1.
There is a real Disney Vault — it’s in Glendale, California. It’s a building that houses everything from the films themselves to the sketches and models used to make them, as well as many other things from the company’s 100-plus year history.
2.
Mickey and Minnie Mouse share the exact same birthday — Nov. 18, 1928 — as they both appeared in Steamboat Willie together:
3.
But, Steamboat Willie is NOT technically the first cartoon Mickey and Minnie appeared in. It was actually Plane Crazy.
4.
Prior to 1988, Minnie Mouse only starred in one cartoon by herself: 1942’s Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire, which was a WWII training video about rationing.
5.
The first sound cartoon in color is 1930’s Fiddlesticks — though it’s not fully color as it used a two-color processing system. The cartoon — which was about the character of Flip the Frog — was created by Ub Iwerks, an early Disney animator who worked with Walt for 10 years. He left the studio in 1930 over various creative differences. Fiddlesticks also features a mouse that looks a lot like Mortimer Mouse, and it’s speculated that it’s because it’s actually an early design of Mickey Mouse, whom Iwerks helped refine the design of.
6.
Legendary Looney Tunes animator and director Bob Campett helped create the very first Mickey Mouse dolls. In 1930, a 16-year-old Bob was asked by his aunt, Charlotte Clark, who was a seamstress, if he could help her come up with some drawings to help make a pattern for a Mickey Mouse doll. Unable to find reference pictures of Mickey, Bob went to a local movie theater in Glendale, California, where he drew sketches while watching Mickey Mouse shorts. Using his sketches, he and Charlotte then created the classic 1930s Mickey Mouse doll.
7.
The classic Mickey Mouse ear hats that you can buy at Disney Parks around the world were originally created for The Mickey Mouse Club in 1955. The design of the hat was inspired by the 1929 animated short Karnival Kid.
8.
It wasn’t until 1986 that Disneyland began being open 365 days a year. Prior to that it was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.
9.
Originally, Sleeping Beauty Castle was meant to be Snow White Castle (which is why its design is based on Germany’s Neuschwanstein Castle). The name was changed to promote the upcoming movie, which, at the time was in production when the park opened.
10.
Sleeping Beauty ended up being a major disappointment at the box office. However, it was able to actually recoup its cost and become a successful movie, but only after it was theatrically re-released three more times (in 1970, 1979, and 1986).
11.
Marc Davis, who did the key animation for Cruella de Vil, based the character partially on actress Tallulah Bankhead.
12.
Cruella pays homage to Tallulah Bankhead being the inspiration for the character in a scene early in the film where Cruella robs the hotel room. In the scene, the movie playing on the TV in the room is Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, which starred Tallulah.
14.
Tim Curry was under consideration to play Judge Doom in Who Framed Roger Rabbit; however, his audition performance was so “terrifying” that producers passed on him.
15.
Robin Williams improvised a lot of his lines as the Genie and gave Disney over 30 hours of voice recordings. While there are enough recordings to make a fourth Aladdin movie, they can’t ’cause Robin has a clause in his will that forbids them from using it (and it has nothing to do with Disney, FTR).
16.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was originally supposed to be a full-length movie, but at the time — in the late ’40s — the studio didn’t have the budget for it.
17.
Disney actually has a history of having its princess films saving it in one way or another — like Cinderella, which actually financially rescued the studio after it became a huge hit in 1950.
18.
Walt Disney almost made a sequel to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs called Snow White Returns. It would have been a featurette instead of a full-length movie, and the plot would have revolved around the Seven Dwarfs getting the cottage ready for a visit from Snow White.
19.
In 2005, a direct-to-video, computer-animated prequel film to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was put into production. The prequel was titled The Seven Dwarfs and was led by director Mike Disa and screenwriter Evan Spiliotopoulos — who both knew the reputation of Disney animated sequel films being unoriginal and not great — and wanted to make something very different. According to Mike, he said it would be “Disney’s answer to The Lord of the Rings.” However, in 2006, when John Lasseter became the Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios, he canceled the movie, along with all other direct-to-video movies still in development.
