Word: disneyism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...middle-brow taste, a comfortable culture of refinement. It included Impressionist reproductions, Pearl Buck novels and light-classical music. Middle-brow provided a semblance of breeding and was pervasive enough that the manufacturers of mass entertainment wanted to tap it. So radio networks featured operas and symphonies. And Walt Disney produced Fantasia, a melange of pieces from the concert-hall repertoire set to swirling, splashing cartoon images...
...moviegoers could not only hear, say, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, conducted by Maestro Leopold Stokowski and recorded in stereophonic sound (then a rarity in film exhibition), but also see it brought to life as a titanic dinosaur duel. A man of artistic ambitions--pretensions, if you will--Disney had a missionary fervor to bring fine music, mediated by his own exquisite middle-brow instincts, to the masses. "Gee," he gushed when he saw one segment of Fantasia, "this'll make Beethoven...
...even then, Fantasia was a critical and box-office flop (Disney's first). Audiences who were pleased to watch the animated cavorting of mice and dwarfs didn't care to be elevated. And from the high end, Walt got contempt. Oskar Fischinger, the famed abstract filmmaker who had worked briefly on the project, called it "a conglomeration of tastelessness." Walt's plans for an "organic" Fantasia, one that would be revived every year with new sequences replacing some old ones, were dropped. It was not until a 1968 reissue, when hippies flocked to it as a head movie, that Fantasia...
...call it F2K--has enough verve and humor to appeal to folks for whom even Kenny G is too rarefied; but will the masses swallow what's good for them? Something that might be called art? "I use the word art, and then I bite my tongue," says Roy Disney. "I hope this is judged not as a piece of art but as a piece of entertainment. And I think it will probably make us a few bucks...
Stephen Schwartz, a four-time Oscar winner who has worked on projects including "The Prince of Egypt," "Godspell, and Disney's version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," offered a class on song composition for his audience of 100 in the Adams House Lower Common Room yesterday afternoon...