Comments on: Epic Win: Disney’s Fantasia

By: Alistaro

Alistaro — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 01:36:13 +0000

Provided me with the imagination that I enjoy today.

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:36:55 +0000

Fantasia introduced my kids to classical music and they love it.

By: Town Crier

Town Crier — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:23:08 +0000

“Fantasia 2000″ was NEVER shown in 3-D! It was shown in standard IMAX, which isn’t 3-D. (There is an IMAX 3-D process, but that wasn’t used for “Fantasia 2000″.)

By: me

me — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:49:03 +0000

i always liked the centaurs, the flying horses, and the hippos, etc… still dunno the names of the symphonies, i was too young when i first watched it…. crap. now i wanna see the centaur bit again!! dangit!

By: modem

modem — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:57:24 +0000

Wow video is really very nice, i always like Disney and mostly i seen all the programmes of Disney. I never seen the Disney’s Fantasia but this all the video’s are such an awesome..

By: LaurenJ

LaurenJ — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 18:07:23 +0000

YES! Although the fish was such a little whore.

By: LaurenJ

LaurenJ — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 19:44:51 +0000

A friend and I phoned up the radio station Classic FM during Mozart hour and requested the theme from Disney. They didn’t play it.

By: The_Machinator

The_Machinator — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:16:49 +0000

Chernabog (sp?) was soo awesome, he was even a boss in Kingdom Hearts.

By: IshiiSachiko

IshiiSachiko — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 04:08:03 +0000

I’ve been watching Fantasia since I was 18 months old! It is by far my favorite movie of all time. I was never scared of anything And by the way, Chernabog, the big guy in Night on Bald Mountain, (also a god in Slovak myth (wow nerd)) boss fight in Kingdom Hearts was epic nostalgia bomb for me.

By: Meg-Meg

Meg-Meg — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:25:38 +0000

Great, it’s 22:25 and I want to watch Fantasia… to stay up or not to stay up, that is the question…

By: Dover

Dover — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 07:58:58 +0000

anyone notice that toccata and fugue was the song from the crossfire commercial posted just previously to this?

By: pianoman91894

pianoman91894 — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 03:27:05 +0000

My favorite would have to be the Rhapsody in Blue

By: exjentric

exjentric — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:58:07 +0000

When I was in kindergarten, a friend and I would watch the centaurs bit, pick out which pretty lady centaur we wanted to be, then stuck the tips of blankets in the backs of our pants (the blankets were our long, luxurious tails), then pranced around until Bald Mountain came on; then we hid under a table and acted frightened.

By: DT0913

DT0913 — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:06:06 +0000

This is the rarest movie ever (I think?) We finally found one we had to order it from Germany!

By: kirby

kirby — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:24:08 +0000

nutcracker suite ftw!!

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:44:00 +0000

I HATED Night on Bald Mountain. I always fast-forwarded through that bit (with my fancy VHS tapes… scene selection? What?). My favorite parts were always the fish and the bit with Bacchus and his wine-stomping issues. Poor guy. Just wants to party and keeps getting tripped up by Jupiter, that jerk…

By: Deb

Deb — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:02:45 +0000

And I love the Nutcracker segment–so cute and graceful–LOTS of favorites in this movie.

By: Deb

Deb — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:00:47 +0000

I like the pasorale’s presentation, but I especially enjoyed the great humor in Dance of the Hours with the crocodiles, ostriches, and hippos! LOL! priceless! (And yes, night on bald mountain still creeps me out…)

By: Spoo

Spoo — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:27:42 +0000

I would literally fast-forward to the Rite of Spring part (I loved the dinosaurs), then I loved everything after that but Night on Bald mountain was my absolute favorite. I would get my huge blankie and wrap it around me so I could open it dramatically like the “giant bat” as I interpreted him to be. I was very into bats. Then I’d rewind and watch the Night on Bald Mountain a hundred times and never sit through the Ave Maria
We are pretty baptist, and though he never found anything offensive about the demonic imagery, my dad always found it kind of ironic that far more quality and energy went into the “profane” sequence than the the boring imagery and mundane performance of Ave Maria.

By: Hito

Hito — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:07:40 +0000

Aah, I love this movie. I never watched it much as a kid, but I remember liking the Nutcracker bit with the faeries and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
Night on Bald Mountain is one of my favourite pieces, but only after I played Kingdom Hearts (whoa, the boss music is orgasmic! Who’s the scary dude?) did I watch the movie again, and realize, “oh, yeah, it… came from there…”.
I just liked it independently and then re-discovered it (o_O )

By: lolMiel

lolMiel — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:51:30 +0000

From what I’ve heard, “Little Black Sambo” was supposed to be Indian (from India).

