19 Wild Disney Movie Facts That Honestly Made My Jaw Drop
Sleeping Beauty did so badly at the box office that Disney had to have massive layoffs.
We asked the BuzzFeed Community to tell us their favorite Disney movie facts that are actually pretty shocking. Here are the wild results.
1. Adriana Caselotti was only paid $20 a day to provide the voice for Snow White.
Caselotti said she was paid $20 a day to act and sing for the role, totaling $970 by the time shooting ended. Adjusted for inflation, that's about $355 per day and $17,221 overall.
2. Flynn Rider's appearance was designed during a "Hot Guy Meeting" where women from the studio picked out their favorite physical attributes from pictures of Hollywood's leading men.
Directors Nathan Greno and Bryon Howard described the whole process, saying, "When we were designing the character, we were trying to get the look down, so one of the things we did was bring a lot of the females in from the building. We wanted this guy to be really, really handsome, so we put up photos all over the walls of the most handsome men in all of Hollywood history and sort of picked out which features sort of worked best. We just listened and let the girls have at it. In the end, we put all this stuff together, so he's this very handsome fellow."
3. Radio City Music Hall in New York had to re-upholster its seats in the giant theater because so many children kept peeing their pants when the witch came on screen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
4. When creating The Little Mermaid, animators based Ariel's appearance on Alyssa Milano.
In an interview, Milano revealed that she didn't even know Disney did this until a year after the movie was released: "Disney drew Ariel's face from pictures of me. This is something that I didn't know while it was going on, and then a year after the film came out they asked me to do sort of a 'making of, behind-the-scenes' special on it, and they told me then, which I thought was really cool."
5. And Tom Cruise was the inspiration for Aladdin's appearance.
According to the documentary Diamond in the Rough: The Making of Aladdin, Michael J. Fox was originally the inspiration for Aladdin, but animators later switched to Tom Cruise.
6. Jodi Benson recorded "Part of Your World" in a dark, isolated sound booth to help produce a more lonely and intimate tone in her voice that Ariel would be feeling in the scene.
7. Donnie Dunagan, who provided the voice of Bambi, was a high-ranking Marine but refused to tell anyone about his voiceover work in fear that they'd call him Major Bambi.
In an interview, Dunagan said, "I never said a word to anybody about Bambi... the image in people's minds of Bambi was of a little frail deer, and I am a commander in the Marine Corps boot camp... I just thought to myself, 'I don't think I want all these young marines to call myself Major Bambi,' and I kept my mouth shut."
8. John Candy was supposed to play Redfeather, a wise-cracking turkey in Pocahontas, but after his untimely death they decided to cut the character completely.
Disney also decided to make all animals in the movie mute, and that's when Redfeather was replaced with Meeko, Pocahontas' pet raccoon.
9. Bobby Driscoll, who voiced Peter Pan and served as the model for the character, died penniless, unclaimed, and unidentified in an abandoned apartment building at the age of 31.
Driscoll was awarded a Juvenile Academy Award for his work in 1949. As a teen he was making over $50,000 a year but spent most of it on drugs. He died in New York in 1968 and was buried in an unmarked grave because no one claimed his body. It wasn't until over a year later that his mother (and everyone else) discovered what happened to him, thanks to a fingerprint match from the police station.
10. Dumbo is one of the shortest full-length Disney movies, and it's also the only Disney movie where the main character never speaks.
11. The Princess Diaries was actually produced by Whitney Houston.
And the movie's sequel was even co-written by Shonda Rhimes!
12. Sleeping Beauty performed so badly at the box office that Disney had massive layoffs throughout the animation department.
The film cost $6 million to make (for reference, that was twice the cost of either of Disney's last three movies: Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, or Lady and the Tramp) but only grossed $5.3 million at the box office. Over time, however, the movie kept getting re-released in theaters, ultimately grossing $51.6 million. Adjusted for inflation, Sleeping Beauty is now the second-highest grossing movie of 1959 ($623.56 million domestically). Not bad for a movie that was once considered a box office failure.
13. In 1939, Walt Disney received one regular-sized Honorary Oscar and seven miniature statuettes, each representing one of the seven dwarfs, to honor his pioneering work for Snow White.
The Honorary Oscars were given with this acknowledgment from The Academy: "To Walt Disney for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, recognized as a significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field for the motion picture cartoon." Walt Disney also holds the records for the most amount of Oscar nominations (59) and wins (22) of any person.
14. Tiana from The Princess and the Frog is the only Disney Princess with dimples.
15. Angela Lansbury recorded the song "Beauty and the Beast" in a single take, even after staying up all night on a flight.
Paige O’Hara, who voiced Belle, revealed what happened in an interview, saying: “I remember the day we were in the recording studio with the amazing Broadway singers in the background chorus and the amazing [New York Philarmonic] orchestra. And then Ms. Lansbury – who I have admired my whole life – came in after being up all night... and was a trooper. We were all worried she would be too exhausted, and then she comes out and sings ‘Beauty and the Beast’ in one take.”
17. John Ratzenberger is the only person to have voiced a character in every single Pixar movie.
Here's the full list of characters, some of whom are probably more recognizable than others: The Toy Story series – Hamm, A Bug's Life – P.T. Flea, the Monsters, Inc. series – Yeti, the Finding Nemo series – Fish School/misc. characters, the The Incredibles series – Underminer, the Cars series – Mack/misc. characters, Ratatouille – Mustafa, Wall-E – John, Up – Construction Foreman Tom, Brave – Gordon, Inside Out – Fritz, The Good Dinosaur– Earl, and Coco – Juan Ortodoncia. His characters in 2020's Soul and Onward are currently unknown.
18. Most animation cels from old Disney movies are lost forever because animators would literally toss them around and pretend to ice skate on them after the movies were made.
Back in the '30s and early '40s, cartoons were painted on cels that were made of nitrate celluloid. Keith Stephens, an animation-art expert, said, "Back in 1940, the artists working on Disney's Fantasia also would toss the cels on the floor once they were filmed... Nobody cared. They'd ice skate on them and play slip 'n' slide on the slick piles. That's why 95% of all vintage animation cels are lost... forever."
19. And Wayne Allwine and Russi Taylor, who provided the voices for Mickey and Minnie Mouse, were married in real life.
Both actors provided the voices of these iconic characters for decades. They married each other in 1991 and stayed together until Allwine's death in 2009.