepared in the '40s by Salvador Dali; a few clips from...
Musically speaking, Fantasia 2000 is a dumbed-down dud. The performances, mostly by James Levine and the Chicago Symphony, are competent but characterless. The selections are all abridged in one way or another, and some are mangled virtually beyond recognition. The first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which normally takes between seven and eight minutes, here is over in less than three. The sole exception is the uncut version of The Sorcerer's Apprentice extracted from the original Fantasia, in which Leopold Stokowski hypnotized an anonymous band of Hollywood studio musicians into sounding just like the Philadelphia Orchestra...
...well be that the corporate conservatism of Fantasia 2000 accurately reflects postmodern American taste, and certainly some of the kids who see it will be hearing classical music for the first time. But it's hard to imagine their falling in love with Beethoven as a result...