‘After the film became the highest-grossing animation of all time Disney searched high and low for further ways to exploit the film’s global success’

No studio is more adept at selling consumers multiple copies of the same film than Disney, and no single innovation has inflated the company’s profits more cunningly than the sing-along release. First launched in 1986 to celebrate the theatrical revival of the studio’s famously iffy Reconstruction-era musical Song Of The South, the Sing-Along Songs range of VHS tapes gave infant audiences everywhere permission to bawl away with such racially dubious characters as King Louie and Dumbo’s Jim Crow.

Sing-Along Songs became one of Disney’s most enduring money-making ventures, straddling the VHS, laserdisc and DVD eras, and eventually expanding to include albums, audiobooks and film-specific sing-along videos for such 90s hits as Hercules and Aladdin. The new millennium saw a decline in interest, largely because the studio’s musical output at the time consisted of self-conscious flops such as Home On The Range and The Country Bears.

A decade-long hiatus ensued, broken like so many box-office records by last year’s wintry smash-hit musical Frozen. After the film became the highest-grossing animation of all time, and its soundtrack sold 3.5m copies in the US alone, Disney searched high and low for further ways to exploit the film’s global success, and arrived at a familiar solution. A sing-along edition is out this week, its format updated for the modern era with a dynamic 3D snowflake replacing the utilitarian bouncing ball of yesteryear. This ain’t your daddy’s sing-along princess musical.

Most kids won’t need any lyrical cues for Let It Go, but may appreciate the help on such lesser hits as Reindeer(s) Are Better Than People and the gruff choral opening number Frozen Heart. The non-musical scenes, meanwhile, go entirely unembellished, allowing audiences to pay full attention to the film’s vaguely contradictory central message and entirely inexplicable trade-embargo subplot.

Walt Disney Studios, DVD





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