OCTOBER 2008 - The history of Disney's soundtracks

Randy Thornton: Walt had always been an innovator in the live action and cartoon world, and sound has always been a very important part of the whole Disney film legacy. "Steamboat Willie" was the first cartoon with synchronized sound, and in "Flowers and Trees" and the Silly Symphonies the animation was motivated by the music.

The Silly Symphonies also included "Three Little Pigs" (with the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf") which was essentially Disney's first big hit as a popular song.

Scott Wolf: I've heard various versions of "Big Bad Wolf" that popular singers recorded but it had different lyrics. Do you know how those came to be?

RT: When a song is written for a film, it's to service the film first and foremost, but at the time there was very little radio, and records were still relatively new but there's a lot of sheet music, so to help popularize the songs sometimes lyrics were added or the songs were made more of a total entity, a beginning, middle and end as opposed to servicing the story. Sometimes these additional lyrics were either lyrics that weren't used in the film or new lyrics written specifically for a publication.

When "Snow White" came along the music was incredibly popular and this was the first time RCA released the songs from the film, directly from the film's recording tracks. This was the first time that had ever been done. Before that, instead of using the film track a song from a film was recorded specifically for record release, but RCA used the original songs from "Snow White" because the songs themselves are so well contained, that they can just take them directly and put them on the record and that's how they sold.

When "Pinocchio" was released RCA did the same thing and this was the first time the term "soundtrack" was actually used. The "Snow White" soundtrack was the first soundtrack, it's actually in the recording industry Hall of Fame as being the first soundtrack, but it was the "Pinocchio" soundtrack a few years later that actually coined the term "soundtrack."

As you know, music has always been a very important part of Disney films and by the time they got to "Bambi," that's 90% of the film and then by "Fantasia" music was the thing. Being an innovator, Walt and his team created Fantasound where sections of the orchestra were recorded separately. The musicians would hear playback of the other sections of the orchestra so they would be in time and in sync, but these separate sections were recorded as separate reels, and the Fantasound section would have music flying over people's heads. It would crossfade from one speaker to another and there was no such thing as panpots or faders or any of the kinds of technology that we have today. In order to achieve that, they retrofitted some old light dimmers from the stages and hooked them up with bicycle chains and used gear ratios. It would go through these cogs and everything and so you'd be turning up one speaker while the other was going down and it would give the illusion that sound was moving across the theater. This is the forerunner to Surround Sound that practically everybody has in their homes now, but this was in 1940.

So music was always a very important part and a motivating factor in the early Disney history. Many people, (great American composer) Jerome Kern I believe said that Walt was one of those natural musicians. He couldn't play a note, couldn't read music but he knew what he liked and he had a sense to it and he understood music. The Sherman brothers said the same thing. He knew exactly what a song needed to do, he knew what music created those emotions.

Music is the vocalization of emotion. You try watching a movie without music, some films work that way if they're structured that way, but to really get that emotion you need that music. That's why silent films had live musicians playing either the organ or the piano while the film was going on.

Also, music is a universal language. Everybody understands music. Even though different territories and different regions have different styles of music and play music on different scales and different keys, but people understand music. It's one of those primal things.

When people leave Disneyland, they're singing songs from the attractions, "Small World," and "Yo Ho," and "Grim Grinning Ghosts." Those are the things people can take away from it. The Sherman brothers talk about it with "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious," that's the talisman that the Banks children bring bank from this incredible adventure they had on their jolly holiday with Mary and Bert. It's something that they can take with them. It's something that's in their mind and it's in the imagination. It's so Disney.

In the late 1950s when Disneyland Records was finally formed, they brought in Salvador "Tutti" Camarata and he was the first A&R Director, that's Artist and Repertoire. This man was a legend. He did charts for the Dorsey brothers, he played with all the big bands, he wrote for Ella Fitzgerald, he helped start London Records. He created Sunset Studio Recorders which was one of the top recording studios in Hollywood at the time, and he was brought in to set up the (Disney) record label.

At the time he came, I believe it was 1956 when he was brought in. It was time for the re-release of "Song of the South," and Tutti was one of the first people to come here and say, your songs and your music is so important, we have to really see soundtracks and put these soundtracks out, not just the songs but maybe some of the underscore as well.

With "Song of the South" being re-released in theaters he asked for a special screening. So some of the animators got together and they went into one of the sweatboxes in the original animation building and they started watching the film, and as the film started rolling Tutti goes, "No, no, no, turn off the picture. I don't want to see the picture," which kind of tweaked some of the animators a little bit, but he was just focusing on the sound and the music and the emotion of it. From there he was able to put together what he wanted to do with the soundtracks.

If you've ever heard the original "Song of the South" original WDL album, it flows. There aren't even real breaks, there aren't even real tracks. The score and the songs, they all sort of blend together, they come together. You can find the individual tracks and go to the songs and stuff but it was really special what he did with that.