By: InfinitySquared

InfinitySquared — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:32:42 +0000

I’ve had the good fortune to have played all these pieces with my symphony. (Okay, so most of them were during a Fantasia tribute concert, but it still counts!)

To this day, Night on Bald Mountain is one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever performed. The only way to top seeing Czernobog rising out of the mountaintop… is to be sitting right in front of the low brass, in the center of all the action. Ooh, the back of my neck is prickling just remembering it, hee!

By: Nightlyeclipse

Nightlyeclipse — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 12:22:45 +0000

Mine always was and still is

1) Beethoven’s Pastorale (I loved the centaurs scene)
2) The Nutcracker Suite
3) The little sound thing that should what the sounds “looked” like. (I’m sick and my brain isn’t functioning well enough to remember the name of it at the moment.)

My brothers and I would watch this movie about once a week growing up. Such a wonderful classic. We’d fast forward through all the talking though because we were kids with short attention spans. I will admit that it took me years to be able to watch Night on Bald Mountain without nightmares. I never found the fascination with the Sorcerer’s Apprentice though.

By: ceallaig

ceallaig — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:47:06 +0000

Two faves — the Nutcracker, the section with the little dancing mushroom Hop Lo (yes, he has a name); and Night on Bald Mountain, all of it. The only section I wasn’t nuts about was Dance of the Hours (the hippos and gators doing ballet), that was just silly. I grew up with classical music, so even as a child I thought this was great. And I owned Fantasia 2000 the day it came out on DVD — as others have said the Rhapsody in Blue segment is awesome. Something I am sorry never got included, and I’ve never known why, was the finished segment done to Clair de Lune (you can see it in the extras) — stunning, looks complete, but it didn’t make the cut on either of them.

By: Fidra

Fidra — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 07:12:37 +0000

The Beethoven’s Pastorale is by far my favourite, and I watch that bit over and over and over and over. And of the second Fantasia…yeh, the Rhapsody in Blue is incredible!

By: Mary

Mary — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 04:34:53 +0000

I remember my favorites as a kid was the Beethoven symphony, probably because of the flying horses and the Greek mythology (I was always big on Greek myth, even as a kid). I also liked the Nutcracker segments, especially the Chinese dance, and the Dance of the Hours.

I also remember hating the Rite of Spring (I never liked Dinosaurs) and for a long time I never watched Night on Bald Mountain, my parents always stopped the DVD. I still can’t listen to that song, and that part gave me serious nightmares once I watched it. xD

By: bodo

bodo — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 04:13:50 +0000

I confess (and I apologize if it offends anyone) that I remember enjoying eating meals at Sambo’s restaurants when I was a kid. The name was based on the story (as I remember it) where the hero (Sambo) climbed a tree and the tigers ran so fast around it that they turned into butter (it was basically a breakfast/diner place). I was disappointed when they closed the restaurants due to “racist” concepts – it was the tigers that were made to look stupid, in my opinion, and the hero was made to look clever. Now that I think about it though, tigers are more part of the Indian sub-continent, right? So I’m wondering if the story was a British thing. I suppose I could Google it, but I’m feeling lazy right now. I admit that the depiction in the censored bit of Fantasia is very stereotypical (the equivalent of depicting all Asian people as having thick glasses and buck teeth). Plus the depiction as, essentially, a slave/servant.

If anyone’s interested, go see if you can find the original lyrics to “I’ve got a Little List” from the Mikado (something about a banjo player) – now that is offensive, I think.

By: toribug11

toribug11 — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 04:05:04 +0000

Night on Bald Mountain (which i didn’t know was the title until tonight) was always my favorite as a kid. it scared the hell out of me, but i think thats why i liked it so much, heheh. i keep forgetting how beautiful traditional cell-by-cell animation is, and i agree thats its a shame how its being slowly lost. i also would watch the 2000 version, but i always liked the ’40s one better. ‘they’ (the pronoun people) need to hurry up and release this on dvd!

By: BAW

BAW — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:44:59 +0000

I’ve heard it said that “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is an allegory of contemporary humankind and technology.

