Word: high-brow
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Mickey Began It. The idea for Fantasia had been germinating in Disney's mild-looking head for several years. Even before he did Snow White he had a vague notion of some day doing a serious opera in animovie style. As early as 1929 he raided the high-brow symphonic repertory to make Saint-Saëns' bone-rattling Danse Macabre into a Silly Symphony. But the idea did not really sprout until early in 1938, when Leopold Stokowski, on a visit to Hollywood, begged Disney to let him conduct the music for The Sorcerer's Apprentice...
Keeping his 1,200 artists, animators, sound engineers and helpers mum, Walt Disney started work, soon got the machinery of his new $3,000,000 Burbank, Calif, studio rolling on Fantasia. Deciding to go the whole artistic hog, they picked the highest of high-brow classical music. To do right by this music, the old mouse opera comedy was not enough. The Disney studio went high-brow wholesale, and Disney technicians racked their brains for stuff that would startle and awe rather than tickle the audience...
...forthwith fired from the paper. Next he tried his hand at the Purple Parrot, Northwestern's comic sheet, turned out a parody American Mercury, with a story about prostitutes, that resulted in the Parrot's suppression. As his farewell to collegiate belles-lettres, Walliser took over the high-brow Scrawl, had that suppressed when he tried to build up circulation with an article attacking marriage...
With prices from a shilling (20?) to three-and-six (70?), the Philharmonic tour brought out working folk in swarms. In Manchester, the inevitable man-in-the-pub exclaimed: "It's made me find out I'm a bloody high-brow...
Pioneers in the use of high-brow art in advertising (they had already got the Dole pineapple people to hire top-flight U. S. artists to paint pineapples in Hawaii -TIME, Feb. 12), N. W. Ayer suggested that the De Beers syndicate buy paintings by famous modernists, reproduce them in color alongside their diamond ads. The De Beers syndicate obediently bought about $20,000 worth of modern art by such headliners as Picasso, Matisse, Dali, Derain, Dufy, Marie Laurencin, got ready to reproduce them, by expensive color processes, as diamond...