1961, 'ONE HUNDRED AND ONE DALMATIANS' PREMIERES

One Hundred and One Dalmatians

Today, The Grandma is still at home. Gloria storm has gone away and the weather starts to improve. She has decided to stay at home watching TV and she has chosen a wonderful movie, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, a 1961 American animated adventure film produced by Walt Disney Productions and based on the 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith.

The Grandma has received the visit of her closer friend Claire Fontaine. They have enjoyed this wonderful movie together, a classic movie that premiered on a day like today in 1961.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians is a 1961 American animated adventure film produced by Walt Disney Productions and based on the 1956 novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith.

Directed by Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wolfgang Reitherman, it was Disney's 17th animated feature film. The film tells the story of a litter of Dalmatian puppies who are kidnapped by the villainous Cruella de Vil ("deVille"), who wants to use their fur to make into coats. Their parents, Pongo and Perdita, set out to save their children from Cruella, in the process rescuing 84 additional puppies that were bought in pet shops, bringing the total of Dalmatians to 101.

The film was originally released to theaters on January 25, 1961, by Buena Vista Distribution, and was a box office success, pulling the studio out of the financial slump caused by Sleeping Beauty, a costlier production released two years prior. Aside from its box office revenue, its commercial success was due to the employment of inexpensive animation techniques -such as using xerography during the process of inking and painting traditional animation cels- that kept production costs down.

Disney released a live-action adaptation in 1996 and a sequel, 102 Dalmatians in 2000, and a live-action spin-off/prequel directed by Craig Gillespie is scheduled to be released on May 28, 2021.

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Roger Radcliffe is a songwriter who lives in a bachelor flat in London, with his pet Dalmatian, Pongo, who decides to find a wife for Roger and a mate for himself, because he is bored with bachelor life.

While watching various women with their female dog look-alikes out the window, he spots the perfect pair, a woman named Anita and her female Dalmatian, Perdita. He quickly gets Roger out of the house and drags him through the park to arrange a meeting. Roger and Anita eventually fall in love and marry with their dogs.

Later, Perdita gives birth to a litter of 15 puppies. That same night, they are visited by Cruella De Vil, a wealthy former schoolmate of Anita's. She offers to buy the entire litter, but Roger says they are not for sale, leading to a falling out.

Perdita & Pongo

A few weeks later, she hires her henchmen, Jasper and Horace, to steal them. When Scotland Yard is unable to find them, Pongo and Perdita use the Twilight bark, a canine gossip line, to ask for help from the other dogs in London.

An Old English Sheepdog named Colonel, along with his compatriots, a gray horse named Captain, and a tabby cat named Sergeant Tibbs, find the puppies in a place called Hell Hall Cruella's abandoned and dilapidated family estate, also known as The De Vil Place, along with 84 other Dalmatian puppies that she had bought from various dog stores. 

When Tibbs learns they are going to be made into dog-skin fur coats, the Colonel quickly sends word back to London. Upon receiving the message, Pongo and Perdita leave town to retrieve their puppies. Winter has arrived, and they must cross the Stour River which is running fast and laden with slabs of broken ice.

Meanwhile, Tibbs overhears Cruella ordering Jasper and Horace to kill the puppies that night out of fear the police will soon find them. In response, Tibbs attempts to rescue them while Jasper and Horace are preoccupied watching television, but they finish their show and come for them before he can get them out of the house.

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Pongo and Perdita break in and confront Jasper and Horace just as they are about to kill the puppies. While the adult dogs attack them, the Colonel and Tibbs guide the puppies from the house.

After a happy reunion with their own puppies, Pongo and Perdita realize there are dozens of others with them, 99 altogether including their own. Shocked at Cruella's plans, Pongo and Perdita decide to adopt the other 84 puppies, certain that Roger and Anita would never reject them.

