- “How do you do? My name is Deems Taylor. And It's my very pleasant duty to welcome you here, on behalf of Walt Disney, Leopold Stokowski, and all the other artists and musicians was combined talents went into the creation of this new form of entertainment, Fantasia.”
- ―Deems Taylor[src]
Joseph Deems Taylor was an American composer, music critic, and promoter of classical music. Nat Benchley, the author of The Lost Algonquin Roundtable, referred to him as "the dean of American music."
He appeared in Walt Disney's 1940 film Fantasia as the film's Master of Ceremonies, as well as musical advisor where he was instrumental in selecting the musical pieces that were used in the film, including the then-controversial Sacre du Printemps. In the long-unseen roadshow version of Fantasia, issued on DVD in 2000, and re-released on the 2010 Fantasia/Fantasia 2000 Blu-ray release, all of Taylor's voice-over work was re-recorded by veteran voice artist Corey Burton. The complete film was originally 124 minutes long, due almost entirely to the fact that Taylor's commentaries were more detailed in the roadshow version, but the original audio elements for these longer commentaries had deteriorated to the point that they could no longer be used, so Corey Burton was selected to re-record all of the dialogue for consistency. The general release version of Fantasia, running 115 minutes, is the version most audiences are familiar with. In that version, Taylor's commentaries were severely abridged and only showed shots of the orchestra tuning their instruments. Only in the VHS release of Fantasia, did Deems Taylor's original long on-screen introduction to Toccata and Fugue in D Minor appear with his original audio, while the rest of the intros were the abridged versions.
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- In a Looney Tunes short entitled "A Corny Concerto", which aired about three years after Fantasia, Elmer Fudd plays a parody of Deems Taylor.