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Popular culture certainly is the realm in which hierarchies are flattened by the rebellious works of entertainment mavericks, though it does not seem right that all such rebellions should be taken in bad taste when they have something more pure and complex at heart.\u00a0 One such maverick is Walt Disney, and his Fantasia<\/em> was one such rebellion.\u00a0 Its reception was as varied as its composition\u00a0\u2014\u00a0most film critics were awed, and most music critics were appalled.\u00a0 It effectively moved the chains on taste, and left as its legacy the visual concert, eventually to be the music video.\u00a0 Did Disney know that he was introducing a totally new wave to popular culture?\u00a0 Was he knowingly usurping the kings and masters who had established clear lines between the high and the low, the tasteful and the distasteful?<\/p>\n When I was three years old, in 2001, I watched Fantasia<\/em> every day.\u00a0 I consumed a lot of other media too, but I distinctly remember \u2018othering\u2019 Fantasia<\/em>, being overwhelmed by the grandness of its music while each scene bursted with color.\u00a0 It was my first introduction to classical music (I probably wouldn\u2019t have been listening to any Beethoven otherwise).\u00a0 Though I wasn\u2019t yet aware of any cultural hierarchy, I consciously set it apart from Dragon Tales<\/em> and Barney<\/em>.<\/p>\n It is the nature of popular culture that using terms like \u2018bad taste\u2019 is problematic, because what may have been labeled such in 1940 could now be seen as the opposite.\u00a0 Fantasia<\/em> gave a huge new momentum to classical music, which carried it all the way to the 21st century, to a new and youthful unexpecting audience.\u00a0 In that time, cultural tastes have changed, and there are fewer gatekeepers now than ever.\u00a0 This is in no small part due to the impact of Fantasia<\/em>, a cultural monolith which Henry Allen of the Washington Post called \u201cWalt Disney’s glorious monument to mid-century \u201cmiddlebrowism\u201d (Allen, 1990).\u00a0 The idea of there being a \u201cmiddlebrow\u201d reinforces the hierarchy, though it creates a grey area into which innovative popular culture can rise and expand, no longer being relegated to the pit.\u00a0 With Fantasia<\/em>, Disney created this space for future generations of artists.<\/p>\n The project of blending low culture, in the form of cartoon animation, and high culture, in the form of the most sophisticated classical scores, was consciously devised in order to shake things up.\u00a0 According to historian John Culhane, Walt Disney “had vowed, when he was snubbed as a mere ‘cartoon-maker’ 17 years before, that his animated productions would someday be treated to the same kind of gala premieres accorded live-action films” (Culhane, 1983).\u00a0 Disney was obsessed from the outset with changing the culture, and breaking down the mechanisms which might saddle his work with such descriptors as lowbrow, bad taste, or \u201cmere.\u201d\u00a0 To get to the gala premier, he had to draw on high culture in a manner of appropriation (he admitted to not caring for classical music himself) and as a true champion of popular culture, its lowly forms, and its spirit of innovation (what some might call \u201cbad taste\u201d) he became a rebel.<\/p>\n