Barbara Luddy

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Robin Hood

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Robin Hood

In 1973, the future of Walt Disney animation was in doubt. The division had been in danger before. Whenever times got tough, the labor-intensive and not-always-profitable animation group always seemed to be the first one on the chopping block. But before, they’d always had Walt to protect them. Now, not only did they not have Walt anymore, they didn’t even have a Disney. Walt’s brother, Roy O. Disney, died at the end of 1971, just two months after the opening of Walt Disney World. The company was now run by CEO Donn Tatum and President Card Walker, two businessmen who seemed like they’d be just as happy to turn Disney into a theme park company that occasionally made low-budget movies and TV shows.

With the release of The AristoCats in 1970, the studio was officially out of projects that Walt had anything to do with. It was Walker who suggested that they return to the classics for their next animated feature, the fairy tales and legends they’d done so well with in the past. Ken Anderson, who had been with Disney as an art director and writer since 1934, thought Robin Hood would be a good fit. Walker liked the idea. So did Wolfgang Reitherman, who had become the primary animation director and producer, and story man Larry Clemmons. Anderson was given the go-ahead to start breaking the story and designing the characters.

Now, Robin Hood was not the most original idea they could have come up with. There had already been countless adaptations of the story in film and television. Disney had already done one in live-action themselves, The Story Of Robin Hood And His Merrie Men back in 1952. Even in 1970, the world did not need another Robin Hood movie. (We need one even less today but that doesn’t seem to stop Hollywood from going back to Sherwood every few years or so. Please, on behalf of a grateful public, please stop.)

Anderson’s primary innovation with his Robin Hood was depicting the characters as animals. But even this idea was heavily inspired by Anderson’s work on Chanticleer, a project that had failed to get any traction for decades. Anderson and Marc Davis had spearheaded the most recent attempt to get Chanticleer off the ground but it had been shot down in favor of The Sword In The Stone. Since then, Davis had left animation to design attractions for the parks, leaving Anderson free to take another pass at the Chanticleer art. With a little softening, Reynard the Fox became Robin. Chanticleer himself became the narrating minstrel Alan-a-Dale.

Many of Anderson’s other ideas were never used. For instance, he’d wanted to shift the location from England to the Deep South. Anderson had been one of the key animators on Song Of The South and wanted to recapture some of the fun of that movie (and say what you will about the film, the animation in Song Of The South is genuinely outstanding). Reitherman didn’t think that was a good idea, partly because he wanted to stick to the original English setting and partly because Song Of The South was already starting to be a touchy subject around the studio.

So Robin Hood stayed in England but Anderson’s concept does possibly explain why so many of the film’s characters have Southern accents. It does not, however, explain why only the stupid characters have Southern accents. I live in Atlanta now and I can tell you that it’s movies like this that reinforced my Yankee stereotype that only stupid people have Southern accents. Having now met many Southerners who are smart, wonderful human beings, I think Disney owes my friends an apology.

Before long, Anderson found himself benched as Reitherman and Clemmons took charge. Anderson wanted to incorporate Robin’s band of Merrie Men. Reitherman wanted a buddy movie focused solely on Robin and Little John. Whenever Anderson’s character designs ventured a little too far out of the box, Reitherman would push things back to the obvious and stereotypical. By all accounts, it was an unhappy experience for Anderson.

Reitherman also tried playing it safe with casting. Peter Ustinov had given Disney a big hit with Blackbeard’s Ghost, his first film for the studio. He was an obvious but still inspired choice to play the cowardly lion, Prince John, and in the film’s closing minutes, King Richard. We’ll see him again soon.

Phil Harris is back, making his third and final Disney appearance as Little John. This choice was even more obvious and considerably less inspired. Look, Harris is a lot of fun in The Jungle Book and The AristoCats but there is no difference between these characters. Here, I can practically see Reitherman sitting at his desk, thinking, “Let’s see…Harris was a bear, then a cat…ah, screw it. Let’s just make him a bear again.”

Harris was basically done with movies after Robin Hood. He made a few TV appearances but mainly focused on his live act in Vegas. In 1991, Don Bluth (more on him in a minute) coaxed him out of retirement to voice the narrator in Rock-A-Doodle, his rockabilly riff on Chanticleer. Around the same time, Disney rehired him to voice Baloo on their new animated series TaleSpin. But Harris’s voice had changed with age, so Ed Gilbert ended up with the part. On August 11, 1995, Phil Harris died of a heart attack at home. He was 91 years old.

