| Lady and the Tramp | |
|---|---|
Original theatrical release poster |
|
| Directed by | Clyde Geronimi Wilfred Jackson Hamilton Luske |
| Produced by | Walt Disney |
| Screenplay by | Erdman Penner Joe Rinaldi Ralph Wright Don DaGradi |
| Story by | Joe Grant Ward Greene (novel) |
| Starring | Peggy Lee Barbara Luddy Larry Roberts Bill Thompson Bill Baucom |
| Music by | Oliver Wallace |
| Editing by | Don Halliday |
| Studio | Walt Disney Productions |
| Distributed by | Buena Vista Distribution |
| Release date(s) | June 22, 1955 |
| Running time | 75 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $4 million |
| Box office | $93,602,326 |
Lady and the Tramp is a 1955 American animated film produced by Walt Disney and released to theaters on June 22, 1955, by Buena Vista Distribution. The fifteenth animated feature in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, it was the first animated feature filmed in the CinemaScope widescreen film process.[1] The story centers on an anthropomorphic female American Cocker Spaniel named Lady who lives with a refined, upper middle-class family, and a male anthropomorphic stray called the Tramp.
Contents |
On Christmas morning in 1909, Jim Dear gives his wife Darling a cocker spaniel puppy and call her Lady. Lady enjoys a happy life with the couple and with a pair of dogs from the neighborhood, a Scottish Terrier named Jock and a bloodhound named Trusty. Meanwhile, across town by the railway, a schnauzer-mix stray mutt, referred to as The Tramp, lives life from moment to moment, be it begging for scraps from the local Italian restaurant or protecting his fellow strays Peg (a Lhasa Apso) and Bull (an English bulldog) from the local dog catcher.
As she blossoms into a one-year-old, Jim Dear and Darling become increasingly impatient with Lady, hurting her feelings. Jock and Trusty visit her, and determine that the change in behavior is due to Darling's pregnancy. While Jock and Trusty try to explain what a baby is, Tramp offers his own opinions to the dogs. Jock and Trusty disapprove of the stray, ordering order him out of the yard; as Tramp leaves, he reminds Lady that "when the baby moves in, the dog moves out".
Eventually, the baby arrives and Jim Dear and Darling introduce Lady to the infant, to whom Lady grows fond. Soon after, the two decide to go on a trip together, leaving their Aunt Sarah to look after the baby and the house. Aunt Sarah, however, dislikes dogs, refusing to let Lady near the baby. When Lady clashes with Aunt Sarah's two trouble-making Siamese cats, Si and Am, she takes Lady to a pet shop to get a muzzle. Lady flees, but is pursued by some street dogs. After the Tramp rescues Lady, the two visit a zoo, where Tramp tricks a beaver into removing the muzzle. Tramp later shows Lady how he lives "footloose and collar-free", eventually leading into a candlelit Italian dinner.
As Tramp escorts Lady back home, Lady is caught by the dog-catcher. At the pound, the other dogs admire Lady's license and reveal Tramp's past girlfriends and how he is unlikely to ever settle down. Eventually, Lady is collected by Aunt Sarah, and is chained to the backyard doghouse. Jock and Trusty visit to comfort her, but when Tramp arrives and tries to apologize, thunder starts to rumble as Lady angrily confronts him about his past girlfriends and failure to rescue her, after which Tramp leaves.
Moments later, as it starts to rain, Lady sees a rat trying to sneak into the yard (The same rat that had tried to get in before at the beginning of the film). While the rat is afraid of Lady, it is able to evade her and enter the house. Despite Lady's unsuccessful attempt at warning Aunt Sarah, Tramp hears her and runs back to help. Tramp enters the house and confronts the rat in the nursery. Meanwhile, Lady breaks free and races to the nursery to find the rat on the baby's crib. Tramp kills the rat, but knocks over the crib in the process, awakening the infant. When Aunt Sarah comes to the baby's aid, she sees the two dogs and thinks they are responsible. She pushes Tramp into a closet and Lady into the basement, then calls the pound to take the Tramp away.
Jim Dear and Darling return as the dogcatcher departs. They release Lady, who leads them and Aunt Sarah to the rat, clearing Tramp. Having overheard everything, Jock and Trusty chase after the dogcatcher's wagon. Jock is convinced Trusty has long since lost his sense of smell, but the bloodhound is able to find the wagon. They bark at the horses, who rear up and topple the wagon onto a utility pole. Jim Dear arrives by car with Lady, and Lady is happily reunited with Tramp. However, Trusty is injured in the struggle and Jock howls in sorrow.
A year later, on Christmas Day, Tramp, now a part of Lady's family, has his own collar and license. Aunt Sarah has also made amends with Lady by sending her a box of dog biscuits as an apology for her mistreatment. Lady and Tramp raise four puppies together: three resemble Lady (Annette, Danielle, and Collette) and the other resembles Tramp (Scamp). Jock comes to see the family along with Trusty, who has a broken leg.
