The Sorcerer's Apprentice called"), a garbled version of one of Goethe's lines ('), which is often used to describe a situation where somebody summons help or uses allies that he cannot control, especially in politics. The animated 1940 Disney film "Fantasia" popularized the story from Goethe's poem, and the Paul Dukas symphonic poem based on it, in one of eight animated shorts based on classical music. In the piece, which retains the title "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", Mickey Mouse plays the apprentice, and the story follows Goethe's original closely, except that the sorcerer ("Yen Sid", or "Disney" backwards) is stern and angry with his
The Sorcerer's Apprentice cartoon scenery machine and getting himself into a big heap of trouble. Like the "Fantasia" segment, there is no dialogue, save for a line by Buster in the end. There is a live action film, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" (2010), featuring a scene based on Goethe's poem (and the "Fantasia" version), produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and starring Nicolas Cage. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels alluded to Goethe's poem in "The Communist Manifesto", comparing modern bourgeois society to "the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells." The