Story development According to the film's publicity materials, the origins of
Lady and the Tramp was inspired by an incident in 1925. At the time,
Walt Disney had been actively working at the
Disney Brothers Studio and was seldomly at home with his wife
Lillian. One night, Disney became heavily preoccupied with one cartoon that had stayed overnight at the studio while his wife waited patiently to return home. Guilt-ridden, Disney decided to purchase a dog companion for Lillian on Christmas. Lillian had disliked dogs, but regardless, Disney asked her if she had wanted what breed of dog would she want if she had to make a choice. She answered with a
chow dog, as she read somewhere they were less odorous. Disney then purchased a chow puppy from a nearby kennel on Christmas Eve and kept the dog near his brother
Roy's house until the next morning. On Christmas Day, Disney presented Lillian with a peace offering kept inside a hat box. She opened the box expecting a hat, but she immediately floored when she saw the puppy with a red ribbon around its neck. The Disneys named their new puppy Sunnee. Years later, Lillian recalled: "I forgave him. You can't stay mad at Walt for very long." This inspired the film's opening sequence, in which Darling unwraps a hat box on Christmas morning and finds Lady inside. In 1937,
Joe Grant, a storyboard artist working for Walt Disney Productions, pitched an idea inspired by the antics of his
English Springer Spaniel Lady, and how she got "shoved aside" by Grant's new baby. The twist is that the story would be told from a dog's perspective. Grant then presented Disney with several sketches of Lady, which Disney enjoyed. He then commissioned Grant to commence story development on a new animated feature. According to
Frank Tashlin, who had worked on the film's early development, a rough story outline had been written by 1940. The outline included two
Siamese cats that were named Nip and Tuck as secondary characters. Tashlin stated: "Joe Grant had models of the dog, Lady, and
Sam [Cobean] and I did a story. I never saw the film...I think we had rats coming after the baby at the end...did they have that? Then that's what we did." In 1943, story development resumed when Disney decided to produce the story into an animated featurette. Grant pitched the new story, and while Disney was fascinated by the charm of the character Lady, he felt the story was lacking something "extra". Disney explained, "We discovered during our preliminary conferences that we only had half of the story we wanted. Our prim, well-bred, house-sheltered little Lady, when confronted with a crisis, just up and ran away." That same year, Disney then read the 1937 short story "Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog" by
Ward Greene, an editor for
King Features, which also distributed Disney comic strips. The story was later published in the February 1945 issue of
Cosmopolitan magazine. In the story, Happy Dan was a streetwise, happy-go-lucky mutt compared to Lady, in Grant's story, who was refined. Disney contacted Greene and suggested a romance between the dogs, stating, "Your dog and my dog have got to get together!" Greene agreed, and he promptly rewrote his story retitling it "Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog, and Miss Patsy, the Beautiful Spaniel." Disney subsequently acquired the rights to the story. Back at the studio, the stray dog was first named Homer, Since Huemer and Grant had left the Disney studio in 1948 and 1949, respectively, the final story development were done mostly by
Erdman Penner and Joe Rinaldi. A solid story began to consolidate in 1953, based on Grant's storyboards and Greene's short story.
Casting Barbara Luddy was a radio actress best known for her role on the
First Nighter radio program. From a dozen auditions from several actresses, Luddy was selected as the voice of Lady. She later provided the voice for several Disney characters, including
Merryweather in
Sleeping Beauty (1959),
Kanga in the
Winnie the Pooh featurettes, and Mother Rabbit and the church mouse Mother Sexton in
Robin Hood (1973). Backed by the ballad "
Bella Notte" sung by
George Givot, the animation has since become one of the most indelible romantic scenes in cinema history. Eric Larson animated the character Peg, among other characters. He became acquainted with the character's voice actress Peggy Lee, and watched her recording sessions. Larson reflected, "She did some of her gestures as she went through the dialogue. I thought, 'God, if I could get a lot of that in the dog, I could at least have some fun with it. When he designed the character, Larson took inspiration from Lee and
Mae West; Peg's hairstyle was supposedly inspired by
Veronica Lake. Disney was impressed with Larson's animation that he selected him to direct
Sleeping Beauty (1959), which was simultaneously in production, after Wilfred Jackson had suffered a heart attack. Wolfgang Reitherman, known for action-driven animation, animated the sequence where Tramp fights several alley dogs and Tramp's fight with the rat in the nursery room. Notably, for the rat fight sequence, Reitherman kept multiple rats in a large cage next to his desk while animating the sequence so he could perfect the rodent's physical movement and behavior. Milt Kahl animated nearly all the dog characters, but primarily focused on Tramp. John Lounsbery worked closely with Kahl on animating Tramp. He also animated Tony and Joe, the respective proprietor and chef of an Italian restaurant, and Bull, an English bulldog. Les Clark animated the scenes of Lady as a puppy. While reviewing the animation dailies, Disney decided to remove several animators, whom he felt had focused too much attention on detail and had lost sight of the characters. He reassigned them to work on
Sleeping Beauty for six months and placed them back on
Lady and the Tramp in hopes they would be rejuvenated with "new enthusiasm." To compensate for the production delays, animators had to work six days a week to have the film finished on time.
Art direction An early proposed version of
Lady and the Tramp was set in San Francisco during the
1906 earthquake.
Mary Blair provided early conceptual art for the film during the 1940s, as it was one of the first projects she had worked on for the Disney studios. However, the film's setting was changed to occur during the turn of the twentieth century in
New England, which resonated with Walt Disney. During a 1952 story meeting, Disney affectionately remembered: "In this period—I can remember those days, you know—I lived in a little town in
Missouri, and there were only two automobiles. It was 1908. They began to come in then."
Claude Coats was then appointed as the key background artist. He explained, "The period was turn-of-the-century
Americana, so we made much use of porch furniture of that era, plus the gingerbread ornamentation of the houses, the curly-cue fences, etc." To create greater authenticity, Coats and the artists studied photographs of older Los Angeles mansions that reflected the ornamented
gingerbread architecture within the once-fashionable
West Adams neighborhood. To maintain a dog's perspective, Coats built miniature models of the interiors of Jim Dear and Darling's house, and took photos and shot film at a low perspective as reference.
Tony Baxter, who was mentored by Coats, further explained: "[He] was trained in architecture so was particularly good at giving credibility to the setting. Coats liked to build models so he could see how things would translate dimensionally."
Music The score for the film was composed and conducted by
Oliver Wallace who composed music from previous movies stating with
Dumbo. It was the last Disney animated film for which Oliver Wallace did the score, as the scores for the next six Disney animated films were composed by
George Bruns, starting with
Sleeping Beauty (1959) until
Robin Hood (1973). Recording artist Peggy Lee wrote the songs with
Sonny Burke and assisted with the score as well. 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. On August 27, 2015, Disney released an expanded two-disc album as an installment of
The Legacy Collection series to coincide with the film's 60th anniversary. The first disc includes the film's complete original soundtrack. The second disc included one demo recording, two
Lost Chords recordings, and six tracks from the 1962
Disneyland Records vinyl album
Lady and the Tramp: All the Songs from the Motion Picture.
Songs Original songs performed in the film include: ==Release==