The part of King Stefan was Taylor Holmes' s final role.
The prince is named after Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh.
The restoration process involved four painstaking steps. The first step was to scan the original negative into a computer and subject the entire print to a deflickering procedure, evening out all the worn images and creating a cohesive canvas upon which the restoration artists could work. This was then followed by roto-scoping to extract the principal characters, dust-busting to remove all traces of dust and scuffing, and then re-inserting the characters into their cleaned-up backgrounds. Then all 180,000 frames would be completely repainted by up to 40 people in a process that clocked up nearly 48,000 hours. Once complete, the final product is then scanned onto a new negative.
The second biggest grossing film of 1959, just behind Ben-Hur.
The third Disney film to undergo a painstaking computer restoration, after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1987 and 1993, and Pinocchio in 1992.
This was in production at the Disney Studios for nearly a decade. Story work began in 1951, voices were recorded in 1952, the actual animation took place between 1953 and 1958 and the stereophonic score was recorded in 1957.
This was the last Disney feature to have cels inked by hand. From One Hundred and One Dalmatians onward, the cleaned-up pencil drawings were xeroxed onto the cels. However, some of the scenes in this movie did use the xerography process.
To help promote the film, the imagineers working on the new Disneyland project modeled the castle on the one in the film.
Various movements from The Sleeping Beauty ballet underwent some reworking for the Disney film. The opening song (Hail to the Princess Aurora) is actually the ballet's final, grandiose movement. Also, the three fairies' theme is based on "The Silver Fairy movement," which, in its original form, is barely a minute long.