The Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical

by Broomfield-McHugh, Dominic; Montgomery, Colleen

• ISBN13: 9780197633496
• ISBN10: 0197633498
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780197633519
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2025-04-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to interrogate an enduringly popular and influential cultural phenomenon. Broadening the purview of extant scholarship while also reflecting its methodological multiplicity, this collection takes an expansive approach to the Disney musical.

From animated musical shorts to Disney video games, the Handbook acknowledges that the Walt Disney Company uses the musical across a range of media and explores what that means culturally, commercially, and technologically. The chapters cover case studies from the classical (Alice in Wonderland, Bambi) and more contemporary (Aladdin, Frozen II) eras, acknowledge the importance of theme parks, television, and video games to Disney's success, and explore cultural figures and themes. Contributors also unpack Disney's complicated relationship with race, gender, and sexuality, and the company's recent centennial provides an apt opportunity to reflect on the importance of the musical to the conglomerate's evolution in diverse segments of the media industries. Taken together, the Handbook combines innovative original research, analyses of previously unexamined archival documents, case studies, topical discussions, and critiques of current knowledge and existing scholarship to give voice to new perspectives on this important topic. By including the perspectives of scholars from film, theater, television, musicology, children's literature, and cultural studies, serving as a multidisciplinary resource.

Author Biography

Dominic Broomfield-McHugh is Professor in Musicology at the University of Sheffield. He has published eight books, which reflect his interest in the cultural world of the mid-twentieth-century American musical, including studies of the work of figures such as Cole Porter and Lerner and Loewe, as well as My Fair Lady and The Wizard of Oz. He is an Emmy Award winner for his role on the PBS documentary Meredith Willson: America's Music Man, which came out of his monograph published about Willson, The Big Parade. He has acted as an advisor to productions of My Fair Lady and Paint Your Wagon in America, Australia and the U.K. and has delivered talks at leading venues including the BFI, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress (AMS lecture), and the Sydney Opera House.

Colleen Montgomery is Associate Professor in the Department of Radio, Television, & Film at Rowan University. Her research centers on animation, film sound/music, and vocal performance. She is completing a monograph on vocal performance in Disney and Pixar Animation for the University of California Press. She is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Media and Vocality with Lisa Coulthard and Katherine Spring. Her work has been published in journals including American Music, Animation Studies, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Media Industries, and Music Sound and the Moving Image, as well as in several edited collections.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Contributors

Introduction
Dominic Broomfield-McHugh and Colleen Montgomery

Part 1. The Classical Period
1. J.B. Kaufman, Act One: The Beginnings of the Disney Musical
2. Daniel Batchelder, Music, Nature, and Materiality in Bambi
3. Malcolm Cook, Musical Evocation, Intertextuality, and Accompaniment in Early Disney Cartoons
4. Tracey Mollet, "Whistle While You Work...": Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Depression Musical and the American Dream
5. Julianne Lindberg, Hall Johnson, The Hall Johnson Choir, and Disney: 1941-56

Part 2. Adaptation
6. Michelle Anya Anjirbag, New Agrabah, Same Old Disney Orientalism: Commodity racism and Western effacement of the "Middle East"
7. Rayna Denison, Mutating Stitch: Shifting Approaches to Vocal Performance and Language in the Lilo & Stitch (2002) Franchise
8. Dominic Broomfield-McHugh, From Victoriana to Vaudeville: Alice's Adventures in Musical Adaptation
9. Sean Griffin, Fidelity-Fiduciary-expialidocious: Mary Poppins' Returns
10. Eve Benhamou, "Come on, Song! I'm Reflecting!" einterpretations of the Musical in Disney's Contemporary Sequels and Remakes
11. Kelly Kessler, Haven't I Seen This Somewhere Before: The Little Mermaid Live!, Content Cannibalization, and Disney's Television Legacy

Part 3. Sound, Music, and Technology
12. Colleen Montgomery, Lady and the Transcription: Peggy Lee's Legal Battle with Disney
13. Kate Galloway, Singing Mice and Grunting Reindeer: Musical Representations of the Nonhuman and Relating to Animals in Disney Animated Musicals
14. Lisa Scoggin, The Original Film and Its Broadway Sequel: Epic Mickey and Epic Mickey 2
15. Elizabeth Randell Upton, The Jungle Book Vultures and Generational Listening
16. Christopher Holliday, That's Integration! Digital VFX Technologies in the Disney Renaissance Musicals (1989-1999)

Part 4. Culture and Identity
17. Kirsten Moana Thompson, Animated Color, Surrealism, and the Latin American Disney Musicals
18. Deborah Paredez and Stacy Wolf, The Disney Diva
19. Mihaela Mihailova, Negotiable Diversity: How the Frozen Franchise Disneyfied Sámi Music and Culture
20. Morgan Genevieve Blue, Television Girlhoods, the Musical: Diversity, Imperfection, and Embedded Fan Practices in Disney Channel's Descendants (2015)
21. Jacqueline Avila and Juan Fernando Velasquez Ospina, The Disney Musical and Latinidad in the 21st Century: imagineering con sabrosura

Part 5. Disney Theatricals
22. Elizabeth Wollman, Before the Beast: Entertainment Conglomerates on Broadway in the 1980s
23. Dean Adams, Synergy, Demographics, and the Disney Broadway Playbook
24. Amy Osatinski, We're All in This Together: Disney Theatricals in Partnership
25. Sammy Grob and Stacy Wolf, An Ethnographic and Critical Approach to Disney Musicals in School
26. Alex Bádue, "There May Be Something There That Wasn't There Before": New Songs in Disney's Broadway Musicals
27. Jennifer A. Kokai and Tom Robson, Finding Nemo: The Musical: When Theatre is a Theme Park Attraction

Index