In early script versions, the Tramp was first called Homer, then Rags and Bozo.[2] However in the finished film, the Tramp never calls himself a proper name, although most of the film's canine cast refer to him as "the Tramp." The Tramp has other names that are given to him by the families he weekly visits for food, such as Mike and Fritzi. However, he doesn't belong to a single family, so his name is never confirmed,[3] although most comics and indeed the film's own sequel assume that he is also named Tramp by Jim Dear and Darling. He is most likely a Schnauzer-mix.
The character that eventually became Aunt Sarah was softened for the movie, in comparison with earlier treatments. In the film, she is a well-meaning busybody aunt (revealed to be the sister of Darling's mother in the Greene novelization) who adores her cats. Earlier drafts had Aunt Sarah appear more as a stereotypical meddling and overbearing mother-in-law. Her singing ability is apparently non-existent. While she is antagonistic towards Lady and Tramp at first, she sends them a box of dog biscuits for Christmas to make amends for having so badly misunderstood them.
Earlier versions of the storyline, drafted in 1943 during the war, had the two cats appear as a sinister pair, suggesting the yellow peril. They were originally named Nip and Tuck.[2] In Ward Greene's novelization, they tearfully express remorse over causing the Tramp's impending execution by hiding the rat's body as a joke, and then try to make amends, while in the film they do not partake of the climactic scene.
In pre-production, Jim Dear was known as Jim Brown, and Darling was named Elizabeth. These were dropped to highlight Lady's point of view. In a very early version, published as a short story in a 1944 Disney children's anthology, Lady refers to them as "Mister" and "Missis". To maintain a dog's perspective, Darling and Jim's faces are rarely shown. The background artists made models of the interiors of Jim Dear and Darling's house, and shot photos and film at a low perspective as reference to maintain a dog's view.[4]
The film's opening sequence, in which Darling unwraps a hat box on Christmas morning and finds Lady inside, is based upon an actual incident in Walt Disney's life when he presented his wife Lily with a Chow puppy as a gift in a hat box.[5]
The Beaver in this film is similar to the character of Gopher in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, down to the speech pattern: a whistling noise when he makes the "S" sound. On the Lady and the Tramp Platinum Edition DVD he demonstrates how the effect was done, and that a whistle was eventually used because it was difficult to maintain the effect.[4]
The Beaver's voice was created by Stan Freberg, who has an extensive background in commercial and comedy recordings. He was known for his works with Warner Bros. Cartoons, but at the time that studio was briefly closed due to studio owner Jack Warner's belief that 3-D film would trump animation. The same closure led to animator Chuck Jones doing work on Sleeping Beauty.
The rat, a somewhat comical character in some early sketches, became a great deal more frightening, due to the need to raise dramatic tension.
In 1937 legendary Disney story man Joe Grant[6] approached Walt Disney with some sketches he had made of his Springer Spaniel named Lady and some of her regular antics. Disney enjoyed the sketches and told Grant to put them together as a storyboard. When Grant returned with his boards, Disney was not pleased and the story was shelved.[7]
In 1943 Walt read in Cosmopolitan a short story written by Ward Greene, called "Happy Dan, The Whistling Dog".[2] He was interested in the story and bought the rights to it.[8]
By 1949 Grant had left the studio,[6] but Disney story men were continually pulling Grant's original drawings and story off the shelf to retool.[7] Finally a solid story began taking shape in 1953,[8] based on Grant's storyboards and Greene's short story.[7] Greene later wrote a novelization of the film that was released two years before the film itself, at Walt Disney's insistence, so that audiences would be familiar with the story.[4] Grant didn't receive credit for any story work in the film, an issue that animation director Eric Goldberg hoped to rectify in the Lady and the Tramp Platinum Edition's behind-the-scenes vignette that explained Grant's role.[7]
This was the first animated feature filmed in CinemaScope.[2] This new innovation presented some additional problems for the animators: the expansion of canvas space created more realism, but gave fewer closeups.[8] It also made it difficult for a single character to dominate the screen, so that groups had to be spread out to keep the screen from appearing sparse.[2] Longer takes become necessary since constant jump-cutting would seem too busy or annoying.[1] Layout artists essentially had to reinvent their technique. Animators had to remember that they could move their characters across a background instead of the background passing behind them.[8] Yet the animators overcame these obstacles during the action scenes, such as the Tramp killing the rat.[1]
More problems arose as the premiere date got closer. Although CinemaScope was becoming a growing interest to movie-goers, not all theaters had the capabilities at the time. Upon learning this, Walt issued two versions of the film to be created: one in widescreen, and another in the Academy ratio. This involved gathering the layout artists to restructure key scenes when characters were on the outside area of the screen.[9]
The finished film is slightly different from what was originally planned. Although both the original script and the final product shared most of the same elements, it would still be revised and revamped. Originally, Lady was to have only one next door neighbor, a Ralph Bellamy-type canine named Hubert. Hubert was later replaced by Jock and Trusty. A scene created but then deleted was one in which, while Lady fears of the arrival of the baby, she has a "Parade of the Shoes" nightmare (similar to Dumbo's "Pink Elephants on Parade" nightmare) where a baby bootie splits in two, then four, and continues to multiply. The dream shoes then fade into real shoes, their wearer exclaiming that the baby has been born.