To voice Robin Hood, Reitherman picked another of Walt’s favorites: Tommy Steele, the madly grinning entertainment dervish from The Happiest Millionaire. But while Steele could handle the comedy and the romance (and could’ve handled the music if they’d bothered to give any songs to Robin), he was less inspiring as a heroic leader of men. So Reitherman decided to scrap everything they’d recorded with Steele and replace him, putting the movie behind schedule and over budget.

Eventually the role went to Brian Bedford, a celebrated Shakespearean stage actor who’d appeared with another Disney star, James Garner, in Grand Prix. I’ve seen a few sources claim that Monty Python’s Terry Jones was also considered for the part but I don’t know how much stock I put in that. Monty Python’s Flying Circus was still being produced back in England at the time and didn’t catch on in America until 1974. I suppose it’s theoretically possible that someone involved with Robin Hood could have visited England and become a Python fan. But, no offense to the late, great Terry Jones, he is not the member of the troupe I would single out as a candidate to voice Robin Hood as a fox. Why not the more fox-like Eric Idle? Or John Cleese, who actually would eventually play Robin Hood in Time Bandits? Or literally anyone else in that group apart from maybe Terry Gilliam? I don’t know, maybe Jones was considered. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Reitherman did cast one legendary British comic actor. Terry-Thomas, the gap-toothed star of It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World, voices Prince John’s advisor, Sir Hiss. Unfortunately, this will be his only appearance in a Disney film. Terry-Thomas had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1971, which resulted in his working less and less throughout the decade. His health forced him to quit acting in 1980 and he and his wife spent much of the 1980s living in poverty thanks to his medical bills. In 1989, a benefit concert was held to honor and raise money for Terry-Thomas, which gave him some degree of comfort in his last days. The disease finally took his life on January 8, 1990, at the age of 78.

Perhaps the film’s most significant casting was Roger Miller as Alan-a-Dale. Miller was a Grammy-winning singer/songwriter whose songs, including “Chug-A-Lug”, “Dang Me” and “King Of The Road”, were smash hits in an era when there was a whole lot more crossover between the country and pop charts than there is now. This wasn’t the first time Disney dipped a toe into the pop music world. But inviting an established star to not only voice a character but to write and perform several original songs was something new. Even the Beach Boys had to sing a song written by the Sherman Brothers in The Monkey’s Uncle and, let’s face it, Brian Wilson was a better songwriter than Roger Miller (again, no offense to Roger Miller, whom I love).

Robin Hood record album cover

Miller’s songs, from the opening “Whistle Stop” (later to achieve internet notoriety in sampled form on the HampsterDance) to the ambling “Oo-De-Lally” to the melancholy “Not In Nottingham”, establish the movie’s tone from the get-go. And Larry Clemmons’ script reinforces those songs at every opportunity. You could make a dangerous drinking game out of taking a belt every time a character uses the expression “oo-de-lally”. Later Disney films would make pop stars part of their entire tapestry, like Elton John and The Lion King or Phil Collins and Tarzan. Roger Miller paves the way for all of that right here.

Miller contributes the movie’s best songs but not the only ones. Naturally, the Academy decided to nominate Robin Hood’s worst song, “Love” by Floyd Huddleston and George Bruns, for Best Original Song. Sung by Huddleston’s wife, Nancy Adams, “Love” isn’t aggressively bad but it is as generic and forgettable as its title. This was Bruns’ fourth and final Oscar nomination, all of which had been for Disney movies. At the Oscars, the song was performed by Napoleon And Samantha costars Jodie Foster and Johnny Whitaker and I really, really wish I could find that clip online. It lost to “The Way We Were”, which I’m sure came as a surprise to no one (it was also up against “Live And Let Die”, so it really didn’t stand a chance). I still think it’s a bad song but evidently Wes Anderson is a fan. He used it on the soundtrack to Fantastic Mr. Fox.

The last original song sequence, “The Phony King Of England”, is remembered more for its animation than the song itself. That’s a little surprising considering it’s the only Disney song written by legendary songwriter Johnny Mercer. But it’s really just another excuse for Phil Harris to do his thing and not as memorable as “The Bare Necessities”. However, those budget overruns and schedule delays took a toll on Reitherman’s plans for this number. Running out of time and money, Reitherman was forced to recycle animation from previous films. This was a trick they’d used before as far back as the package films of the 1940s. But they’d never been quite as blatant about it as they were here.

Reusing animation from The Jungle Book and The AristoCats would have been bad enough. Phil Harris is singing the song and playing another bear. Of course that’s going to stand out. But having Maid Marian inexplicably grow about two feet and transform into Snow White doing one of the most famous dances in animation history is just plain lazy. If you’re subtle about it, you can disguise reused animation so only the keenest of eyes will notice. There’s nothing subtle about this and it pulls you right out of the movie.

