Deems Taylor

[longer introduction to "The Rite of Spring"]

Deems Taylor: When Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet, "The Rite of Spring"...

[a chime sound is heard; somebody has knocked over a set of tubular bells]

Deems Taylor: I repeat, when Igor Stravinsky wrote his ballet, "The Rite of Spring" his purpose was, in his own words, "to express primitive life." And so Walt Disney and his fellow artists have taken him at his word. Instead of presenting the ballet in its original form as a simple series of tribal dances, they have visualized it as a pageant as the story of the growth of life on Earth. And that story, as you're going to see it, isn't the product of anybody's imagination. It's a coldly accurate reproduction of what science thinks went on during the first few billion years of this planet's existence. Science, not art, wrote the scenario of this picture. According to science, the first living things here were single-celled organisms, tiny little white or green blobs of nothing in particular that lived under the water. And then, as the ages passed, the oceans began to swarm with all kinds of marine creatures. Finally, after about a billion years, certain fish, more ambitious than the rest, crawled up on land and became the first amphibians. And then several hundred million years ago, nature went off on another task and produced the dinosaurs. Now, the name "dinosaur" comes from two Greek words meaning "terrible lizard", and they were certainly that. They came in all shapes and sizes, from little crawling horrors about the size of a chicken to hundred-ton nightmares. They were not very bright. Even the biggest of them had only the brain of a pigeon. They lived in the air and the water as well as on land. As a rule, they were vegetarians, rather amiable and easy to get along with. However, there were bullies and gangsters among them. The worst of the lot, a brute named Tyrannosaurus Rex was probably the meanest killer that ever roamed the earth. The dinosaurs were lords of creation for about 200 million years. And then... well, we don't exactly know what happened. Some scientists think that great droughts and earthquakes turned the whole world into a gigantic dustbowl. In any case, the dinosaurs were wiped out. That is where our story ends. Where it begins is at a time infinitely far back when there was no life at all on earth, nothing but clouds of steam, boiling seas and exploding volcanoes. So now imagine yourselves out in space billions and billions of years ago looking down on this lonely, tormented little planet spinning through an empty sea of nothingness.