While today there are millions of children (and adults!) who enjoy the music of such Disney films as The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and The Lion King, Walt Disney Studios has been producing movies and cartoons with progressive and ground-breaking soundtracks since the late 1920s. Over seventy years ago Walt Disney had the vision to begin a tradition which is carried on today. He had the inspiration to make the music an integral part of the stories his studios created, instead of just background filler. The story began in 1928, but it was really the 1930s which saw the advent of a new theory behind movie and soundtrack production.
In 1927 the Jazz Singer premiered in movie theaters across the country. It was the first film in which movie-goers could actually hear the voices of the actors. It might not sound like much now, but then it was extraordinary. Most movie moguls saw sound as a passing novelty, but one man saw “talkies” as the future of film. Walt Disney dove head-first into cinema sound both as a means of keeping his audience glued to their seats and as a way to get his fledgling Walt Disney Studios off the ground.
The first song ever to be heard in a cartoon was “Steamboat Bill”, whistled by an industrious mouse creation of Disney’s named Mickey. In the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie Mickey never spoke, he just whistled and played some instruments. The instruments were really such strange things as a goat, a washboard, a cow’s teeth – some of the odd noises you can hear in the background of the song Turkey in the Straw. Steamboat Willie was an instant success and Walt knew it wasn’t just his lovable mouse, but also the music behind the mouse which made it so popular. He brought in an old musician friend named Gene Stalling to help write the music to his next two Mickey Mouse cartoons, Gallopin’ Gaucho and Plane Crazy. These two cartoons were actually finished before Steamboat Willie, but Disney wanted to wait to release them until after they had music.
Stalling and Disney went on to make many cartoons, but they shared differing opinions on the role of music in the cinema. Disney wanted his cartoonists to create cartoons in which the characters’ actions fit the music. Stalling, though, wanted to see the music fit the characters’ actions. It was a subtle difference but an important one. The compromise was the Silly Symphonies series. Disney’s Mickey Mouse cartoons had background music, but the characters in Stalling’s Silly Symphonies were led by music.
Stalling’s disagreements with Disney led him to leave Walt Disney Studios for Warner Brothers Productions in 1932. Instead of Silly Symphonies he began working on Merrie Melodies and instead of Mickey Mouse he wrote music for Bugs Bunny. He went on to create hundreds of cartoons for Warner Brothers for many years. His most famous creation, though, the Silly Symphonies, were the first cartoons ever in color. But more importantly for Walt Disney Studios, they were the first cartoons ever to produce a hit song.
In 1933 during the darkest time in America’s Depression, Disney had a hit in the Silly Symphony which featured The Three Little Pigs and their song, Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf? My seventy-five year old grandmother remembers buying the sheet music to Who’s Afraid… for a penny. The song became a happy anthem for a country much in the need of hope and a silly bad guy. The song was one of the first to have its sales measured in the millions and it topped the Hit Parade, the equivalent of today’s Billboard Charts. The Three Little Pigs won an Academy Award for Best Cartoon Short Subject. Who’s Afraid… didn’t win any award, but that was only because Best Song didn’t become part of the Academy Awards until the following year.
Walt Disney Studios spent four relatively quiet years churning out Silly Symphonies and Mickey Mouse shorts while in the background, Disney was working. He had what everyone else at the time considered a crazy idea. It was called “Disney’s Folly.” No one in the world, the critics said, would sit through an 83-minute cartoon! But just before Christmas in 1937, the film Snow White and the Seven Swarfs was released and became a box-office smash.
Walt’s idea was simple: instead of having characters just bursting into song, which was the way Hollywood musicals went, he wanted the cartoon to be more like a Broadway show. He wanted to make it more believable. When Snow White tells the dwarfs to start humming a little tune, they do. When she says they should whistle while they work, they start to whistle. Audiences loved the film and Disney won an Academy Award – in fact, he won seven little awards, one for each dwarf.
Before the end of 1937 Victor Records released the first ever original motion picture soundtrack. In 1938 Disney’s Snow White had six songs in the Hit Parade, more than any other musical, cartoon or otherwise, ever since. Whistle While You Work, my grandmother said, was the most popular song she can remember from her childhood. She said her father used to actually sing it on his way out the door in the morning! The music of Walt Disney was a welcome change from the hard times of the Depression, she said.
Disney’s next musical success was When You Wish Upon a Star from the 1940 film Pinocchio. Walt Disney Studios has had dozens of hits in the last seventy years, but it was the decade of the thirties which saw the first true masterpieces of Disney music.
Steamboat Willie 1928 — Turkey in the Straw
The Three Little Pigs 1933 — Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — Heigh-Ho, Whistle While You Work, Someday My Prince Will Come
Fisher, David J. The Music of Disney, A Legacy in Song. Buena Vista Productions, Lake Buena Vista, FL 1992