Walt Disney sure had me fooled. I always thought he was an Establishment square, the pious merchant of every virtue that middle America cherishes and young America hates. Who else could make cuteness so commercial? Or extract so many millions from a mouse?
But suddenly the young have embraced this king of squares. His Fantasia was revived recently at a New York theater and, overnight, there they were, lined up outside, the beaded and bearded Aquarians, making such a box-ofiioe hit of the 30-year-old film that it is now being booked into cities and college towns all across the country.
Obviously Fantasia is saying something to the young in 1970 that it wasn’t saying to me-or anyone-in I940. I remember it then for its heavy cultural pretensions: U ncle Walt bringing good music to the masses by wrapping it in easy-to-take animated cartoons. The other day 1 went to the movie again and saw just what the young have instead discovered-that Disney was zonked out of his mind while making the movie and so was his entire studio. Safely hidden behind the chaste pillars of classical music, behind the impeccable tails of Leopold Stokowski, he was a hippie 30 years ahead of his time, producing a psychedelic light-and-sound show that was his only flop because nobody was freaked out enough to dig it. It‘s like finding out that J. Edgar Hoover reads Marcuse under the covers at night. […]
