19 Interesting Facts About Disney That Are Not Commonly Known

Did you know that Sleeping Beauty was a box office disaster and Disney had to do massive layoffs because of it?

Damjan

• Published in Disney
• February 12, 2020

When something has such a huge fan base, there are bound to be stories circling around, sometimes even made up. And that stories can draw attention away from the true ones.

Over the decades, Disney has produced many movies. With such a movie library, there are guaranteed to be so many interesting facts that the public wasn’t aware of. Of course, it is a crying shame, so people in the BuzzFeed Community took it upon themselves to reveal the most shocking and wild facts about Disney movies.

Some of them may seem familiar to you, and some will be a complete surprise.

1. Adriana Caselotti, who provided the voice for Snow White was paid only $20 per day for that.

She earned $970 in total by the time filming ended. If you count in the inflation that makes $17,221 overall in today’s money.

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2. In order to decide how Flynn Rider should look, the studio executives organized a "Hot Guy Meeting," where female employees picked their favorite physical attributes of their favorite male movie stars.

Directors Nathan Greno and Bryon Howard portrayed the entire 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."

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3. Scary witch.

The witch in the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was so scary that the children were often peeing their pants when she appeared. Radio City Music Hall in New York had to do new seat upholstery in their theater because of that.

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4. Ariel from the Little Mermaid was based on Alyssa Milano.

Milano revealed that she wasn’t aware Disney did this until a year after the film 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."

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5. And Aladdin was based on Tom Cruise’s appearance.

The documentary Diamond in the Rough says: “The Making of Aladdin, Michael J. Fox was originally the inspiration for Aladdin, but animators later switched to Tom Cruise.”

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6. Jodi Benson made a recording of "Part of Your World" song in a murky, remote sound booth so she could give lonely and intimate tone to her singing.

It was an incredibly tense process.

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7. Donnie Dunagan, who gave Bambi his voice, was a high-ranking Marine but didn’t want to tell anyone about his voiceover work because he was afraid people would call him Major Bambi.

In an interview, Dunagan stated, "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."

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8. A wise-cracking turkey in Pocahontas, Redfeather, was supposed to be played by John Candy, but the directors decided to remove that role completely after the actor’s death.

Disney also chose to make all animals in the movie without voice, and that's when Redfeather was swapped with Meeko, Pocahontas' pet raccoon.

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9. Bobby Driscoll, who gave voice to Peter Pan and vas a model for the character’s appearance, died broke, unclaimed, and unidentified in an empty apartment building at the age of 31.

Driscoll received a Juvenile Academy Award for his work in 1949. As a teen he was earning over $50,000 per year but wasted most of it on drugs. He was buried in an unmarked grave after his death in 1968 since no one claimed the body. His mother discovered what happened to him years after, thanks to a fingerprint match.

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10. Dumbo is the only Disney movie where the main character doesn’t speak.

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11. The Princess Diaries was, in fact, produced by Whitney Houston.

And Shonda Rhimes was the co-writer for the sequel.

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12. Sleeping Beauty was a box office flop, so Disney had huge layoffs all over 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.”

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13. Walt Disney received one regular-sized Honorary Oscar and seven small statuettes in 1939, each being one of the seven dwarfs, to honor his groundbreaking work on 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.”

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14. Only one Disney Princess has dimples - Tiana from The Princess and the Frog.

"According to Mark Henn, one of Disney's supervising animators, they gave Tiana dimples and made her left-handed because Anika Noni Rose, who voiced her, had dimples and was left-handed."

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15. Angela Lansbury recorded the song "Beauty and the Beast" in one take, even though she was traveling all through the night to get to the studio.

Paige O’Hara, who gave voice to Belle, revealed: “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.”

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16. Bambi is the only Disney film where the villain is shown on the screen.

"Man" (aka the hunter who kills Bambi's mom) is also listed as number 20 on AFI's "100 Heroes and Villains" list. He can choke, tbh.”

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17. John Ratzenberger is the only actor that gave voice to a character in every movie Pixar ever made.

"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."

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18. Most of the animation cels from old Disney movies are destroyed because animators would literally throw them around and imagine to ice skate on them after the films were done.

"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."

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19. Wayne Allwine and Russi Taylor, who gave voices for Mickey and Minnie Mouse, were a married couple in real life also.

"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."

Damjan