Behind the music: Rowan professor co-edits new “Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical” – Rowan Today

For nearly 100 years, The Walt Disney Company has defined what it means to make a movie musical.
And they’ve made a lot of them.
From Snow White to The Jungle Book to Mary Poppins and The Little Mermaid, Disney became synonymous with popular musicals whose stories and songs were woven into the fabric of popular culture.
Now, an Oxford University Press book co-edited by Rowan University film professor Colleen Montgomery takes a close, unvarnished look at exactly what that means, and it’s not all song and dance.
In “The Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical,” Montgomery, co-editor Dominic Broomfield-McHugh, and a team of scholars look at the good, the bad and the wicked that have come to define a century of Disney moviemaking.
Organized into five parts, the book’s 27 chapters examine not just the history of the company and its popular films but important side stories and themes including stereotypes and racial depictions of African Americans and Asians.
In addition to editing the collection, Montgomery wrote a chapter for Part III: Sound, Music, and Technology, titled Lady and the Transcription: Peggy Lee’s Legal Battle with Disney.
Lee, who died in 2002 at 81, was a lifelong singer, songwriter and actress who sang, starred in and wrote many of the hit songs for Disney’s 1955 blockbuster Lady and the Tramp. When the company released the film on VHS in the 1980s, Lee sought compensation. Disney refused, Lee sued and eventually won nearly $4 million in court.
“She wrote all of the most popular songs in the film with Sonny Burke, and the VHS was wildly successful,” Montgomery said. “It became the best-selling VHS tape of that year.”
Montgomery, whose deep research included tracking down a transcript of the courtroom battle, said the company actually aided Lee in her fight against them.
“She won, which was very unusual, because Disney has so many resources and is so litigious,” Montgomery said. “But Disney had set a precedent by suing someone else. They inadvertently set a precedent that was then used against them in the Peggy Lee lawsuit.”
A deeply researched, 636-page tome, the “The Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical” covers virtually every aspect of the popular, public facing company, including movies, television, video games, Broadway shows and theme parks.
But, Montgomery said, Disney did not make doing that research easy.
For the chapter on Lee, it was only because the LA Law Library had a transcript of the lawsuit that Montgomery was able to access it, and in it was an original copy of the singer’s contract, she said.
“I gave a talk about the research recently, and one of the lessons was that sometimes you have to find other pathways,” she said. “Because Peggy Lee was a star, I could look at both the transcript of the lawsuit and archives of the coverage of it.”
Montgomery became involved with the Disney project after writing a chapter for “The Oxford Handbook of the Hollywood Musical,” which her co-editor, Broomfield-McHugh, had edited.
She said the Disney musical handbook is especially relevant now because of the company’s practice of remaking musicals, such as its 2025 version of Snow White, which was released theatrically March 21 and reportedly took in more than $200 million at the box office.
She’s presently working on another edition for the publisher, “The Oxford Handbook of Media and Vocality.”
As for the Disney book, Montgomery said, though it was written and edited by scholars she expects fans of the company’s films, shows, parks and merchandise to also be interested in it.
“Some chapters could definitely be for fans,” she said. “We also wanted to keep them accessible for classes, to keep them highly readable.”
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