Editing Lady and the Tramp (section)

===Story development===
In 1937, [[Walt Disney Animation Studios|Walt Disney Productions]] story artist [[Joe Grant]] came up with an idea inspired by the antics of his [[English Springer Spaniel]] Lady, and how she got "shoved aside" by Joe's new baby. He approached Walt Disney with sketches of Lady. Disney enjoyed the sketches and commissioned Grant to start story development on a new animated feature titled ''Lady''.<ref name="DVD">{{cite AV media notes|title=Lady and the Tramp Platinum Edition DVD - "Behind the Scenes: Story Development"|type=Bonus feature|others=Eric Goldberg|year=2006|publisher=Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment}}</ref> Through the late 1930s and early 1940s, Joe Grant and other artists worked on the story, taking a variety of approaches, but Disney was not pleased with any of them, primarily because he thought Lady was too sweet, and there was not enough action.<ref name="DVD"/>

Walt Disney read the short story written by Ward Greene, titled "Happy Dan, the Cynical Dog", in the ''[[Cosmopolitan (magazine)|Cosmopolitan]]'' magazine, published in 1945.<ref name="archive"/><ref>{{cite journal|last1=Greene|first1=Ward|title=Happy Dan, The Cynical Dog|journal=Cosmopolitan|date=February 1945|volume=118|issue=2|page=19}}</ref> He thought that Grant's story would be improved if Lady fell in love with a cynical dog character like the one in Greene's story, and bought the rights to it.<ref name="thomas">{{cite book|last=Thomas|first=Bob|chapter=Chapter 7: The Postwar Films|pages=103–104|title=Disney's Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Hercules|year=1997|publisher=Disney Editions |isbn=0-7868-6241-6}}</ref> The cynical dog had various names during development, including Homer, Rags, and Bozo, before "Tramp" was chosen.<ref name="archive">{{cite web|work=Disney Archives|title=Lady and the Tramp History|url=https://disney.go.com/vault/archives/movies/ladytramp/ladytramp.html|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070224175329/http://disney.go.com/vault/archives/movies/ladytramp/ladytramp.html|archive-date=February 24, 2007}}</ref>

The finished film is slightly different from what was originally planned. Lady was to have only one next-door neighbor, a [[Ralph Bellamy]]-type canine named Hubert. Hubert was later replaced with Jock and Trusty. Aunt Sarah was the traditional overbearing mother-in-law. In the final film, she is softened to a busybody who, though antagonistic towards Lady and Tramp, is well-meaning (she sends a packet of dog biscuits to the dogs at Christmas to apologize for mistreating them). Aunt Sarah's Nip and Tuck were later renamed Si and Am.<ref name="archive"/> Originally, Lady's owners were called Jim Brown and Elizabeth. These were changed to highlight Lady's point of view. They were briefly referred to as "Mister" and "Missis" before settling on the names "Jim Dear" and "Darling". To maintain a dog's [[perspective (visual)|perspective]], Darling and Jim's faces are rarely shown, similar to Tom's various owners in the ''[[Tom and Jerry]]'' cartoons. The rat was a somewhat comic character in early sketches, but became a great deal more frightening, due to the need to raise dramatic tension. A scene created but then deleted was one in which after Trusty says "Everybody knows, a dog's best friend is his human", Tramp describes a world in which the roles of both dogs and humans are switched; the dogs are the masters and vice versa.<ref name="DVD"/> There was a love triangle among Lady, Tramp, and a [[Russian wolfhound]] named Boris (who appears in the dog pound in the final version).<ref>{{cite AV media notes|title=Lady and the Tramp Blu-Ray Diamond Edition - Deleted Scenes, Backstage Disney|type=Bonus feature|publisher=Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment|year=2012}}</ref>

The film's opening sequence, in which Darling unwraps a hat box on Christmas morning and finds Lady inside, is inspired by an incident when Walt Disney presented his wife Lily with a [[Chow chow|Chow]] puppy as a gift in a hat box to make up for having previously forgotten a dinner date with her.<ref>{{cite video|title=''Walt: The Man Behind the Myth'': Pre-production of ''Lady and the Tramp''|year=2001|publisher=Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment}}</ref>

In 1949, Grant left the studio, yet Disney story men were continually pulling Grant's original drawings and story off the shelf to retool.<ref name="DVD"/> A solid story began taking shape in 1953,<ref name="thomas"/> based on Grant's storyboards and Greene's short story.<ref name="DVD"/> Greene later wrote a [[novelization]] of the film that was released two years before the film itself, at Walt Disney's insistence, so that audiences would be familiar with the story.<ref name="backstage"/> Due to Greene's novelization, Grant did not receive film credit for his story work, an issue that animation director [[Eric Goldberg (film director)|Eric Goldberg]] hoped to rectify in the ''Lady and the Tramp'' Platinum Edition's behind-the-scenes vignette that explained Grant's role.<ref name="DVD"/>

Singer Peggy Lee not only voiced four characters but co-wrote six songs for the film.<ref name="nyt">{{cite news|last1=Weinraub|first1=Bernard|title=It's a Small World After All, Mr. Eisner|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/07/business/it-s-a-small-world-after-all-mr-eisner.html|work=The New York Times|date=August 7, 1995|access-date=September 13, 2017|archive-date=August 13, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180813005241/https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/07/business/it-s-a-small-world-after-all-mr-eisner.html|url-status=live}}</ref>