A bitter strike paralyzed Disney's studio in 1941. Then came Pearl Harbor, and evervbodv went to work for the armed forces.
“The release of Fantasia, in November of 1940, put Dad nearly fifteen years ahead of the rest of the movie makers. It takes courage to be that far ahead of the rest of the field in any endeavor. You can be so far ahead that you can lose your public.
It took a special amount of courage in the case of Fantasia because the supply lines through which money funneled into the Disney bank account from foreign markets had been plugged as a result of Hitler’s rampaging around Europe.
Willy-nilly, Dad and Uncle Roy brought out Fantasia, confident that it was such an advance in motion-picture presentation that it would pay off. Dad wanted to release Fantasia in much the same way that Cinerama is being shown today. He had made it for a wide screen with dimensional sound. He even had a projector which ran double-width frames, but the money shortage kept him from building enough cameras or wide-screen projectors to show Fantasia in that way. Otherwise, he'd have had the kind of big-screen presentation and stereophonic sound which has been hailed as the salvation of the motion-picture industry. As it was, the film had to be shown on a standard screen, but it did have his new sound effect.
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