"Darling's" real name is never used, even her friends call her "darling" at the baby shower. It is unclear if that's her name or an endearment.
Walt Disney originally didn't want to include the 'Bella Note' spaghetti-eating scene, now one of the most iconic moments in the whole Disney canon.
Walt Disney read Ward Greene's story, "Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog" in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1943 and eventually hired Greene to include the Dan character in the film during the pre-production stage. But Greene wrote and published an entirely new story "Lady and the Tramp; the Story of Two Dogs," which became the source of the film.
Peggy Lee helped promote the film on the Disney TV series, explaining her work with the score and singing a few numbers.
Peggy Lee later sued Disney for breach of contract claiming that she still retained rights to the transcripts. She was awarded $2.3m, but not without a lengthy legal battle with the studio which was finally settled in 1991.
Barbara Luddy was nearly 50 when she voiced the young Lady.
A dream sequence where giant dogs take their owners for walkies was scrapped because of adverse audience reactions.
A model of the inside of Jim Dear and Darling's house was built as a guide for staging.
As the release date neared, Walt Disney was dismayed to learn that not all theaters were equipped to show a film in CinemaScope. Consequently, another version of the film had to be made, this time in original aspect ratio.
As the story was being developed at the studio, Ward Greene wrote a novelization. Walt Disney insisted that this be released some two years before the film itself to give audiences time to familiarize themselves with the plot.
At the time of its release, this was the highest grossing Disney cartoon since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Before animating the fight between Tramp and the rat, animator Wolfgang Reitherman kept rats in a cage next to his desk to study their actions.
CinemaScope presented some new problems for the animators. The wider canvas space made it difficult for a single character to dominate the screen, and groups had to be spread out to keep the screen from appearing too sparse.
Disney's 15th animated feature.
Hiring Peggy Lee arguably was the first instance of a superstar voice being used for an animated film.
In 1937, story man Joe Grant approached Walt Disney with some sketches he had made of his Springer spaniel called Lady. Disney really liked the sketches and told Grant to put them into a storyboard. However, Disney ultimately didn't think much of the finished storyboard. Six years later, he read a short story in Cosmopolitan by Ward Greene called 'Happy Dan the Whistling Dog'. He was sufficiently interested in the story to buy the rights to it. Then in 1949, after Joe Grant had left the studio, his spaniel drawings were unearthed and a solid story using his designs started to take shape. Grant never received any acknowledgement for his contribution to the film until the Platinum Edition DVD in 2006.
In early script versions, Tramp was first called Homer, then Rags and Bozo. A 1940 script introduced the twin Siamese cats. Eventually known as Si and Am, they were then named Nip and Tuck.
In making this film, Walt Disney claimed that it was a "fun picture" to make (another example of such a film was Dumbo), because it was an original story and was easily adjustable as they made the film and got to know the characters - there were no pre-existing storylines.
In order to make the fight between the rat and the Tramp more exciting Wolfgang Reitherman animated from the point of view of the loser and then attempted to avoid that particular outcome.
In the 1999 video release, some scenes had pieces of dialogue missing that had been part of the original theatrical release. This was believed to be caused by the studio restoration process that incorporated both US and international formats of the film, which inadvertently created a hybrid version. Disney often produces different international and foreign versions of their films to make the foreign dialogue fit.