I have always maintained that the characters, the story and the writing are key to the success of a good film. But don’t underestimate the music. Have you ever tried imagining what Star Wars would have been like without the score of John Williams? Or what The Little Mermaid would have been like without Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s “Part of Your World” or “Under the Sea?” They lend so much to the presentation and to the emotion of the characters that I have a hard time believing those films would have been as popular without them.

Ever the intuitive storyteller, no one understood the importance of music more than Walt Disney. In fact Steamboat Willie, the film that turned Mickey Mouse into a star and put Disney’s name on the map in 1928, told a story that was centered around music. So the importance was apparent from the beginning

The forefather of Disney music was Carl Stalling. Carl Stalling and Walt Disney both grew up in Kansas City and in the earliest days of both men’s careers, Stalling would play the piano to accompany Walt’s animated films at the local theater. Since then Walt and Stalling remained friends and Walt later asked Stalling to be his music director and compose for Mickey Mouse cartoons. Walt’s discussions with Stalling about music even led to the creation of the Silly Symphonies, the first one being the macabre 1929 film The Skeleton Dance, and that series of music-themed animated shorts would last all the way until 1939.

Carl Stalling would eventually leave Disney and join Leon Schlesinger’s animation studio to compose for the Looney Tunes, but thankfully Disney still had talented musicians like Frank Churchill and Leigh Harline on hand. Frank Churchill, an L.A. radio musician who first joined Disney in 1930, was the one responsible for the hit song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” which made its debut in Disney’s Oscar-winning 1933 cartoon Three Little Pigs and became an anthem for Depression-era audiences, many of whom were facing a “big bad wolf” of their own that decade. The simple and cheerful tune was like medicine for many Americans at the time and once again music had elevated the success of one of Disney’s films. Meanwhile Leigh Harline and lyricist Larry Morey had written their own cheerful anthem called “The World Owes Me a Living” which was the song sung by Pinto Colvig’s grasshopper in Disney’s 1934 cartoon The Grasshopper and the Ants and would later be sung regularly by Goofy (also voiced by Colvig). Both Churchill and Harline proved invaluable in their music writing skills and as a result Walt would place both of them in charge of the soundtracks for his feature films that decade.

Walt chose Frank Churchill to write the music and Larry Morey to write the lyrics for the soundtrack of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) while Paul Smith and Leigh Harline would handle that film’s score. That movie’s soundtrack, which included major hits like “Whistle While You Work,” “Heigh Ho” and “Someday My Prince Will Come,” was a big part of its huge box office success, to the point where it revolutionized Disney’s marketing strategy when it came to music. Snow White was the first American film to have a soundtrack album released in conjunction with the movie. Something that is very common today. And Leigh Harline would have similar success composing the soundtrack for Pinocchio (1940) with lyricist Ned Washington. “When You Wish Upon a Star” would win Disney the Oscar for Best Original Song and would go on to become the signature anthem for Disney as a brand, while songs like “Hi Diddle Dee Dee” and “I’ve Got No Strings” were among the studio’s catchiest toe tappers.

Another rising star in Disney’s music department at this time was score composer Oliver Wallace. He started scoring Disney shorts in the late 1930s and continued to do so until the 1950s, but he will be recognized by most Disney fans for his feature film scores. Dumbo (1941) was the first feature film he worked on, and while that movie would earn Frank Churchill and Ned Washington a Best Original Song nomination for “Baby Mine,” Wallace and Churchill would win the Oscar for that movie’s score. Oliver Wallace would go on to compose the scores for The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Old Yeller (1957) and Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959), in addition to various docushorts in the True-Life Adventures and People and Places series. Oliver Wallace’s scores were practically synonymous with Disney’s Silver Age.

