A chance meeting in 1937 between Walt Disney and conductor Leopold Stokowski marked the beginning of an association which resulted in the appearance over three years later of Fantasia, the first film to be released in stereophonic sound. Though stunning for 1940, improvements in the state of the sound recording art over 40 years diminished the marquee value of the stereo mix. Ever mindful of the re-issue potential of Fantasia - it is the only Disney film which is in perennial release, and not just dragged from the vaults every seven years for the next generation of youngsters - executives at Walt Disney Productions decided to bring the soundtrack up to date, and then some, by digitally re-recording Stokowski's score note-for-note.
The Sorcerer's Apprentice Disney's original idea was not to make the feature-length film we see today, but simply to create a short that would fuse animation with Paul Dukas’ scherzo for orchestra, “The Sorcerer's Apprentice.” Stokowski was so eager to handle the music chores that he is said to have offered to work for nothing. He saw this as an opportunity to fully exploit a system that had been used to record his score of the 1937 Universal film One Hundred Men and a Girl. Music for that film was recorded on eight optical recorders - remember, Les Paul's medium, magnetic recording,
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