At the start of 1942, more than a year since Walt Disney’s Fantasia had its New York premiere, the animated epic opened in theaters across the country. The delay was not for want of critical acclaim. In 1940, the New York Times’ reviewer Bosley Crowther gushed: “At the risk of being utterly obvious and just a bit stodgy, perhaps, let us begin by noting that motion-picture history was made at the Broadway Theatre last night with the spectacular world première of Walt Disney's long-awaited Fantasia.” While the film was a labor of love for Walt Disney, it was not a lifelong dream finally realized. It fact, its origin stemmed from a financial, not an artistic, motive. After running over the cost of Mickey Mouse short, “The Sorcerer's Apprentice,” Disney decided to make a concert film, a series of short animated sequence set to classical music to defray the expenditure. The famed conductor Leopold Stokowski agreed to direct the music. Animators were given the freedom to let their imaginations run wild. In an unprecedented directive, Disney authorized his artists to choose whatever colors they wanted. The technical crew arranged to have the music recorded by a multi-channel system dubbed "Fantasound," a sound design that, however, couldn’t be played in most theaters, which were only set up to play a mono mix. Disney planned for the film to be an event––there would be special theaters, audiences would be required to dress, seats would be assigned. But such selective screenings could barely make up the film’s enormous cost. And worse, outside of urban areas, the film proved too highbrow for many audiences. By the end of 1941, Disney gave the film to RKO, which cut the 125-minute feature down to 81 minutes, and remixed it for mono sound, releasing it wide in 1942. The great experiment in animation and sound flopped. And while Disney re-released it every few years, theaters, all too happy to play any Disney film, often refused it. It was not until 1969, when the film’s wild animation touched a nerve with a generation whose imagination had been pried open by LSD, that Fantasia made a profit.