FUN FACTS (you may not know) about LADY and the TRAMP.

-acknowledgements: I will be referencing several sites from which I gathered the information for this blog. I will be including links and the url address for each to acknowledge the sources and just in case you would like to explore them further.

When I think of famous Cocker Spaniels, LADY is at the top of the list!! She was so lovable and cute, not to mention popular, that many families just had to have one for their children. Disney's movie put Cocker Spaniels in the spot light. I mean, who can resist such a wiggly bundle of happiness?

We all know the story... pampered purebred pooch falls for street cred mutt. Everyone "knows" Lady is too good for the Tramp, but she cannot resist his charms. Everyone is suspicious of Tramp and works against the poor boy until... Tramp saves the baby, is deemed the hero and is officially welcomed into Lady's family... and... they all live happily ever after. But! There are many factors connected to this movie that the general audience may not be aware of... For instance...

"Lady and the Tramp" was nearly buried in the back yard.

Did you know that this smash hit movie almost never got off the ground? A span of nearly two decades went by before the movie was produced and projected onto the big screen. In 1937, Disney's story man, Joe Grant brought Walt Disney an idea about a Spaniel named “Lady.” Walt encouraged Grant to develop the idea further, but after a series of storyboards fell flat, the idea went to the scrap heap and the S.S. Tramp was totally forgotten about for a few years. (And of course... WWII happened...)

A few years into the 40s, Walt Disney happened to read Ward Greene’s story, “Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog,” in Cosmopolitan, which got him to thinking about his own dog story that had faded into obscurity. Disney immediately brought Greene in to revamp that story. Greene penned a canine romance, and the Disney machine once again put the wheels in motion to generate what would become one of the most beloved Disney movies ever produced. However... there would be another glitch in the system before that was to happen...

Team “Lady” was well into pre-production when everything crashed to a halt in 1943. With the United States' involvement in WWII, the studio focused on making propaganda cartoons for WWII. 'Lady' was again confined to the kennel in order to promote a wartime parody of the now-villain Donald Duck who wore a Nazi uniform, did the goose'-step, and forcibly quacked

'Heil Hitler' at the end of a bayonet.

After the war, Lady and the Tramp was kept on the back-burner. Even though writers were still playing around with the script of the story, 'Tramp' stalled out for a few more years.

A gift Walt once gave his wife inspired a scene in the movie.

Meanwhile, It was during this time that one of the film’s most iconic scenes came together, where Jim Dear presents his wife, Darling, with a Cocker Spaniel puppy, whom she names, Lady.

This scene was inspired by one of Walt Disney’s own personal stories. You see, around Christmas one year, Walt had forgotten a dinner date and had accidentally ditched his wife, Lillian. In order to save his backside, Disney wrapped a Chow puppy in a hatbox and attempted to appease his angry wife with puppy love (literally). She was disappointed at first—Lillian preferred to choose her own hats—but quickly recovered when the pup emerged. Phew!! The ploy worked and all was well once again in the Disney household. I have always believed that puppy kisses can cure almost any ill.

The storyline and the script were finally agreed upon around 1953, and blessedly, the movie was released in 1955, making it the first Disney production shot in the new widescreen Cinemascope - a brand new format for films at that time. Though it took almost two decades, Joe Grant’s original idea was developed into a smash hit, and the wildly popular pooch kept her name, even after all those years: “Lady.”

The spaghetti scene almost didn’t happen.

It’s now one of the most famous (and parodied) scenes ever, but Walt was against that cozy pasta scene. Though he wanted the dogs to have human emotions, he just couldn’t wrap his head around two dogs romantically sharing a strand of spaghetti. If you’ve ever watched your dogs fight over a plate of leftovers, you can imagine why. Disney eventually relented after animator Frank Thomas worked up a rough draft of how it might work.

Peggy Lee sued Disney for $25 million 30 years after the fact.

Singer Peggy Lee provided speaking and singing voices for several characters in the Disney movie Lady and the Tramp (1955), playing the human "Darling" (in the first part of the movie), the dog Peg, and the two Siamese cats, Si and Am. She sang many of the film's songs, including "La La Lu",

"The Siamese Cat Song", and "He's a Tramp" which she co-wrote with Sonny Burke. In 1988, Lee sued for $25 million in royalties and damages, claiming that her original umbrella of “transcriptions,” and that Disney hadn’t given her anything for the millions of VHS tapes they later sold. ”I should think [Disney] would be willing to share, but I guess mice need a lot of cheese,” she later said.

The court awarded Lee $3.83 million in 1991.

Sonny Burke, Peggy Lee and Walt Disney

Trusty the Bloodhound almost didn’t make it.

Near the end of the movie, Trusty the bloodhound finds himself on the wrong end of the dogcatcher’s wagon. Though we later see him enjoying Christmas Day with his friends, it wasn’t supposed to end so happily. There are two stories as to why Trusty got a reprieve: one version is that Walt had gotten a lot of criticism for killing Bambi’s mother, and he wasn’t eager to repeat the experience. The other is that he saw Peggy Lee crying in the studio one day, and when he asked her why, she declared that the scene was just too sad. He argued that the movie needed the drama, but Lee pleaded with him to let Trusty live.

For whatever the reason, here are the changes that were made. After Lady's heartwarming and heartbreaking adventure with Tramp, Jock and Trusty then appear as he visits her. Trusty is then seen feeling guilty at the fact that he misjudged Tramp after he saved Lady and Jim Jr. from a vicious rat. To redeem themselves, Jock and Trusty rush to find the dog-watcher's wagon, where Jock realizes that Trusty never lost his sense of smell; in fact, Trusty's sense of smell is so acute that the rain concealing the trail helped him track it down. Trusty and Jock successfully stop the wagon, but Trusty was caught in the wheel, leaving him seriously injured, seemingly killed. However, on Christmas Day, it was shown to only be a broken leg, and Trusty joins his family for Christmas day.