The article from the D23 magazine talks about the popularity of the ballet in America. You were right,
JeanGreyForever, it was around the 1950's that it became so famous.
Quote:
The Nutcracker has been beloved by American audiences for nearly 80 years, thanks in part to Walt Disney.
His Fantasia in 1940 was the first time US audiences had seen actual dancing to accompany Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s well-known Nutcracker Suite — even though the dancers were fairies, fish, flowers and mushrooms rather than prima ballerinas. The full ballet from which the suite was excerpted wasn’t staged in the United States until 1944, in San Francisco, and it didn’t become an annual phenomenon until 10 years later, when a brief debut at New York City Ballet — in February — was so popular that it was brought back to run for a full month at the holidays.
In the decades since, Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece has conquered the world — as the international cast and crew of Disney’s upcoming adaptation, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, can attest.
It also confirms that the Nutcracker will be in the film.
Quote:
The movie takes its inspiration from the same 18th-century stories adapted for the Tchaikovsky ballet, as well as from the ballet itself, but as the title promises, it takes young heroine Clara, her toy soldier companion, and her mysterious godfather, Drosselmeyer, into realms previously only hinted at.
And it seems that, like Belle in the live-action remake, Clara will be an inventor too.
Quote:
“We landed on the idea of Clara as a very science-oriented girl” Powell (one of the screenwriters) says “someone who was maybe a little bit of a tomboy and had that mechanical sensibility that could make her view the world in a different way and give her a stronger connection to Drosselmeyer because they shared this love of inventing things and figuring out how they worked.”
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Forgive me. I know Fantasia very well, but have seen the Roadshow version only twice (maybe thrice) and am not really familiar with Deems Taylor’s added commentary. I remember none of it, actually, though I can clearly recall everything he says in the shortened 1990s cut of the film. 
That’s the one I grew up with.
