Work on the beloved Lady and the Tramp, released on this day in 1955, actually began in 1937 when Walt bought the story from Ward Greene, a friend and head the King Features Syndicate, which distributed Disney comic strips. As Neal Gabler recounts in his recent biography, Walt Disney: Triumph of the American Imagination, Lady and the Tramp took several narrative turns during its long pre-production period. “Joe Grant and Dick Huemer introduced two calculating Siamese cats,” Gabler recounts, “Ted Sears introduced a dog pound, and Greene himself apparently introduced a romance—though Grant and Huemer objected to the idea of two dogs falling in love as ‘distasteful’ and ‘utterly contrary to nature.'” It was Walt, Gabler notes, who scratched out the name “mutt” in the script and inserted “Tramp” in its place, and though work on the film was halted when World War II broke out, it’s obvious Walt felt a special connection to the story. In 1952 Roy encouraged Walt to put the film back into production with the proviso that the production team kept the cost down to not more than double the price per foot of a short. And, as Gabler notes, “the film missed its original target date, in part because it was being animated in the widescreen Cinemascope process, which took so much more time than the standard-format animations that it doubled the cost of the backgrounds. Animators had to work-six-day weeks down the stretch… but when it was released it was another Disney success.”
