Cinderella (1950) on Netflix

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cinderella (1950)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

• Nearly 380 applicants were auditioned for the role of Cinderella; in March 1948 The Hollywood Reporter said singer Jeannie McKeon had been signed to voice her, but the deal fell through, and Ilene Woods announced on national radio that she had been cast.
• Walt Disney's brother Roy O. Disney was reluctant to greenlight another film and asked Walt to consider selling the studio and retiring with the money they had; after arguing for weeks, Roy conceded and allowed a new feature-length animated film to be made.
• None of animator Kimball's designs for Lucifer the cat pleased Walt Disney, so Disney visited Kimball's home to see his steam train and, on seeing his calico cat, remarked, "Hey, there's your model for Lucifer".
• Cinderella's profits, along with money from record sales, music publishing and merchandise, gave Disney the cash flow to finance animated and live-action productions, establish his own distribution company, enter television production, and begin building Disneyland and the Florida Project.
• After quarreling with Dalton S. Reymond while writing Song of the South (1946), Maurice Rapf was reassigned to Cinderella, where he wrote her as less passive than Snow White and more rebellious against her stepfamily.
• To keep production costs down, actors were filmed on soundstages in spring 1948 mouthing to a playback of the dialogue, and the footage was used to check the plot, timing and movement of characters before they were animated, as had been done on Snow White, Pinocchio and Fantasia.
• Animator Eric Larson first drew Cinderella as a sixteen-year-old with braids and a pug nose, but Disney preferred Marc Davis's design of an exotic dame with a long swan-like neck, and brought in Ken O'Brien to make "his gals and Marc's gals look like the same gal".
• Walt Disney wanted the Fairy Godmother tall and regal, like the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio (1940), but animator Kahl disagreed and, after Verna Felton was cast as her voice, convinced Disney of his undignified concept of the character.