364 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
collection of animals down a river. At a time when the industry was changing from
silent fi lm to sound, the animation of Steamboat Willie was made to a metronome’s
beat, and rhythmic energ y pulses through the assortment of whistles, cowbells,
and tin pans featured in the soundtrack. The characters fi nd musical instruments
in unlikely places: Minnie Mouse cranks a billy goat’s tail as if it were a street organ
to make the animal sing, while Mickey plays on a cow’s teeth as though on a xylo-
phone. Within a decade, Disney began to make feature-leng th animated fi lms, still
relying on music to carry the action, as in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
Among movie musicals based on fantasy, perhaps the era’s greatest achieve-
ment was MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), which dramatized the children’s tale by
L. Frank Baum and featured a score by Harold Arlen and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg. The
fi lm, made for more than $2.5 million at a time when a loaf of bread and a gallon
of gasoline cost six cents each, relied heavily on special effects. In the familiar
story, twelve-year-old Dorothy is lifted up by a cyclone from the plains of Kansas
and whirled into the magical land of Oz. There she meets several strange com-
panions who join her in a visit to the Wizard, who helps her return home. The
Kansas sequences are fi lmed in sepia-toned black and white, but Dorothy’s
adventures in Oz, where she encounters a yellow brick road and the Emerald
City, appear in color.
“Over the Rainbow,” the fi lm’s most famous song, has a clear function in
the story: it shows the strength of Dorothy’s imagination as she pictures a place
more interesting to live than the Kansas fl atland. Convinced that the fi lm
needed a melody here with breadth and sweep, Arlen fi lled the bill with a ballad
based on bold upward leaps. Sung by the sixteen-year-old Judy Garland play-
ing a preadolescent, the song could not revel in the kind of romantic love that
dominated the day’s popular music. But with Harburg’s words sketching a vivid
fantasy supported by Arlen’s expansive music, the number takes on a grandeur
of its own.
By the late 1930s the Holly wood musical had settled on a
more or less standard framework: a modern-day romantic
comedy that featured four or fi ve songs. The high demand
for fi lm musicals drew to southern California, at one time or
another, virtually all of Broadway’s songwriting talent, lured
by the generous salaries, pleasant weather, and relatively
light workload (a fi lm score required about one-quarter the
songs needed for a Broadway musical). In a typical movie
musical at least one song involved some dancing, and in
one genre, the dance musical, nearly all the songs included
dance. The key fi gure in the dance musical was Fred Astaire,
a veteran of vaudeville and Broadway whose assets included
accomplished musicianship, a talent for light comedy, and
perfection as a dancer, though not the handsomeness of a
romantic screen idol.
In 1933 Astaire signed a contract with RKO Radio Pic-
tures, and before long he was paired with actress-dancer
Ginger Rogers in a collaboration now recognized as a mira-
cle of Holly wood’s studio era. By 1939 Astaire and Rogers had
appeared in nine fi lms together and established the dance
musical as a genre. Their fi lms stand out not for the quantityK Sixteen-year-old Judy
Garland’s sophisticated
vocal delivery helped
make Harold Arlen and
Yip Harburg’s “Over the
Rainbow” a highlight of The
Wizard of Oz (1939).172028_15_361-385_r3_ko.indd 364 23/01/13 8:36 PM