Another cut scene was after Trusty says "Everybody knows, a dog's best friend is his human". This leads to Tramp describing a world where the roles of both dogs and humans are switched; the dogs are the masters and vice-versa.[7]
Prior to being just "The Tramp," the character went through a number of suggested names including Homer, Rags, and Bozo. It was thought in the 1950s that the term "tramp" would not be acceptable, but since Walt Disney approved of the choice, it was considered safe under his acceptance. On early story boards shown on the Backstage Disney DVD had listed description "a tramp dog" with "Homer" or one of the mentioned prior names.[4]
The spaghetti scene, wherein Lady and the Tramp eat opposite ends of a single strand of spaghetti until meeting in the middle, is often parodied, including in the film's own sequel, Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure.
The movie was originally released in theaters on June 22, 1955. At the time, the film took in a higher figure than any other Disney animated feature since Snow White.[10] An episode of Disneyland called A Story of Dogs aired before the film’s release.[11] The film was also reissued to theaters in 1962, 1971, 1980, and 1986.
The movie was released on VHS and Laserdisc in 1987 (this was in Disney's The Classics video series) and 1998 (this was in the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection video series). A Disney Limited Issue series DVD was released on November 23, 1999.
"Lady and the Tramp" was remastered and restored for DVD on February 28, 2006, as the seventh installment of Disney's Platinum Editions series.[12] One million copies of the Platinum Edition were sold on February 28, 2006.[13] The Platinum Edition DVD went on moratorium on January 31, 2007, along with the 2006 DVD reissue of Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure.[14]
The film will be released on February 7, 2012 for Blu-ray combo pack as the fifth installment of Disney's Diamond Editions series.[15] A standalone 1-disc DVD edition will also be available on March 27, 2012.[16]
Despite being an enormous success at the box office, the film was initially panned by many critics: one indicated that the dogs had "the dimensions of hippos," another that "the artists' work is below par".[17] However the film has since come to be regarded as a classic.
Lady and the Tramp was named number 95 out of the "100 Greatest Love Stories of All Time" by the American Film Institute in their 100 Years...100 Passions special, as one of only two animated films to appear on the list, along with Disney's Beauty and the Beast (which ranked 34th).[18]
In 2010, Rhapsody (online music service) called its accompanying soundtrack one of the all-time great Disney & Pixar Soundtracks.[19]
In June 2011, TIME named it one of "The 25 All-TIME Best Animated Films".[20]
| Year | Ceremony | Award | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1956 | BAFTA Awards[21] | Best Animated Film | Nominated |
| David di Donatello Awards[22] | Best Foreign Producer (Walt Disney) |
Won | |
| 2006 | Satellite Awards[23] | Best Youth DVD | Nominated |
(songs and musical cues as listed on CD)
| No. | Title | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | "Main Title (Bella Notte) / The Wag of a Dog's Tail" | |
| 2. | "Peace on Earth (Silent Night)" | |
| 3. | "It Has a Ribbon / Lady to Bed / A Few Mornings Later" | |
| 4. | "Sunday / The Rat / Morning Paper" | |
| 5. | "A New Blue Collar / Lady Talks To Jock & Trusty / It's Jim Dear" | |
| 6. | "What a Day! / Breakfast at Tony's" | |
| 7. | "Warning / Breakout / Snob Hill / A Wee Bairn" | |
| 8. | "Countdown to B-Day" | |
| 9. | "Baby's First Morning / What Is a Baby / La La Lu" | |
| 10. | "Going Away / Aunt Sarah" | |
| 11. | "The Siamese Cat Song / What's Going on Down There" | |
| 12. | "The Muzzle / Wrong Side of the Tracks" | |
| 13. | "You Poor Kid / He's Not My Dog" | |
| 14. | "Through the Zoo / A Log Puller" | |
| 15. | "Footloose and Collar-Free / A Night At The Restaurant / Bella Notte" | |
| 16. | "It's Morning / Ever Chase Chickens / Caught" | |
| 17. | "Home Sweet Home" | |
| 18. | "The Pound" | |
| 19. | "What a Dog / He's a Tramp" | |
| 20. | "In the Doghouse / The Rat Returns / Falsely Accused / We've Got to Stop That Wagon / Trusty's Sacrifice" | |
| 21. | "Watch the Birdie / Visitors" | |
| 22. | "Finale (Peace on Earth)" |
Recording artist Peggy Lee wrote the songs with Sonny Burke, and assisted with the score as well.[2] In the film she sings: "He's a Tramp", "La La Lu", "The Siamese Cat Song", and "What Is a Baby?".[28] She helped promote the film on the Disney TV series, explaining her work with the score and singing a few of the film's numbers.[2] These appearances are available as part of the Lady and the Tramp Platinum Edition DVD set.
On 16 November 1988 Peggy Lee sued the Walt Disney Company for breach of contract claiming that she still retained rights to the transcripts, including those to videotape.[29] She was awarded $2.3m in 1991 after a protracted legal battle with the studio.[30]