20.
Walt Disney re-released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1944 because the studio was cash-strapped because of WWII. The re-release was a huge success, and it started the tradition of Disney re-releasing its films into theaters every 7–10 years. This would end in the ’90s after Disney decided to release the wildly successful The Little Mermaid onto VHS. Being the first Disney movie to be released on home video following its theatrical run was considered a huge gamble for the company.
21.
The Little Mermaid was released onto home video six months after its release and, of course, went on to become a huge seller. But, many at Disney did not want it to be released onto home video as it would cut into the established theatrical re-release model. The success of it led Disney in the 1990s to shift to the home video model, not only releasing its new movies on home video but also its “vault” movies.
22.
Though Disney very much resisted putting its animated movies onto VHS, in 1985, Pinocchio became the first classic Disney animated movie to get released onto home video, and they charged a premium for it, pricing it at $79.95 (which would be around $238.94 in today’s money).
23.
Hocus Pocus was originally a short story that the film’s producer David Kirschner submitted to Muppet Magazine in the early ’80s, which is based on a bedtime story he told his kids.
24.
Treasure Planet is actually the most expensive 2D animated movie ever made, costing up to $140 million to make. Like Tangled, the movie had been years in development (first pitched in 1985), but it also caused much debate within the studio about what the direction of the movie should be. Though a cult classic today, the movie bombed at the box office and is cited as the reason Disney moved away from 2D animated movies.
25.
A few years before she would appear in Disney’s Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews partially inspired the design of Anita in 101 Dalmatians. At the time of the 101 Dalmatians production, Julie was most famous for playing Eliza Doolittle on Broadway in My Fair Lady.
26.
According to British writer Brian Sibley, who had befriended Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers during the 1980s, there could’ve been a Mary Poppins sequel. One day, she mentioned that Disney had reached out again to ask about another film and that she was going to say no, to which Brian replied that it was a shame there hadn’t been a sequel. To his surprise, P.L. said she would agree to it only if she had control and if he wrote it.
27.
The Black Cauldron is Disney’s most infamous production and a low point that nearly killed the animation department. However, the film — which was in development since 1973 — was doomed nearly from the start. In 1979, legendary animator Don Bluth, whose team had been working on The Black Cauldron, left Disney, taking 14 key animators with him to start his own animation production company. This left Disney’s already small animation department short-staffed and impacted the film’s production, causing issues with the story’s direction and animation quality, ultimately resulting in a disjointed film.
28.
The iconic boulder-rolling scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark is an homage to a very similar thing that happened in the 1954 Scrooge McDuck comic, “The Seven Cities of Cibola.”
30.
The DuckTales theme song is one of the catchiest Disney songs of all time (and one of the best theme songs ever, IMO). The song was written by songwriter Mark Mueller, who said he wrote the song in about 45 minutes and that the only instruction Disney gave him was that they wanted a pop radio song not a “cartoon song.” Mueller would also go on to write the theme song for Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers.
31.
If you watched the brilliant Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers movie, then you know the villain of it was a grown-up Peter Pan. However, according to the film’s director, Akiva Schaffer, they also had a version that they “played with” where the villain was a grown-up Charlie Brown.
32.
Ugly Sonic’s appearance in the Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers movie was arguably the best cameo. However, Ugly Sonic was not supposed to be in the movie; originally, the character at the expo that Dale talks with was supposed to be Jar Jar Binks.
33.
In The Lion King, Mufasa was originally not supposed to appear again after his death. The spirit scene was added because producers felt that Simba needed to see his father again. This was also the last scene created for the movie.
34.
Andreas Deja — who was the supervising animator for Gaston in Beauty the Beast — took inspiration for the design of the character from Brom Bones, who was Ichabod Crane’s nemesis in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
35.
And lastly, the final ballroom dance scene in Beauty and the Beast reuses the animation from the final dance scene in Sleeping Beauty. But contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t done to save money — it was actually done to save time.