That feeling of déjà vu extends to the rest of the film. Reitherman doesn’t so much tell a story as compile Robin Hood’s Greatest Hits. There’s a little robbing from the rich, a little giving to the poor. There’s Robin in disguise, there’s the archery contest, there’s the kiss with Maid Marian. It’s the most basic, pared-down telling of the Robin Hood story I can imagine. Even the stuff that works feels like a hand-me-down. I like Ustinov and Terry-Thomas but we just saw a kingdom ruled by a lion and his officious assistant (a bird, not a snake) in Bedknobs And Broomsticks. But Robin Hood never makes the unexpected choice when the obvious one is right there for the taking.

Despite its many drawbacks and shortcuts, Robin Hood is a hard movie to dislike. It’s too easy-going and relaxed to get mad about. Do I wish it was better? Absolutely. Would I say it was one of my favorite Disney movies? Not a chance. But have I watched it more than once? Yep. I never love it but I don’t wish I had the time back, either.

Robin Hood theatrical reissue poster

Most critics seemed to feel the same way, although some, like Gene Siskel, absolutely hated it. But in general, they gave Robin Hood a light pass while still pining for Disney’s glory days, which seemed to be a distant memory at that point. Audiences, on the other hand, loved it. Released on November 8, 1973, it became Disney’s highest grossing film of the year and one of the ten highest grossing films of the year overall.

The success of Robin Hood earned the animation division a reprieve. The studio now wanted to stay in the cartoon business but to do that, they’d need to make some changes. For one thing, most of the team had been with Disney since the 1930s. If Disney animation was going to survive, the studio needed some new blood.

The studio would hire several new animators in the years following Robin Hood, many from the animation program at CalArts, a school Walt had helped found back in 1961. But one member of the next generation was already there. Don Bluth (see, I told you we’d get back to him) was first hired by Disney as an assistant to John Lounsbery on Sleeping Beauty. But he got bored and went off to do other things, including missionary work overseas and graduating from college.

Bluth returned to animation in 1967, first as a layout artist for Filmation. In 1971, he went back to Disney where he was put to work on Robin Hood. Don Bluth would become a big figure at Disney over the next several years. Eventually, he’d become an even bigger problem for them after deciding to strike out on his own. But we’ll get to that story down the road.

Robin Hood has never been an A-list Disney title. Whenever it shows up on home video, which is frequently, the studio doesn’t make a big song-and-dance about it being locked up in “the vault”. It’s just one of those titles you can always pick up, usually at a big discount. But it’s had a low-key impact over the years. People who like it seem to like it quite a bit (and I’m sure I’ll hear from a few of them over my dismissive attitude…Disney fans are a passionate lot). It’s frequently cited as a seminal film in the furry community, a fandom so foreign and mysterious to me I’m not even going to question or comment about it apart from to say yeah, I guess that tracks. And the movie definitely had an influence on later films like Fantastic Mr. Fox and Zootopia. Not a bad legacy for a movie that frequently feels like an afterthought. Oo-de-lally, indeed.

VERDICT: This is a tough one. Compared to other Disney animated classics, this is a Disney Minus or, at best, a Disney Shrug. But compared to a lot of the other crap we’ve seen in this column lately, it’s a Disney Plus.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Sleeping Beauty

~ electrictheatre ~ 2 Comments
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty marks the end of an era for Walt Disney. The man who invented the animated feature was just about ready to be done with them. Sleeping Beauty was a make-or-break proposition intended to capture Walt’s animators working at the very top of their game. It was supposed to cement their reputation as the absolute best in the business. Instead, it very nearly spelled the end of Disney animation entirely.

Walt began developing Sleeping Beauty back in 1950. It would take him most of the decade to complete it. By Disney standards, story development went relatively quickly. This is a little surprising since Charles Perrault’s original fairy tale, the primary source for the adaptation, is only about 15 pages long, not counting illustrations. If Disney’s team was going to make a meal out of this meatless bone, they’d have to add a lot more ingredients.

Walt put Wilfred Jackson in charge of the film. The first order of business was fleshing out the villain. In Perrault’s original, she’s an unnamed wicked fairy who shows up just long enough to place a curse on the princess and is never seen or heard from again. Given an essentially blank slate to create a character from scratch, the Disney team came up with Maleficent, one of their most iconic villains.

The movie doesn’t really give us a whole lot of information about Maleficent. Unlike past villainesses like Snow White’s Queen and Cinderella’s stepmother, Maleficent doesn’t seem particularly threatened by or jealous of Princess Aurora. She’s just mad that King Stefan didn’t invite her to the christening. But no one ever questions why Maleficent does what she does. The character design and animation by Marc Davis and vocal performance by Eleanor Audley (also the voice of Cinderella’s nemesis, Lady Tremaine) are so singular that we don’t need any backstory.

