101 things that must be said about 101 Dalmatians
1. Every kid exposed to Disney films has one they fixate on. For some, it’s The Little Mermaid, or Beauty and the Beast, or Sleeping Beauty.
2. But for me, I watched One Hundred and One Dalmatians one million times. I spent hours playing with friends, pretending to be characters from the movie. I’ve never met anybody who imprinted on it in the same way.
3. And that means that, simply by laws of nostalgia, I know a lot of things about this movie that most people don’t — because I just think it’s neat!
4. Which is ironic, because Walt Disney abhorred the design of the film from top to bottom.
5. On its premiere in 1961, the success of One Hundred and One Dalmatians rescued Disney’s animation studio from potential shutdown after the financial failure of the lavishly rendered Sleeping Beauty.
A Century of Disney
6. One Hundred and One Dalmatians was the first Disney animated feature to be written and storyboarded by one person, animator and writer Bill Peet.
7. Peet cut his teeth at Disney animation doing menial animation work on Donald Duck shorts.
8. Peet nearly quit before he was promoted to the story department in time to work on Pinocchio.
9. Peet did quit just a few years after One Hundred and One Dalmatians came out, after arguing with Walt during the production of The Jungle Book. He went on to be a successful writer and illustrator of children’s books, including The Wump World.
10. The Wump World follows an innocent society of capybara-like animals called Wumps, whose home is colonized into ruin by wasteful alien invaders who get back in their rocketships and find another planet to despoil the moment they have exhausted all the resources.
11. In the final moments of The Wump World, the Wumps emerge from
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