Tutti understood the musical journey. As I've said, music is the vocalization of emotion and what the music does is tells the story. If you're familiar with the story already, if you've already seen the movie and you listen to the soundtrack, you relive that movie. That's what I did all those years growing up. That's why I'm interested in and do what I do.

By 1958, "Sleeping Beauty" was in production and he went to Walt and said, "What George Bruns has done with Tchaikovsky's score is really incredible." He really fought to put more and more score on there. Also, some of the songs, particularly songs like "I Wonder" and "Bluebird" aren't really represented as songs per se in the film. Again, the music and the songs are there to service the film and to tell the story. Sometimes the songs are interrupted so it doesn't have an ending. "Mary Poppins" had that a lot. "Sister Suffragette" really doesn't have an ending in the movie. A special ending was recorded specifically for the record so the song can end. "Mary Poppins" was one of the first ones where they recorded specific endings just for the record.

But, what Tutti wanted to do with "Sleeping Beauty," he was familiar with Mary Costa (the voice of Princess Aurora), coming from the music industry himself and Mary Costa being a relatively famous opera singer, he brought her into the studio and re-recorded some of her songs specifically for this version of the studio recording of the soundtrack. The score cues were George Bruns' original recordings from the film, but all of Mary Costa's vocals were completely redone. So within a much more controlled environment it's much more of a song element.

I didn't discover until I restored the "Sleeping Beauty" soundtrack back in '96 that they weren't the same versions. Often it was the older soundtracks when I went in to restore them. A lot of the separated elements don't exist and most of those separated elements were destroyed after Tutti had done the first version of the soundtrack. So for song elements in particular I'd be able to go back to what Tutti had done and use those and clean those up to match the other material because they didn't have the sound effects or dialogue chunks in there or those kinds of things. "Sleeping Beauty" wasn't going to be able to do that.

So doing some more research I pulled some track numbers and things. A lot of our musical elements are stored seriously in salt mines in the midwest because it's naturally climate controlled and constant. So we had these elements pulled, they were just numbers but they all had the "Sleeping Beauty" production number. So I had them pulled and transferred and everything and when I got them over here I come to realize that they were the actual session recordings.

Most of the old stuff, actually the first couple soundtracks I did, the original elements no longer exist and I had to cobble them together from whatever I could find and try to reconstruct the soundtrack. "Sleeping Beauty" was the first time that I actually had all of the recording sessions. It also turned out that "Sleeping Beauty" was the first true stereo soundtrack.

True stereo never really got here until the 1960s and this was 1958. There is a conflicting rumor of it that the studio went to Germany to record the "Sleeping Beauty" soundtrack because of the state of the art equipment, or they went to Germany because there was a musician's strike in the US at the time and I think it's a combination of the both.

I had found all the original recording sessions for "Sleeping Beauty" so I was able to reconstruct it and recreate it. That's when I found that what Tutti had done was completely different. My original thought was to include the secondary versions of the songs as part of the CD when I did it back in '96 but that never happened.

What's interesting about the "Sleeping Beauty" soundtrack that I did in '96 was after the laser disc release some people came up to me and said, "How come your soundtrack sounds better than the movie?" Well, it's a combination of things. One, I don't have to worry about dialogue and effects and stuff, and two, I'm myself. I'm the one that edits it, I'm the one that does all the research to find out where it is. Evelyn Kennedy, the great music editor here at the studio, took extensive notes but we couldn't use the notes for "Sleeping Beauty" at the time, so I actually synced up the movie in my computer and took all these different takes and false starts and alternate versions of tracks and synced them up to make sure that I had the right one. I then reconstructed the soundtrack, putting the vocals back on top and doing all that stuff on my own. It's a very time consuming thing. Sometimes there will four or five takes for one specific music cue and it would take up to ten different music cues to create one track for the film or for the record. It's a really extensive bit of work to try and reconstruct it.

Then the DVD came out and people said the same thing. Tony Baxter and a lot of people were continually pushing to say, "You've got to use the elements that Randy used for the soundtrack CD to restore the film." By the time the Blu-Ray started production they go, "Now is the time!" You're putting it out on this whole new format, it really is going to serve the benefit of having these new elements and rebuilding the stuff. Believe me, it's no small task what they had to do. If there's ever a reason to go back and reconstruct the entire soundtrack again, it's because the Blu-Ray is so incredibly phenomenal. So pushing and pushing and pushing, and finally I get a call from someone in home video going, "I understand that you found the original orchestra sessions," and I go, "Yeah!" "Well, we can't find them. Do you know where they could be?" and I go, "I have all my paperwork. I'll send you copies of my original sound transfer order sheets. I have all the information, the numbers, the locations, I have all that stuff." So I sent that over to them and they pulled the elements and that's how they were able to record the orchestra sessions for this new Blu-Ray disc.

So something that I did twelve years ago is now reaping this new technology, and it sounds absolutely incredible and they even interviewed me and I'm on the Blu-Ray disc in the bonus features.

(Randy's "Sleeping Beauty" soundtrack and his restoration of Tutti Camarata's are both available on iTunes)