Lady and the Tramp (1955)

Tuck in for some Valentine’s Day spaghetti and meatballs as Chris and Alex chew on Walt Disney’s celebrated cel-animated love story Lady and the Tramp (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1955), a musical romance released in the mid-1950s and based on the 1945 Cosmopolitan magazine story “Happy Dan, The Cynical Dog” by Ward Greene. The studio’s first CinemaScope release and a film that coincided with the opening of Disneyland in California, Lady and Tramp is rife with context and offers a number of threads that speak to the landscape of Disney animation in the 1950s. Listen as discussion turns to the collision in Lady and the Tramp between a refined vs. rough animated style embodied by the film’s eponymous characters; its complex anthropomorphic register, and how the film’s many canine performances negotiate the meeting point of humanity with the animal through racial politics; caricature and the grotesque within character design, and the silhouetted and symbolic representation of affluence, class, wealth, power, and normalcy; connections between Disney’s feature and the Mammy Two Shoes figure from Tom & Jerry; the star voice of Peggy Lee and traditions of animated voicework; and how Lady and the Tramp reflects on the possible ‘threat’ of children in suburban America as part of its subversive and radical agenda. Bella Notte!

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**