10 Fascinating Facts You Never Knew About Fantasia
4. "Fantasound" Was Created For The Feature
With the completion of the film, Fantasia initially wasn’t released in the traditional way, and was instead showcased in the style of a touring musical. It was taken to one theatre at a time, had its picture and sound systems installed, played the film for the audience, then onto the next location. The method was necessary to accommodate the bespoke audio system for the film.
Fantasound was created to bring as close to an authentic sounding orchestra to cinema screens as possible. As such, the score for the film was recorded using 33 microphones spread throughout the Academy of Music concert hall and took 7 weeks to complete.
The system itself went through 10 different phases, from just using 3 speakers to a 140 square foot system requiring 400 vacuum tubes and around 90 speakers for each showing. Not one single system was used for the roadshow, rather a different one for each of the 13 cities Fantasia was showcased.
Fantasound was not used for any other project due to the complexity of the model and the amount of space needed to make the film function properly. The films soundtrack was eventually changed to a mono soundtrack for wide home video releases.