The 1950s would be the first time Disney turned to outside composers rather than in-house to write music for their films, with the studio hiring New York songwriters Mack David, Jerry Livingston and Al Hoffman to compose the soundtrack for Cinderella and in the process make classic hits out of “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes,” “The Work Song” and “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo.” That songwriting group would also contribute to the soundtrack for Alice in Wonderland with “The Unbirthday Song” while Oscar-winning composer Sammy Fain contributed significantly to the films Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan writing songs like “I’m Late,” “All in the Golden Afternoon,” “Painting the Roses Red,” “The Second Star to the Right” and “You Can Fly.”

That decade in 1956, Disney also founded their own record label Walt Disney Records, a savvy move suggested to Roy O. Disney by Disney business manager Jimmy Johnson after years of licensing their albums to labels like RCA, Capitol and United Artists.

The Disney music legacy has only grown since then with songs that continue to penetrate the pop culture lexicon. Here are a few of the songwriters and composers who have contributed the most heavily:

George Bruns

The man who wrote the music for “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” along with lyricist Tom Blackburn as well as the music for the theme song “Yo Ho” for Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean attraction with lyricist Xavier Atencio and would go on to compose the scores for Sleeping Beauty (1959), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), The Jungle Book (1967), The Love Bug (1969), The Aristocats (1970) and Robin Hood (1973).

The Sherman Brothers

The songwriting team who made songwriting seem effortless with their simple yet creative melodies and lyrics and contributed to the soundtracks for the films The Parent Trap (1961), The Sword in the Stone (1963), Mary Poppins (1964), The Jungle Book (1967), The Aristocats (1970) and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) as well as Disney theme park attractions like It’s a Small World, Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room and the Carousel of Progress.

Alan Menken

A musician who got his start collaborating with playwright Howard Ashman on the stage before joining Disney and creating some of the best music in film history and along with Ashman helping usher in a new era for Disney music. Menken composed both the soundtracks and the scores for The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Newsies (1992), Aladdin (1992), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Home on the Range (2004), Enchanted (2007), Tangled (2010) and the television series Galavant (2015-16).

Randy Newman

A singer and songwriter who brought his lighthearted and emotional Americana influence to the music in films like Toy Story (1995), James and the Giant Peach (1996), A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Cars (2006), The Princess and the Frog (2009), Toy Story 3 (2010), Monsters University (2013), Cars 3 (2017) and Toy Story 4 (2019).

Hans Zimmer

Oscar-winning German film composer who has worked on the scores for everything under the sun from Batman to Transformers to James Bond to Dune. He also did beautiful work for Disney composing the scores for Cool Runnings (1993), The Lion King (1994), Muppet Treasure Island (1996), Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006), Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) and The Lone Ranger (2013).

Michael Giacchino

Giacchino started out as a television composer working for Bad Robot on the ABC shows Alias (2001-06) and Lost (2004-10) and was later hired by Disney to compose feature film scores where he worked on The Incredibles (2004), Sky High (2005), Ratatouille (2007), Up (2009), Cars 2 (2011), John Carter (2012), Tomorrowland (2015), Inside Out (2015), Zootopia (2016), Doctor Strange (2016), Rogue One (2016), Coco (2017), Incredibles 2 (2018), Lightyear (2022) and Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) in addition to the 2022 Disney+ series Zootopia+.

Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez

The husband-and-wife songwriting team who wrote the music and lyrics for the soundtracks of Winnie the Pooh (2011), Frozen (2013), Coco (2017), Frozen II (2019) and the TV series WandaVision (2021).

Lin-Manuel Miranda

The Broadway songwriter who wrote the Tony Award-winning musicals In the Heights and Hamilton contributed to the soundtracks for Moana (2016), Encanto (2021) and Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid (2023) in addition to reprising the title role in Hamilton on Disney+ in 2020 and playing a cockney lamplighter named Jack opposite Emily Blunt’s Mary Poppins in Rob Marshall’s delightful sequel Mary Poppins Returns (2018). Miranda also brought his vocal skills to that film’s soundtrack with the songs “Lovely London Sky,” “The Royal Doulton Music Hall,” “A Cover Is Not the Book,” “Turning Turtle,” “Trip a Little Light Fantastic” and “Nowhere to Go But Up.”