A reader tipped me off to the fascinating interview Terry Gross did on NPR today with Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, the husband-wife composers who wrote the music and lyrics for Frozen. This exchange, from late in the interview, is revealing:

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: Well, I will say out of many experiences I’ve had Disney – the people who we have been lucky enough to work with at Disney – there’s a lot of theatrical tradition behind all of the creative choices up at the higher levels of Disney.

LOPEZ: Yeah. Disney is not this sanitized place that you might imagine it to be. I mean, they hired Ashman and Menken after they did “Little Shop of Horrors” which was sort of the “Avenue Q” of its day. It was very campy and very kind of…

GROSS: Mm-hmm.

LOPEZ: …a little off color and racy. And I don’t think Disney has any problem with employing people who have, you know, done off color stuff in the past.

GROSS: Right.

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: It’s funny. One of the only places you have to draw the line at Disney is with religious things, the word God.

LOPEZ: Yeah. You just can’t…

GROSS: You can’t say the word God?

LOPEZ: There was even a – well, you can say it in Disney but you can’t put it in the movie.

ANDERSON-LOPEZ: You can’t put it in the movies.

That explains a lot.