Clarence Nash (best known as the voice of Donald Duck) did the dog barks for this film.
Walt Disney disliked the rough drawing style brought about by the Xerography process.
Art director Ken Anderson came up with the idea of overlaying cels of line drawings over the painted backgrounds to match the Xeroxed cels of the characters. For the next twenty years, all Disney features - with the exception of The Jungle Book and the animated segments in Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks - would use this technique for their backgrounds. With The Fox and the Hound, Disney returned to fully painted backgrounds, with a brief reprise of the cel overlay for Oliver & Company.
CASTLE THUNDER: Various versions are used during the storm while the puppies are born. The version used on Bambi is heard when Cruella enters, and again when she leaves and Pongo barks at her.
Characters from "Lady and the Tramp" are shown in brief cameos during the Twilight Bark scene: Jacque is first shown coming out of a doghouse and then barking into the drainpipe a dog in an upper apartment. The strays Peg and her friend the bulldog are seen in a pet shop with various puppies, and Lady is shown very briefly with several dogs at the end of the scene when the barking reaches across the entire city.
Cruella De Vil was designed as a manic take-off on the flamboyant actress Tallulah Bankhead, as well as some of her personality quirks.
Due to the commercial failure of Sleeping Beauty, production costs needed to be cut. As a result, this was the first Disney feature film to use photocopying technology (Xerography), which made an animated film with this much visual complexity possible. It also set the visual style of Disney animation (a scratchy, hard outline look) for years until the technology advanced enough (with the production of The Rescuers) to allow a softer look.
HIDDEN MICKEY: on almost all the Dalmatians.
In the early 1990s merchandise tied-in with the video's release was quickly pulled from shelves because the word Dalmatian had been spelled incorrectly as "Dalmation" on some of the product packaging. The merchandise was only available at Disneyland or the Disney Stores.
In the USA, this was the highest grossing movie of 1961.
On previous Disney animated features, the top animators were assigned a character and drew the bulk (if not all) of that particular character's scenes individually. Animation on this film was far more of a "team effort" - for example, seven of the famed "Nine Old Men" worked on Perdita. There was one notable exception: Marc Davis drew Cruella De Vil entirely on his own.
Premiered at the famed Radio City Music Hall in New York City.
Quite a few liberties were taken in bringing the book to the screen. In the original story, the two Dalmatians who ran across England to rescue their pups were named Pongo and Missis Pongo, or just plain Missis; Perdita was a stray whose own puppies had been sold, and who was taken into the household to help wet nurse Missis' fifteen puppies. In the film, their owners are named Roger and Anita Radcliffe; in the book, they're Mr. and Mrs. Dearly, no first names given. The book also features two Nannies (Nanny Cook and Nanny Butler) to the film's one; Jasper appears under the same name in both versions, but Saul is changed to Horace for the film; and Tib, the book's heroic gray tabby female, is transformed into an orange-colored tom. However, the film was not the first time the story had undergone changes; "The Hundred and One Dalmatians" first appeared as a serial in Ladies' Home Journal, under the title "The Great Dog Robbery".
Someone counted all black spots in the movie, frame-by-frame, and reached the total of 6,469,952.
The author of the book on which the film is based, Dodie Smith, was a successful playwright and novelist who had nine Dalmatians of her own, including one named Pongo. She got the idea for the book when a friend who was at her house saw all the dogs together and remarked, "Those dogs would make a lovely fur coat."
The author, Dodie Smith, noted that her favorite cel in the movie, was the one where Pongo stretches while lying on a window sill near the beginning.
The birth of the puppies actually happened to the author Dodie Smith. Her dalmatians had 15 puppies, one was born lifeless and her husband revived it. However, they sold most of them, and kept only a small number.
The final film for animator Marc Davis. After animating Cruella De Vil in this film, Davis went to work for WED Enterprises, designing for such Disneyland rides as the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean.
The various vehicles in the movie are live-action models painted white with black lines. Each frame of the live-action footage was Xeroxed onto cels and painted the same as the hand-drawn characters. This would become standard procedure at Disney and other studios until the mid-1980s, when computer animated models first came into use.
There is a scene where The Colonel and Jasper come face to face. They are both voiced by the same actor.