The Dalmatians begin making their way back to London through deep snow, as all open water is frozen solid. Other animals help them along the way, while Cruella, Jasper, and Horace chase them. In one town, they cover themselves with soot to disguise themselves as Labradors, then pile inside a moving van bound for London.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians

As it is leaving, melting snow clears off the soot and Cruella sees them. Enraged, she follows the van in her car and rams it, but Jasper and Horace, who try to cut it off from above, end up crashing into her. 

Both vehicles are destroyed and fall into a deep ravine, leaving Cruella and her henchmen stranded and defeated at last. Cruella angrily scolds her henchmen before breaking down in tears as the van drives away. Back in London, Roger and Anita are attempting to celebrate Christmas and his first big hit, a song about Cruella. They miss their canine companions, but they hear barking outside and the house is filled with dogs after their nanny opens the door.

After wiping away the rest of the soot, they are delighted to realize their pets have returned home. After counting 84 extra puppies, they decide to keep all the puppies and use the money from Roger's song to buy a larger house in the country so they can have a Dalmatian plantation.

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Dodie Smith wrote the book The Hundred and One Dalmatians in 1956. When Walt Disney read it in 1957, it immediately grabbed his attention, and he promptly obtained the rights. Smith had always secretly hoped that Disney would make it into a film.

Disney assigned Bill Peet to write the story, which he did, marking the first time that the story for a Disney animated film was written by a single person. Writing in his autobiography, Peet was tasked by Disney to write a detailed screenplay first before storyboarding.

Because Peet never learned to use a typewriter, he wrote the initial draft by hand on large yellow tablets. He condensed elements of the original book while enlarging others, some of which included eliminating Cruella's husband and cat, as well compressing the two surrogate mother dogs into one character, Perdita. 

One Hundred and One Dalmatians

He also retained a scene in which Pongo and Perdita exchange wedding vows in unison with their owners, by which the censor board warned that it might offend certain religious audiences if the animals repeated the exact words of a solemn religious ceremony.

The scene was reworked to be less religious with Roger and Anita dressed in formal clothes. Two months later, Peet completed the manuscript and had it typed up. Walt said the script was great stuff and commissioned Peet to begin storyboarding. Additionally, Peet was charged with the recording of the voice-over process. Although Disney had not been as involved in the production of the animated films as frequently as in previous years, nevertheless, he was always present at story meetings.

When Peet sent Dodie Smith some drawings of the characters, she wrote back saying that he had actually improved her story and that the designs looked better than the illustrations in the book.

In order to have music involved in the narrative, Peet used an old theater trick by which the protagonist is a down-and-out songwriter. However, unlike the previous animated Disney films at the time, the songs were not composed by a team, but by Mel Leven who composed both lyrics and music.

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Previously, Leven had composed songs for the UPA animation studio in which animators, who transferred to work at Disney, had recommended him to Walt. His first assignment was to compose Cruella de Vil, of which Leven composed three versions. The final version used in the film was composed as a bluesy number prior to a meeting with Walt in forty-five minutes.

The other two songs included in the film are Kanine Krunchies Jingle sung by Lucille Bliss, who voiced Anastasia Tremaine in Disney's 1950 film Cinderella, and Dalmatian Plantation in which only two lines are sung by Roger at its closure. Leven had also written additional songs that were not included in the film.

The first song, Don't Buy a Parrot from a Sailor, a cockney chant, was meant to be sung by Jasper and Horace at the De Vil Mansion.

A second song, Cheerio, Good-Bye, Toodle-oo, Hip Hip! was to be sung by the dalmatian puppies as they make their way into London.

A third song titled March of the One Hundred and One was meant for the dogs to sing after escaping Cruella by van. Different, longer versions of Kanine Krunchies Jingle and Dalmatian Plantation appear on the Disneyland Records read-along album based on the film.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians was first released in theaters on January 25, 1961. The film was re-released theatrically in 1969, 1979, 1985, and 1991. The 1991 reissue was the 20th highest-grossing film of the year for domestic earnings.

Download One Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith

They are my only true love dah-ling. 

I live for furs, I worship furs.

After all is there a woman in this wretched world who doesn't?

Cruella De Vil