The 100 Greatest Disneyverse Songs of All Time

In October 1923, brothers Walt and Roy O. Disney founded the Disney Brothers Studio, to have a place to produce the hybrid animated/live action shorts that Walt was then creating. In the century since, Disney has become as inextricable a part of American culture as baseball, barbecue and the blues — a cultural constant that has continued to define not only the shared experience of each generation, but a good deal of the connective tissue between people of all ages. And music has been at the center of all of it all.

From the studio’s breakthrough Steamboat Willie short (set to “Steamboat Bill” and “Turkey in the Straw”) in 1928, right up to this week’s release of the live-action The Little Mermaid remake (featuring new songs from legendary Disney scribes Alan Menken and Lin-Manuel Miranda, and with pop star Halle Bailey in the lead role), music has been the fuel for the entire Disney machine. It’s played an essential role in not only dozens of the studio’s most classic movies — animated, live-action or both — but also in the great majority of their signature Disney Channel TV shows, and even in most of the theme park rides that keep fans returning year after year.

So with that in mind, we’re celebrating the Disney Century with our list of the 100 greatest songs from the Wide World of Disney — any composition, from pop numbers to showtunes to instrumental scores, that was specifically written for a Disney property. That means no pre-existing songs that have come to be commonly associated with Disney works (sorry, Sorcerer’s Apprentice fans) and no songs written for properties later acquired by Disney (no early Simpsons or Star Wars) — but it still means there’s hundreds of unforgettable musical moments to choose from, spanning decades and genres and formats and carrying a lifetime’s worth of memories between them.

Thus, we present our 100 favorite songs from the entire Disneyverse: in other words, the happiest list on earth.