Full Description
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.
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction
Dominic Broomfield-McHugh and Colleen Montgomery
Part I. 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, Disney's Fairy-Tale Musicals, and the American Dream
5. Julianne Lindberg, Hall Johnson, The Hall Johnson Choir, and Disney: 1941-1955
Part II. 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's Returns
10. Eve Benhamou, "Come on, Song! I'm Reflecting!" Reinterpretations 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 III. 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 IV. Culture and Identity
17. Kirsten Moana Thompson, The Doors of Perception: Animated Color, Surrealism, and the Latin American Disney Musicals
18. Deborah Paredez and Stacy Wolf, Disney Divas
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 Velásquez Ospina, Imagineering con Sabrosura: Cultural Imagineering and Latinidad in the Twenty-First-Century Disney Musical
Part V. Disney Theatrical
22. Elizabeth L. Wollman, Before The Beast: Entertainment Conglomerates on Broadway in the 1980s
23. Dean Adams, Branding, Demographics, and the Disney Broadway Playbook
24. Amy S. Osatinski, We're All in This Together: Disney Theatrical in Partnership
25. Sammy Grob and Stacy Wolf, An Ethnographic and Critical Approach to Disney Musicals in US K-12 Schools
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