Jackson and his story team also embellished the three Good Fairies, cut down from Perrault’s original seven, probably to downplay any comparisons to Snow White’s dwarfs. Weirdly, Walt wanted the thee Fairies to be virtually identical. Animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston talked him out of that idea, thank goodness. Flora, Fauna and Merryweather are ostensibly supporting characters but in a lot of ways, the movie’s really about them. They’re the ones who have to raise and protect Aurora. They’re the ones who end up defeating Maleficent (Prince Phillip may throw the sword but who knows what would have happened without their enchantment). Robbing them of their distinct personalities would have been a serious mistake.

When Jackson turned in his first pass at Sleeping Beauty, Walt was unimpressed and ordered him, Ted Sears and the rest of the story crew back to the drawing board. This was not unusual. What was unusual was that this seems to have been the extent of Walt’s concerns with the story. On Snow White, Walt had been involved with every last detail. There wasn’t a line of dialogue or a plot point in the entire picture that didn’t have Walt’s stamp of approval. But by Sleeping Beauty, Walt had checked out. Story meetings became a thing of the past. Walt’s mind was on Disneyland, television, and live-action features. By the middle of 1953, the script for Sleeping Beauty was considered good enough.

Theatrical poster for the 1970 re-release of Sleeping Beauty

To the extent Walt did care about Sleeping Beauty, it was all about the movie’s look. Eyvind Earle had joined the studio in 1951 as a background painter. In 1953, he worked on the short subject Toot, Whistle, Plunk And Boom. This was a radical departure from the typical Disney house style, influenced by the modernist, angular style of the independent animation house UPA (United Productions of America). UPA had been formed in 1943 by a number of ex-Disney animators in the wake of the strike that bitterly divided the studio. The UPA style was unique, widely praised by critics, and a direct reaction against the rounded, formal Disney style.

For years, Walt resisted any change to his signature animation style. But the Oscar-winning success of Toot, Whistle, Plunk And Boom started to change that. Walt put Earle in charge of defining the look of Sleeping Beauty. He’d been using concept artists (or “inspirational sketch artists”) to help establish tone from the early days. Artists like Albert Hurter and Tyrus Wong had been hugely important in setting the right visual palette on films like Pinocchio and Bambi. But Walt had begun to feel that the elements that made, for example, the concept art of Mary Blair special was being lost in the finished animation on films like Alice In Wonderland and Peter Pan. Walt vowed to change that with Sleeping Beauty. Earle’s vision would be represented on screen no matter how long it took.

As it turned out, it took a very long time indeed. The animators struggled to reconcile the realistic figure movement Walt had been demanding for years with the hyper-stylized character designs. They disagreed with Earle’s color choices and fought against his overly detailed backgrounds. When they took their issues to Walt, he would take Earle’s side every time. Toward the end of 1953, Wilfred Jackson suffered a heart attack and was replaced as supervising director by Eric Larson. At the time, Sleeping Beauty was scheduled for release in February 1957.

Larson struggled mightily with the massive workload but Walt’s insistence on perfection in every frame kept progress to a snail’s pace. According to Neal Gabler’s book Walt Disney: The Triumph Of The American Imagination, the animators took such meticulous care drawing Aurora that at one point, they were only producing a single cleaned-up image a day. The release date was pushed back to Christmas 1957. When it became clear they wouldn’t make that date either, Larson was taken off the project, replaced by Clyde Geronimi. Larson would later refer to Sleeping Beauty as his “downfall”.

With the help of Wolfgang Reitherman, Geronimi was able to get Sleeping Beauty over the finish line and into theaters by the end of January 1959, not Christmas 1958 as they’d hoped. What was meant to be Walt Disney’s crowning animated achievement landed with a bit of a thud. Reviews compared it unfavorably to earlier films like Snow White and Cinderella, exactly the reactions Walt had wanted to avoid. With a few exceptions, most critics disliked the animation style everyone had worked so hard to perfect. People seemed to enjoy the music (George Bruns’ score, adapting Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty Ballet, received the film’s sole Oscar nomination) but that was about it. Since the movie had taken so long to produce, its budget had skyrocketed and its original theatrical released failed to earn it back.

Even today, Sleeping Beauty isn’t quite as beloved as some of Disney’s animated classics, although it has certainly undergone a critical re-evaluation. For instance, time has been very kind to Eyvind Earle’s singular design scheme. It bridges several gaps, from the Industrial Gothic Renaissance art that inspired Earle to his own modernist style. But it also connects the traditional Disney style of animation to the sleek, vertical style of UPA. The movie shows us not only where animation has been but where it’s headed.

Make no mistake, the animation in Sleeping Beauty is nothing short of breathtaking. Shot in Technirama, this is some of the most spectacular animation Disney ever produced. The animators learned quite a bit about shooting in widescreen thanks to Lady And The Tramp. They put those lessons to good use here. Every frame is perfectly staged, filling the eye with color and movement.

But while Walt was obsessing over the visual aspect, he really ought to have worried a bit more about the story. With a running time of only about 75 minutes, Sleeping Beauty doesn’t seem all that interested in letting us get to know its main characters. The opening sequence packs in a lot, establishing the baby Princess Aurora, her future betrothal to Prince Phillip, the three Good Fairies, Maleficent and her curse that Aurora will die on her 16th birthday, and the Fairies’ promise to raise Aurora under the name Briar Rose deep in the woods without using magic. That isn’t a story. That’s the set-up for the story.

However, the very next thing we know, it’s already Briar Rose’s sweet 16 and the Fairies are getting ready to say goodbye. We’ve been given no chance to get to know this girl. We don’t even get to see Flora, Fauna and Merryweather try to live a magic-free existence. Virtually the entire burden of getting the audience to care about Aurora is placed on the forest sequence where she meets Prince Phillip. It’s a nicely animated sequence and the song “Once Upon A Dream” is pretty good. But that’s a lot to ask of a single scene and song.

The movie doesn’t let up once Aurora falls into her sleep and Maleficent captures Phillip. Perrault’s original has our heroine cursed to sleep for one hundred years before she’s rescued. The story team was smart to realize that’s too long for a movie but they go too far in the opposite direction. Unable to face telling King Stefan that they’ve failed, the Fairies decide to put the whole kingdom to sleep until they can fix all this, then go straight to Phillip. Aurora’s plight doesn’t mean a whole lot if nobody even knows about it.

Freeing Phillip, the Fairies warn him that he’ll have to face the rest of these challenges on his own. This turns out to be a lie. They do nothing but help him, zapping Maleficent’s Goons and enchanting his sword for the death blow against Maleficent herself. This is not to take anything away from the power and beauty of this incredibly animated sequence. The arrival of Maleficent in dragon-form is legitimately awe-inspiring. None of it makes a lot of sense logically but that’s OK. The only problem is that it seems to take no time at all. By the time the curse is lifted and everyone wakes up, it feels more like Aurora was cursed to an afternoon nap.

Sleeping Beauty has a great big hole in its center where it heart should be. It’s just too difficult to become invested in the romance between Aurora and Phillip. We don’t spend enough time with either of them to care. But it’s easy to overlook that potentially fatal flaw because everything surrounding that hole is so great, beginning with Maleficent.

Theatrical re-release poster for Sleeping Beauty

Visually, Disney has never created a more compelling villain (unless you want to count the demon Chernabog in Fantasia). The fact that we don’t know much about her apart from her commitment to pure evil makes her one of Disney’s most mysterious and sinister villains. It was also enough to justify expanding the character into the Angelina Jolie vehicle Maleficent, automatically one of Disney’s more interesting live-action adaptations of an animated property simply by virtue of not being a shot-for-shot remake.

(Maleficent will presumably appear in this column eventually, assuming people are still reading this by the time we make it to the 2010s.)

Eleanor Audley, voicing her second and final Disney villainess, is absolutely perfect in the role. Apart from a couple episodes of The Swamp Fox miniseries on Walt Disney Presents, this would be Audley’s last Disney role. She went on to a prolific television career with recurring roles in shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres and My Three Sons (alongside Fred MacMurray, someone we’ll soon start seeing a lot of in this column).

Flora, Fauna and Merryweather are equally well-cast, completely disproving Walt’s theory that they should have had identical personalities. Verna Felton was an old pro by now, having voiced characters in Dumbo, Cinderella and Alice In Wonderland. She also provided the voice of Aunt Sarah in Lady And The Tramp, with Barbara Luddy (Merryweather) as Lady. Barbara Jo Allen (Fauna), a new voice at the studio, was better known as Vera Vague, a radio character she’d played that became so popular that she temporarily adopted it as her professional name. This column will hear from all three of these women again.

Felton, Allen and Luddy are so perfect as the Fairies that it’s hard to imagine other actresses in the roles. But other actresses did play the parts for the live-action reference footage that was shot. Frances Bavier (The Andy Griffith Show’s Aunt Bee), Madge Blake (Batman’s Aunt Harriet) and Spring Byington (an Academy Award nominee and presumably somebody’s aunt) were performance models, as was Hans Conried for King Stefan. The use of live-action reference footage was common at the Disney studio but there was usually more overlap between the vocal and live-action actors. This time, only Eleanor Audley performed both halves of her character.

I can’t find any explanation for why they chose to separate the voices from the live-action models this time around. Conried had provided both the voice and live-action reference for Hook in Peter Pan. Not to take anything away from Taylor Holmes but Conried would have made an excellent King Stefan. It may have simply boiled down to the film’s lengthy production schedule.

The long production had one very immediate effect at the studio: Walt would no longer commit the same kind of money and resources to animation. Following the financial failure of Sleeping Beauty, Walt was forced to institute wide-sweeping layoffs that hit the animation division especially hard. While they still produced occasional short films, they no longer had a separate department dedicated to their production. Animators would be forced to find cheaper, more efficient ways of making the features. Walt himself would only oversee three more animated features before his death in 1966 and they would be much different from those that came before.

The disappointment of Sleeping Beauty also scared the studio away from an entire genre. It would be years before Disney dared to tackle another fairy tale. That movie, The Little Mermaid, would come to represent the beginning of an era just as Sleeping Beauty marked the end of another. But that’s a tale for another column.

Theatrical re-release poster for Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty didn’t receive its first theatrical re-release until 1970. Subsequent re-releases would restore the film to its 70mm Technirama glory. Those screenings would be a revelation for those of us who had never seen a Disney film of this size and scope before. For awhile in the 1980s, I would have considered Sleeping Beauty to be my favorite Disney movie. There simply wasn’t anything else quite like it.

Today, I’m a bit more reserved in my appreciation of the film. Its technical qualities are beyond reproach. The movie still has the ability to dazzle and amaze audiences. But its story flaws prevent it from being the masterpiece Walt wanted it to be. In his pursuit of technical perfection, he lost sight of the heart and soul that made his best movies truly special. Disney animation would never be the same again.

VERDICT: Disney Plus

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Lady And The Tramp

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Lady And The Tramp

When Lady And The Tramp debuted on June 22, 1955, it should have been a bigger deal. For years, the Disney name had been synonymous with feature animation. Here was the studio’s first feature cartoon since Peter Pan two years earlier. Not only that, it was the first ever produced in CinemaScope. But animation had become almost an afterthought at the studio. Walt himself had decided it was time for his name to become synonymous with something much bigger. His attention was entirely on Disneyland. Lady And The Tramp would have to sink or swim on its own merits.

Lady And The Tramp is easily one of Disney’s most unusual feature animations. For the first time, the story was entirely self-generated and not based on a classic fairy tale or book. Development began all the way back in 1937 when animator Joe Grant brought in some sketches he’d done of his English Springer Spaniel, Lady. Grant had just had a baby and his sketches of the jealous Lady made Walt think there might be a story there. He assigned a small group of storymen to the project and work quietly began on Lady.

By 1945, work on Lady hadn’t progressed much farther than that. Various artists and storymen dropped in ideas here and there but it simply wasn’t coming together. The project might have disappeared into the vault if Walt hadn’t come across a short story in Cosmopolitan magazine called “Happy Dan, The Cynical Dog”. Walt decided a scrappy, cynical dog might be just the counterpoint the sweet, lovable Lady needed.

Walt already knew the story’s author. Ward Greene was a writer and journalist but his day job was general manager of King Features Syndicate, distributing columns and comic strips to newspapers around the country. Disney had been a staple of the funny pages and a feather in King Features’ cap since the Mickey Mouse comic strip premiered in 1930. Odds are this was not a difficult negotiation.

Work continued on what would eventually be titled Lady And The Tramp off and on for the next several years, mostly off. Joe Grant left the studio (and animation, at least temporarily) in 1949, leaving the story to be molded primarily by Ward Greene. Still, the project was simply not a priority at the studio.

Finally in 1953, Walt and Roy Disney had a problem. For years, they had struggled with having too many animated projects in various stages of development. Now, for the first time, they didn’t have enough. Peter Pan had been released but Sleeping Beauty, intended to be Walt’s magnum opus, was nowhere near finished. Roy was in the process of launching Buena Vista, the studio’s new distribution arm. It would be a lot easier to woo exhibitors to Disney distribution with the promise of new Disney animation.

According to Neal Gabler’s excellent book Walt Disney: The Triumph Of The American Imagination, Walt first considered simply cobbling together another package film. That would have been easier said than done, since the production of animated short subjects was trickling to a halt. Any animators not working on Sleeping Beauty had been kept busy producing new but cheap footage for the Disneyland TV series and The Mickey Mouse Club. Instead of a package film, Roy encouraged Walt to kickstart Lady And The Tramp, figuring it would be a relatively quick and easy project to complete.

It probably would have been except for one thing: CinemaScope. The widescreen process had become Hollywood’s latest craze toward coaxing audiences away from televisions and back into theatres. Disney had successfully used it on the live-action 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and the Oscar-winning animated short Toot, Whistle, Plunk And Boom. When he decided to shoot Lady And The Tramp in CinemaScope, the animators had to make some big adjustments. The backgrounds had to be bigger. Layouts had to be changed. They even had to prepare a second, alternate version formatted for theaters that weren’t equipped to project CinemaScope. Consequently, the “quick and easy” project took longer to complete than anticipated.

Narratively, Lady And The Tramp remains true to the modest goals first laid out by Joe Grant. The story opens on Christmas with Jim Dear presenting Lady in a hatbox as a gift to his beloved wife, Darling. This incident, supposedly inspired by Walt’s own Christmas gift of a puppy to his wife, Lillian, early in their marriage, helped obfuscate Grant’s contribution to the story in later years. Opening with such a personal moment, everyone simply assumed the story was Walt’s and Walt himself did little to suggest otherwise.

The movie ambles along at its own pace from there, following Lady as she grows up, gets to know her neighbors Jock and Trusty, acquires her collar and official dog license. The movie’s almost a third over before we’re introduced to either the idea of a new baby entering the home or even Lady’s costar, Tramp.

Theatrical re-release poster for Lady And The Tramp

Lady And The Tramp has a reputation as one of the most romantic movies of all time, animated or otherwise. It landed at Number 95 on the American Film Institute’s 2002 list of love stories, 100 Years…100 Passions. But the film takes its time revealing that side of itself. Crucially, Disney spends the first 45 minutes or so romanticizing the characters’ world rather than the characters themselves. Tramp and his friends from the wrong side of the tracks are kept separate from Lady and her Snob Hill neighbors. Both worlds seem equally appealing and idyllic on their own. When Lady and the Tramp come together, they blend into a singular, magical space.

After Disneyland opened, it became common shorthand to compartmentalize Disney’s work into the four park areas: Fantasyland, Adventureland, Frontierland and Tomorrowland. But there was always a fifth area to the park, Main Street USA, and it’s that idealized, hyper-nostalgic worldview that’s on full display in Lady And The Tramp.

More often than not, Disney would indulge his nostalgic impulses through live-action films like So Dear To My Heart and later, Pollyanna. Lady And The Tramp translates that live-action aesthetic into animation and the result is even more idealized. We believe in the somewhat unlikely romance between these two dogs in large part because of their perfect surroundings.

Supposedly, Walt was ready to cut the now-iconic spaghetti dinner scene, concerned that the sight of two dogs wolfing down a big plate of pasta would just look ridiculous. Animator Frank Thomas fought for it, animating the whole thing by himself to prove his point. The beautifully animated scene kicks off the “Bella Notte” sequence, a lovely blend of character animation, sumptuous backgrounds and romantic details. How could anyone not fall in love to images like these?

Theatrical re-release poster for Lady And The Tramp

Their happiness is short-lived as Lady is thrown into the local dog pound, where she learns some harsh truths about her new boyfriend. Tramp gets around and everybody’s got a story to tell about his love life. By the time she gets sprung from lockup, Lady’s fed up with Tramp. He ran off and abandoned her when she was caught. Now it seems he never really cared about her at all.

But Tramp hasn’t abandoned Lady or run away. He’s completely selfish but he isn’t a coward. We’ve already seen that he’s got a soft spot for puppies and is a true and loyal friend, rescuing dogs on their way to the pound. He assumed that Lady would be fine, thanks to her get-out-of-jail-free license. As soon as she’s out, he comes by to check on her and learns that love means putting another person (or dog or, in this case, baby) ahead of your own best interests. As relationship lessons go, the ones taught by Lady And The Tramp aren’t bad.

For the voice talent, Disney cast a wider net than on other projects, recruiting a number of actors from outside the studio. Barbara Luddy provided the voice of Lady. It was her first role for Disney but not the last. She’d go on to voice a number of characters over the years, including Kanga in the Winnie The Pooh series. Tramp was voiced by Larry Roberts, a stage performer who never made another film. He retired from show business in the late 1950s and went into fashion design. Reliable Disney stock players Verna Felton and Bill Thompson appeared as Aunt Sarah and Jock.

Disney even brought in a pair of voice talents not typically associated with the studio. Stan Freberg was an established voice talent at Warner Bros. and on radio who was beginning to hit the big time with his own comedy records when Disney brought him in to provide the voice of the Beaver. Alan Reed was still a few years away from landing his defining role as Fred Flintstone but was a popular radio and character actor when he voiced Boris, the Russian wolfhound.

But the not-so-secret weapon of Lady And The Tramp is undoubtedly Miss Peggy Lee. Disney had never relied on celebrity voices for his cartoons but he certainly wasn’t against using them. Bing Crosby and Basil Rathbone had toplined The Adventures Of Ichabod And Mr. Toad and Alice In Wonderland’s Mad Hatter was modeled after radio star Ed Wynn. But Peggy Lee was in a different category when she arrived on the Disney lot.

Peggy Lee became the singer in Benny Goodman’s orchestra in 1941. Within two years, she had the number-one song in the country, the million-selling “Why Don’t You Do Right?” After she left Goodman’s group, her career really took off with huge hits like “Golden Earrings” and “Mañana (Is Soon Enough for Me)”. Her being asked to work on Lady And The Tramp was the 1950s equivalent of Elton John working on The Lion King or Phil Collins on Tarzan.

Peggy Lee gave the work her all. She provides the voices for four characters: Darling, the cats Si and Am and, of course, Peg the Pekingese. She even gave story notes. Trusty the bloodhound was supposed to die at the end until Peggy Lee cautioned against traumatizing a generation that was still grieving Bambi’s mom.

Album cover art for Songs From Walt Disney's Lady And The Tramp by Peggy Lee

Most importantly, she collaborated with Sonny Burke on six original songs. Burke had first worked for Disney on Toot, Whistle, Plunk And Boom and he’d go on to produce some of Frank Sinatra’s most iconic records, including “My Way”. The songs Lee and Burke wrote for Lady And The Tramp work perfectly with Oliver Wallace’s Victorian-tinged score. The lullaby “La La Lu” bridges the gap between the eras nicely.

But the songs everyone remembers from Lady And The Tramp are distinctly modern. “Bella Notte”, “The Siamese Cat Song” and “He’s A Tramp” are very much of their era. They help contemporize Lady And The Tramp, bringing it out of the rose-colored mists of nostalgia and into the present day. Today, it creates a feeling of double-nostalgia for both Walt’s turn-of-the-century youth and for the 1950s. It’s the same powerful feeling that accounts for the continued popularity of movies like Grease. We’re nostalgic for nostalgia itself, not for a specific era.

As for “The Siamese Cat Song”, it’s a bit lame to brush aside its casual ethnic stereotyping by saying that this is far from the worst example of it we’ll see in a Disney movie. Sure, they’re cats but there’s no missing the implications of the character design, music or voices. One can certainly understand why the song was scrapped from the recent Disney+ remake. Still…it’s a good song. The Asian pastiche is a pretty common type of popular song and this is one of the better examples of it.

Besides, it isn’t like the cats are singled out. It’s a long-standing tradition in animation that if an animal can be defined by an ethnic stereotype, it will be. Jock, the Scottish terrier, is very Scottish. Boris, the Russian wolfhound, is very Russian. Pedro, the chihuahua, is very Mexican. Of course Si and Am are going to be very “Siamese”, which is a word that people just took to mean generally Asian back in the day. At least they weren’t called “Oriental”. On our ongoing list of Outdated Tropes of the Past, “The Siamese Cat Song” doesn’t seem worth getting too worked up over.

Lady And The Tramp was not an immediate hit with critics. Many longtime Disney supporters dismissed it as sentimental and inconsequential. But audiences loved it. It quickly became the studio’s biggest hit since Snow White, ending up as the sixth highest grossing film of 1955.

Lady And The Tramp didn’t exactly lend itself to Disneyland attractions or toys and games beyond the usual merchandise but its popularity earned it a spin-off comic strip. Scamp, originally written by Ward Greene and distributed by King Features, followed the adventures of Lady and the Tramp’s mischievous son for over 30 years. The strip finally ended in 1988 and Scamp returned to animated form in the 2001 direct-to-video sequel Lady And The Tramp II: Scamp’s Adventure.

Comic book cover art for Walt Disney's Lady And The Tramp spin-off Scamp

Even today, Lady And The Tramp remains one of Disney’s most popular films. In 1987, the film was released on VHS for the first time and surprised everyone by becoming the best-selling videocassette of all time. Perhaps nobody was more surprised than Peggy Lee, who sued Disney for royalties on the video sales. She was eventually rewarded over $2 million and the case changed entertainment copyright law forever, forcing studios and unions to grapple with new media like home entertainment.

Lady And The Tramp proved that Walt Disney didn’t need a beloved book or fairy tale to deliver a heartfelt, masterfully animated feature. The studio was more than capable of crafting their own stories. But unfortunately, it came around a little too late. Walt had almost done everything he wanted to accomplish with animation. His heart and his mind now belonged to Disneyland. The golden age of Disney animated features was coming to a close.

VERDICT: Disney Plus.

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