20 Surprising Facts You Never Knew About Your Favorite Disney Movies
Characters’ names in ‘Frozen’ are an homage to the author of the original tale
Hans, Kristoff, and Anna were all named after Hans Christian Andersen, the creator of “The Snow Queen.” Moreover, if you say the names of four of the film’s main characters (Hans, Kristoff, Anna, Sven), you may hear a familiar name. So that’s kind of cool.
‘Hercules’ should really have been called ‘Heracles’
While all of the characters and places in Disney’s Hercules have Greek names, there’s actually one character that doesn’t: Hercules! Like “Mars” is for “Ares” and “Neptune” is for “Poseidon,” “Hercules” is actually the Roman name for the Greek figure “Heracles.”
If the movie were to be consistent, the movie’s main character and title should have been Heracles. However, Disney executives went with the Roman “Hercules” because they said it was more familiar to the general public.
One of the voice actors in ‘The Great Mouse Detective’ died years before the movie came out
Basil Rathbone, the voice of the human Sherlock Holmes in the movie, was actually not alive for the production of The Great Mouse Detective even though his voice was in the movie. Rathbone had played Sherlock Holmes throughout his life (and was actually very well-known for his portrayal) and so creators took his voice from audiobooks he had completed before his death (as well as clips from his Holmes films) and used those for his role in the film. By the time the film was finished, Rathbone had been deceased for about 20 years.