Various Artists: Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music From Vintage Disney Films album

Liner notes

Some people will tell you that music was a key ingredient of Walt Disney's success. Don't you believe it. Music was the foundation of Walt Disney's success.

That statement may seem extreme, but remember that the cornerstone of Walt's career was Steamboat Willie in 1928. This pioneering "talkie" cartoon introduced Mickey Mouse to movie audiences, but contrary to popular legend, it wasn't Mickey's personality, or his famous falsetto voice, that won people over. (In point of fact, Mickey was rather crude in this cartoon, and he barely spoke at all!) What made Steamboat Willie a hit was the novelty of animated characters moving in rhythm to a musical soundtrack, enhanced by colorful sound effects. Everything depended on that jaunty, colloquial musical score.

Walt followed up that landmark cartoon with an even bolder experiment that owed its very existence to music: Skeleton Dance. By this time Walt was working with an old friend from Kansas City, a former movie-theater organist named Carl W. Stalling (later to gain fame as the composer of all the soundtracks for the wonderful Warner Bros. cartoons). It was Stalling who suggested to Walt the idea of designing a cartoon around musical moods, and the macabre Skeleton Dance was the result. It launched the highly successful "Silly Symphony" series, and planted the seed of an idea (setting pictures to music) that blossomed more fully some years later as Fantasia.

It could be said that music was the backbone of Walt Disney's early cartoons, and indeed, they were jam-packed with music. Mickey and Minnie weren't the only ones who moved to a steady beat, either; even inanimate objects bounced and swayed, in that carefree cartoon world of the 1930's.

In 1933 Disney produced the most successful "Silly Symphony" of them all, and the most successful short cartoon ever made: The Three Little Pigs. Here again, music played a crucial role in its success, and "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" became a nationwide hit. For the first time, Disney saw the kind of impact the right song could have, in expressing a character's personality, or summarizing a key story point. It was a lesson he'd never forget.

As plans took shape for his first feature-length cartoon, Walt knew that good songs would be essential to the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The songs had to be simple enough for children to enjoy, and each one had to serve a specific purpose in the story. This was no easy task. As on all of Disney's subsequent projects, many songs would be written and rejected.

Everything about Snow White was a gamble, but it paid off beyond Walt's wildest expectations. One of the most satisfying results must have been the success of the score: several of the songs became overnight hits ("Heigh Ho," "Whistle While You Work," "Someday My Prince Will Come.") Most of them have gone on to become American standards.

Music continued to play an essential role in Walt Disney's film and television projects, for the rest of his career. And just as his film classics have given us all a shared experience (who can forget the first time we saw Bambi, or Pinocchio?), his songs have become part of our common consciousness. They're not so much a part of the hit parade as they are a piece of pop culture: "Hi Diddle Dee Dee," "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah," and all the rest.

Many fine songwriters contributed the words and music; a team of writers, animators, and gag mem created the stories and characters around whom these songs were written. But they all expressed the creative vision of one man, whose impact on music was at least as great as it waas on the world of film and the history of animation: Walt Disney.

Leonard Maltin