By: BAW

BAW — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:43:39 +0000

I’m sure that for a lot of kids this was their first intoduction to classical music. For me, not so much; my mother was a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, and the first major purchase my parents made after marriage was a grand piano, which will tell you how important music was to us. For me it wasn’t so much an introduction as a new way of seeing the things mother played on the piano or I heard on the stereo.

By: BAW

BAW — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:40:34 +0000

Disney is sort of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” here. If they leave the black maid centauress in, they are racist; if they cut her out, they’re accused of censorship/bowdlerizaiton/PC’sim.

By: lolMiel

lolMiel — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 03:18:02 +0000

I liked the flamingos (short and sweet) and Firebird and it’s lovely Pagan symbolism…but I agree about the rest. The flying whales part was…trying too hard, to say the least.

By: pantiara

pantiara — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 02:48:04 +0000

My only beef with Fantasia is that they tended to chop up and modify the score a bit to make it fit with the animation. But the animation itself is top notch, the movie is a big reason why I love classical music so much to this day.

By: vi31

vi31 — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 01:27:22 +0000

Sorry for the double post.

Anyway, great OUAW! I show the original and 200 when I’m teaching – I think kids like 2000 a bit better; the first is pretty long. But because of the original, the Pastorale is my FAVORITE symphony of all time (yes, including every other symphony out there). But to be honest, I did a side by side compairson of the original and 2000, and 2000 won by a bit.

By: vi31

vi31 — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:32:51 +0000

That was the Arabian Dance from Tschaikovsky’s Nutcracker.

By: vi31

vi31 — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:31:51 +0000

That’s Tschaikovsky’s Arabian Dance from the Nutcracker.

By: CowKirby

CowKirby — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:03:49 +0000

If I remember correctly, in the Night on Bald Mountain segment, we see topless harpies fly VERY close to the camera.

By: Looli

Looli — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:59:22 +0000

Does anyone remember the fish part?

By: Looli

Looli — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:57:22 +0000

LOL the hippos and crocodiles! And the gargoyle bit scared the pants off me, but I still love it! <3

By: michaelab

michaelab — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:35:35 +0000

watched night on bald mountain on holloween at my aunt, scared the pants off me, in a good way, and intence minor music usually is

i like the goldfish one too, but yeah night on bald mountain ftw

By: zenna

zenna — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:10:58 +0000

First watched this when I was about four… absolutely loved it. Who said it was only for adults?

By: AJ

AJ — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:02:01 +0000

Both of those pieces scared me. The Pastorale was always my favorire. I still have the VHS, I refuse to part with it. Now I’m just waiting for it to come out of the vault and be released on DVD. ^_^

By: Decoy

Decoy — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:23:51 +0000

I am constantly in awe of what the artists were able to do “back in the day.” It’s a true shame that production companies seem to be phasing out hand drawn animation.

By: Decoy

Decoy — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:21:54 +0000

I agree, “Rhapsody in Blue” was by far the stand-out of all the segments.

By: bodo

bodo — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 17:04:49 +0000

Actually, I thought I had memories of the female centaurs being topless (although not explicitly, exactly – that is, kinda like a Barbie doll). Did someone Bowdlerize it, or was it just me? Kinda like in the Pixar short Knick Knack, where they…deflated the two female characters significantly by the time they used it as a trailer (in the original, which I think we’ve got on VHS around here somewhere, they were more…Pamela-esque).

By: bodo

bodo — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:57:21 +0000

What! What about the flamingos?

By: bodo

bodo — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:56:03 +0000

As a horn player, Pastorale is probably my second favorite of the Big 9 (after the Eroica, obviously). Although the excerpt book I have was able to condense the important bits down to about six and a half pages (and of those, two are for the Eroica). That’s for all of the horn parts (not just first). And I thought Night on Bald Mountain was scarier, myself.

By: Shut The Forks Up

Shut The Forks Up — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:32:53 +0000

1) Hippo Ballerinas
2) Dinosaurs!
3) Night On Bald Mountain, even though it gave me vicious nightmares from age 4 until, like, NOW.

By: Patrick

Patrick — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:32:36 +0000

My two favorite scenes from the movie would have to be the Nutcracker Suite with the dancing flowers, mushrooms, snowflakes, etc. and Night on Bald Mountain. The first time I saw Night was when I rented the video Disney’s Halloween Treat. It was just so awesome. What was more awesome about the movie is that no computers were used in the animation.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 16:21:09 +0000

Superb! A classic from my childhood, I rented the video at least once a month when I was younger and would sit with my face almost attached to the television screen.
This was and still is my favorite: