66 Surprising Facts About Your Favorite Disney Movies
Subliminal messages, MC Hammer’s pants, 9.4 million party balloons, and more than 75 years of Disney history.
1. 101 Dalmatians, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, and Mulan are the only animated Disney films where both parents are present and don’t die during the course of the movie.
2. Pixar credits its success to going against Disney’s standard narrative elements: No songs, no “I want” moments, no happy village, no love story, no villain.
3. The words at the beginning of The Lion King are Zulu for “Here comes a lion, father” and “Oh, yes, it’s a lion.”
4. When it was released, The Lion King experienced controversy when people thought the word “SEX” could be read in a puff of dust during one scene. It’s claimed that the dust actually spells “SFX,” and was a nod to the film’s special effects team.
5. A hyena biologist sued Disney for defamation of character for portraying hyenas as villains in The Lion King.
6. Abba were originally approached to do the music for The Lion King, but when they weren’t available, Disney went with Elton John.
7. The “asante sana squash banana” song that Rafiki sings The Lion King is actually an old nursery rhyme in Swahili.
8. The creators of The Lion King have been accused of lifting elements from an anime series from the 1960s called Kimba the White Lion.
9. Beast’s appearance in Beauty and the Beast is an amalgamation of several animals, including the head of a buffalo, the brow of a gorilla, the body of a bear, the mane of a lion, the tusks of a boar, and the legs and tail of a wolf.
10. Jackie Chan provided the speaking and singing voice for Beast in the Chinese version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
11. Aladdin’s appearance was almost based on Michael J. Fox, but was later modeled after Tom Cruise.
12. His movements were, in part, modeled after MC Hammer.
13. Rapunzel and Flynn from Tangled can be seen in Frozen.
14. The main characters in Disney’s Frozen sound out the name of the author on which the original story is based. Hans, Kristoff, Anna, Sven = Hans Christian Andersen.
15. Frozen was the first animated Disney film directed by a woman.
16. Ursula the Sea-Witch from The Little Mermaid was inspired by a drag queen named Divine.
17. It’s believed that the movement of Ariel’s hair underwater was based on footage of astronaut Sally Ride’s hair in zero gravity.
18. Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck all make a brief cameo in The Little Mermaid.
19. If the events of Finding Nemo actually happened, and Nemo’s mother and siblings got eaten, Nemo’s father would have developed female sex organs and formed a breeding pair with Nemo.
20. Finding Nemo harmed clownfish populations when people started buying wild-caught, pet clownfish after seeing the movie.
21. The character Lots-o’-Huggin Bear in Toy Story 3 was originally meant to appear in Toy Story but Pixar didn’t have the technology to realistically animate his fur.
22. Also, Andy didn’t have a dad in Toy Story because human characters were too expensive and difficult to animate.
23. Joss Whedon co-wrote Toy Story. The character Rex the dinosaur was Whedon’s creation.
24. Woody’s full name is Woody Pride, but it has never been mentioned in any of the Toy Story movies.
25. While Pixar was working on Toy Story 2, someone accidentally ran a Unix command and deleted the entire film. Luckily, an animator had a copy of the data at home so she could work on the movie while caring for her new baby.
26. The ship used to portray the Edinburgh Trader in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest sank off the coast of North Carolina during Hurricane Sandy.
27. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is the most expensive film ever made.
28. Tangled, which cost $260 million, is the second-most expensive movie ever made.
29. That means that Tangled cost more to make than James Cameron’s Avatar.
30. The character Sid from Toy Story makes an appearance in Toy Story 3 as a garbage man.
31. Sulley from Monsters, Inc. was originally drawn with tentacles instead of legs. They were later changed because it was thought tentacles would be distracting, and the character was almost designed with legs, but no arms.
32. Boo’s real name is Mary.
33. When a 10-year-old girl with cancer was too sick to see Up in theaters, Pixar flew an employee to her home with a DVD copy of the movie for a private screening. She died seven hours after seeing the film.
34. It would take more than 9.4 million party balloons to lift Carl’s house in Up.
35. The character Russell from Up was modeled after a Pixar employee.
36. Young Ellie from Up is voiced by the director of the film’s daughter, Ellie Docter.
37. In a 2003 poll by Empire magazine of the worst accents in film, Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney accent in Mary Poppins came in second.
38. Dick Van Dyke’s accent coach during Mary Poppins was Irish, and according to Van Dyke, “didn’t do an accent any better than I did.”
39. The author of the Mary Poppins books, P.L. Travers, was not a fan of the film adaption of her books, and she spent most of the premiere in tears and refused to let Disney adapt the rest of the series.
40. The first use of animatronics in film was the robin that whistles a duet with Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. Andrews had wires going up her dress to move the bird. The bird’s movements were so realistic, critics were baffled as to how it was animated.
41. The word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” actually predates Mary Poppins.
42. Songwriter Robert Sherman, who helped write “It’s a Small World (After All)” and the Mary Poppins soundtrack, led the first American troops into Dachau during World War II.
43. Disney’s Robin Hood has recycled animation from The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and other previous Disney films.
44. Sleeping Beauty underperformed at the box office during its initial release in 1959, resulting in massive layoffs at Disney. It was the last Disney princess movie until The Little Mermaid 30 years later.
45. Fa Ping, the name Mulan chooses while posing as a man, is a pun on the Chinese expression for “eye candy.”
46. The creator of Peter Pan, Jim Barrie, gave the rights of the story to a children’s hospital, so they could always collect royalties to fund the hospital.
47. The first-ever use of double tracking in music was in Cinderella when Walt Disney asked singer Ilene Woods if she could sing harmonies to herself.
48. The Disney character WALL-E is named after Walter Elias Disney (aka Walt Disney).
49. Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod, iMac, and iPhone, helped design the character Eve from Wall-E.
50. The voice of Lilo in Lilo & Stitch, Daveigh Chase, also played Samara in The Ring.
51. The actor who voiced Bambi as a young boy, Donnie Dunagan, went on to become the youngest drill instructor in Marines history and served three tours in Vietnam.
52. In an early draft of the script for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Judge Doom was revealed to be the man who killed Bambi’s mother.
53. Walt Disney received one regular and seven small Oscar statues when Snow White and the Seven Dwarves won an honorary Academy Award.
54. The vultures from The Jungle Book were originally meant to be voiced by the Beatles.
55. Disney had intended to produce a wine to market alongside the release of Ratatouille, but the company was advised by the California Wine Institute not to advertise alcohol with cartoon characters.
56. Development of Wreck-It Ralph started in the late 1980s, and the films were almost called High Score and Joe Jump.
57. Disney actually produced a number of “Fit-It Felix, Jr.” arcade machines to promote Wreck-It Ralph, complete with graphics and wear to make it seem as though they were made in the 1980s.
58. Author Aldous Huxley was hired by Disney to write a script for Alice in Wonderland, but Walt Disney rejected the script because he said he could only understand every third word.
59. To celebrate the premiere of Pinocchio, Walt Disney hired 11 little people to dress up as Pinocchio and greet children. After being left with a day’s worth of food and wine, the actors ended up naked and screaming obscenities at the crowd by mid-afternoon.
60. Technically, alcohol and the resulting hallucinations are what unlock Dumbo’s potential in Dumbo.
61. Disney’s Pocahontas originally featured a talking turkey named Redfeather who was going to be voiced by John Candy. The character was scrapped after John Candy’s death.
62. Production on Dreamworks SKG’s Antz was sped up in order to release before Pixar’s A Bug’s Life after the head of Pixar, John Lasseter, told his friend Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Dreamworks, about the film, which had already been in production for years.
63. Pixar’s John Lasseter was fired from Disney immediately after pitching The Brave Little Toaster, which he envisioned including both traditional and computer animation.
64. The Emperor’s New Groove was originally intended to be a much more serious and dramatic film called Kingdom of the Sun.
65. Over 50 children were hospitalized with salmonella from kissing frogs after the release of The Princess and the Frog.
66. Marc Okrand, who created both the Klingon and Vulcan languages for Star Trek, was hired to create an entire Atlantean language system for Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
How many of these did you already know & which ones didn't you know? Let us know in the comment section below!
2. Pixar credits its success to going against Disney’s standard narrative elements: No songs, no “I want” moments, no happy village, no love story, no villain.
3. The words at the beginning of The Lion King are Zulu for “Here comes a lion, father” and “Oh, yes, it’s a lion.”
4. When it was released, The Lion King experienced controversy when people thought the word “SEX” could be read in a puff of dust during one scene. It’s claimed that the dust actually spells “SFX,” and was a nod to the film’s special effects team.
5. A hyena biologist sued Disney for defamation of character for portraying hyenas as villains in The Lion King.
6. Abba were originally approached to do the music for The Lion King, but when they weren’t available, Disney went with Elton John.
7. The “asante sana squash banana” song that Rafiki sings The Lion King is actually an old nursery rhyme in Swahili.
8. The creators of The Lion King have been accused of lifting elements from an anime series from the 1960s called Kimba the White Lion.
9. Beast’s appearance in Beauty and the Beast is an amalgamation of several animals, including the head of a buffalo, the brow of a gorilla, the body of a bear, the mane of a lion, the tusks of a boar, and the legs and tail of a wolf.
10. Jackie Chan provided the speaking and singing voice for Beast in the Chinese version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
11. Aladdin’s appearance was almost based on Michael J. Fox, but was later modeled after Tom Cruise.
12. His movements were, in part, modeled after MC Hammer.
13. Rapunzel and Flynn from Tangled can be seen in Frozen.
14. The main characters in Disney’s Frozen sound out the name of the author on which the original story is based. Hans, Kristoff, Anna, Sven = Hans Christian Andersen.
15. Frozen was the first animated Disney film directed by a woman.
16. Ursula the Sea-Witch from The Little Mermaid was inspired by a drag queen named Divine.
17. It’s believed that the movement of Ariel’s hair underwater was based on footage of astronaut Sally Ride’s hair in zero gravity.
18. Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Donald Duck all make a brief cameo in The Little Mermaid.
19. If the events of Finding Nemo actually happened, and Nemo’s mother and siblings got eaten, Nemo’s father would have developed female sex organs and formed a breeding pair with Nemo.
20. Finding Nemo harmed clownfish populations when people started buying wild-caught, pet clownfish after seeing the movie.
21. The character Lots-o’-Huggin Bear in Toy Story 3 was originally meant to appear in Toy Story but Pixar didn’t have the technology to realistically animate his fur.
22. Also, Andy didn’t have a dad in Toy Story because human characters were too expensive and difficult to animate.
23. Joss Whedon co-wrote Toy Story. The character Rex the dinosaur was Whedon’s creation.
24. Woody’s full name is Woody Pride, but it has never been mentioned in any of the Toy Story movies.
25. While Pixar was working on Toy Story 2, someone accidentally ran a Unix command and deleted the entire film. Luckily, an animator had a copy of the data at home so she could work on the movie while caring for her new baby.
26. The ship used to portray the Edinburgh Trader in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest sank off the coast of North Carolina during Hurricane Sandy.
27. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is the most expensive film ever made.
28. Tangled, which cost $260 million, is the second-most expensive movie ever made.
29. That means that Tangled cost more to make than James Cameron’s Avatar.
30. The character Sid from Toy Story makes an appearance in Toy Story 3 as a garbage man.
31. Sulley from Monsters, Inc. was originally drawn with tentacles instead of legs. They were later changed because it was thought tentacles would be distracting, and the character was almost designed with legs, but no arms.
32. Boo’s real name is Mary.
33. When a 10-year-old girl with cancer was too sick to see Up in theaters, Pixar flew an employee to her home with a DVD copy of the movie for a private screening. She died seven hours after seeing the film.
34. It would take more than 9.4 million party balloons to lift Carl’s house in Up.
35. The character Russell from Up was modeled after a Pixar employee.
36. Young Ellie from Up is voiced by the director of the film’s daughter, Ellie Docter.
37. In a 2003 poll by Empire magazine of the worst accents in film, Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney accent in Mary Poppins came in second.
38. Dick Van Dyke’s accent coach during Mary Poppins was Irish, and according to Van Dyke, “didn’t do an accent any better than I did.”
39. The author of the Mary Poppins books, P.L. Travers, was not a fan of the film adaption of her books, and she spent most of the premiere in tears and refused to let Disney adapt the rest of the series.
40. The first use of animatronics in film was the robin that whistles a duet with Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. Andrews had wires going up her dress to move the bird. The bird’s movements were so realistic, critics were baffled as to how it was animated.
41. The word “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” actually predates Mary Poppins.
42. Songwriter Robert Sherman, who helped write “It’s a Small World (After All)” and the Mary Poppins soundtrack, led the first American troops into Dachau during World War II.
43. Disney’s Robin Hood has recycled animation from The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and other previous Disney films.
44. Sleeping Beauty underperformed at the box office during its initial release in 1959, resulting in massive layoffs at Disney. It was the last Disney princess movie until The Little Mermaid 30 years later.
45. Fa Ping, the name Mulan chooses while posing as a man, is a pun on the Chinese expression for “eye candy.”
46. The creator of Peter Pan, Jim Barrie, gave the rights of the story to a children’s hospital, so they could always collect royalties to fund the hospital.
47. The first-ever use of double tracking in music was in Cinderella when Walt Disney asked singer Ilene Woods if she could sing harmonies to herself.
48. The Disney character WALL-E is named after Walter Elias Disney (aka Walt Disney).
49. Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod, iMac, and iPhone, helped design the character Eve from Wall-E.
50. The voice of Lilo in Lilo & Stitch, Daveigh Chase, also played Samara in The Ring.
51. The actor who voiced Bambi as a young boy, Donnie Dunagan, went on to become the youngest drill instructor in Marines history and served three tours in Vietnam.
52. In an early draft of the script for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Judge Doom was revealed to be the man who killed Bambi’s mother.
53. Walt Disney received one regular and seven small Oscar statues when Snow White and the Seven Dwarves won an honorary Academy Award.
54. The vultures from The Jungle Book were originally meant to be voiced by the Beatles.
55. Disney had intended to produce a wine to market alongside the release of Ratatouille, but the company was advised by the California Wine Institute not to advertise alcohol with cartoon characters.
56. Development of Wreck-It Ralph started in the late 1980s, and the films were almost called High Score and Joe Jump.
57. Disney actually produced a number of “Fit-It Felix, Jr.” arcade machines to promote Wreck-It Ralph, complete with graphics and wear to make it seem as though they were made in the 1980s.
58. Author Aldous Huxley was hired by Disney to write a script for Alice in Wonderland, but Walt Disney rejected the script because he said he could only understand every third word.
59. To celebrate the premiere of Pinocchio, Walt Disney hired 11 little people to dress up as Pinocchio and greet children. After being left with a day’s worth of food and wine, the actors ended up naked and screaming obscenities at the crowd by mid-afternoon.
60. Technically, alcohol and the resulting hallucinations are what unlock Dumbo’s potential in Dumbo.
61. Disney’s Pocahontas originally featured a talking turkey named Redfeather who was going to be voiced by John Candy. The character was scrapped after John Candy’s death.
62. Production on Dreamworks SKG’s Antz was sped up in order to release before Pixar’s A Bug’s Life after the head of Pixar, John Lasseter, told his friend Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Dreamworks, about the film, which had already been in production for years.
63. Pixar’s John Lasseter was fired from Disney immediately after pitching The Brave Little Toaster, which he envisioned including both traditional and computer animation.
64. The Emperor’s New Groove was originally intended to be a much more serious and dramatic film called Kingdom of the Sun.
65. Over 50 children were hospitalized with salmonella from kissing frogs after the release of The Princess and the Frog.
66. Marc Okrand, who created both the Klingon and Vulcan languages for Star Trek, was hired to create an entire Atlantean language system for Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
How many of these did you already know & which ones didn't you know? Let us know in the comment section below!
