Trivia / The Great Mouse Detective

• Acting for Two: Quite a few of the principal actors had secondary roles. For example:
  • Barrie Ingham voices both Basil and the unlucky Bartholomew. Interestingly, that makes two out of the three characters in the movie who call Ratigan a rat (the other being Olivia), and one out of two that live to tell the tale.
  • Val Bettin voices both Dr. David Q. Dawson and one of Ratigan's thugs.
  • Surprisingly, Candy Candido voices both Fidget and the bar patron.
  • Eve Brenner voices the Mouse Queen and her robotic counterpart.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Vincent Price called Ratigan his favorite film role, and was especially thrilled to have two songs written specifically for him.
  "I do adore Ratigan. I did it because one should never stop. That’s the first rule. Keep going. Do everything, even cartoons. If you don’t, you stop. And stopping stinks."
• Bilingual Bonus: The Dutch dub has Basil, Dawson, and Olivia singing the reprise of "Goodbye So Soon" offscreen during the end credits, with Basil remarking beforehand, "Dawson, how did that terrible song go back in the basement? You know when we were tied up?"
• Career Resurrection: Thanks to the massive failure of The Black Cauldron, Walt Disney Animation Studios had been in a very dire situation and was on the brink of closure, with this film effectively being their last chance. Fortunately for them, this film's timely critical and financial success has succeeded in proving to Disney executives that animation was still a viable medium to invest in, which saved the animation department and would later pave the way to The Little Mermaid and the Disney Renaissance.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: Vincent Price as Ratigan, naturally. Interestingly, an effort was made to maintain this in foreign dubs:
  • In the Latin American Spanish dub, Ratigan was played by the famous Mexican actor Narciso Busquets.
  • In the Japanese dub, Ratigan is voiced by veteran film actor and singer Akira Takarada, best known for his work in the Godzilla franchise.
  • In the French dub, Ratigan was voiced by Gerard Rinaldi, not only an acclaimed comedian but also a popular singer and songwriter.
• Completely Different Title: "Basil, Private Detective" in French.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • After the film's release, Candy Candido viewed Fidget as his personal favorite role.
  • As aforementioned in Awesome, Dear Boy, Vincent Price considers Ratigan to be his favorite film role.
• Directed by Cast Member: Besides directing the Latin American Spanish dub, Francisco Colmenero voiced Bartholomew as well as some minor roles including one of Ratigan's thugs.
• Dueling Movies: With An American Tail, another animated movie about mice coming out the same year (though it didn't come out until a few months afterward). While GMD still made a profit, An American Tail was the highest-grossing animated feature ever made at the time. Despite all this, GMD remained financially and critically successful in receiving more critical acclaim than An American Tail did, which received mixed reviews. Both of these things would factor into Disney deciding to re-beef their animation department.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Jeffrey Katzenberg demanded the title of this film be changed from Basil of Baker Street to simply The Great Mouse Detective, a move that inspired an infamous fake memo that stated Disney was changing all the titles of its films to more generic ones, such as "Seven Little Men Help a Girl", "The Wonderful Elephant Who Could Really Fly", "The Girl with the See-Through Shoes", and "A Boy, a Bear, and a Big Black Cat". The memo later became a category on Jeopardy!. Two of the four directors have since said they've always hated the new title. However, those directors may have had some solace in the title being changed to "Basil the Great Mouse Detective" in some countries.
    • A reason given for the title change was that Young Sherlock Holmes, the movie Paramount had positioned as its tentpole film for Christmas 1985, had been a box-office disappointment — suggesting a title that hinges on a Holmes reference would not have an inherent draw to families, hence a more generic but accurate title.
    • Ironically, years later, this would become the norm for Disney, when "Rapunzel" would become Tangled and "The Snow Queen" would become Frozen. As with The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron, this was in response of an underperforming prior film sparking the studio in finding more mass-appealing titles, as the relative box office failure of The Princess and the Frog had Disney scampering away from movie titles that sounded like they were aimed exclusively at young girls. Frog also finished the job The Black Cauldron nearly accomplished 25 years prior, as the beginning of the end for 2D theatrical movies from Disney.
  • A positive example: Co-director John Musker has stated that the famous Big Ben sequence was not in the original script or storyboards. Ratigan's ship would have still crashed into it, but Ratigan would have been killed from the crash while Basil and Olivia would have survived. Katzenberg insisted there needed to be some kind of showdown between Basil and Ratigan, and thus the fight inside and out of Big Ben was conceived.
• Fake Brit: Missouri-born Vincent Price voices Professor Ratigan.
• I Am Not Shazam: The lead dancer at the bar is listed in the credits as "Miss Kitty Mouse," but, Fanon aside, this doesn't actually appear to be her name. Rather, it's a description of her. She isn't "Miss Kitty Mouse," but "the Miss Kitty mouse."
• Late Export for You: The film was finally dubbed into Hungarian, Hebrew and Czech in the mid-2010's, nearly 30 years after its original release.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: The film was produced concurrently with The Black Cauldron, which was Disney's most expensive film ever made at the time, and which Disney marketed at the time as being their most revolutionary film since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. By contrast, Great Mouse Detective was treated as a much smaller affair, and was relegated to the sidelines for most of its production. Despite this, The Black Cauldron would nearly kill Disney's animation department due to its poor critical reception and disastrous box office performance, while The Great Mouse Detective would go on to remain a financial and critical success, saving Disney animation and laying the groundwork for their eventual Renaissance a few years later.
• One-Book Author: Olivia was Susanne Pollatschek's only voice role. After completing her studies in Scotland, she moved to Switzerland.
• Post-Release Retitle: The 1992 theatrical re-release expanded the title to The Adventures of The Great Mouse Detective. Home video releases from the 1992 VHS and Laserdisc, to the 2002 VHS and DVD, used the shorter name on the packaging, and the longer one in the opening credits. The remaster struck for prints from the 2010 DVD onwards reverted the title to the shorter version, by swapping the '92 credits back with the ones used in 1986.
• Production Posse: Fidget was voiced by Candy Candido, who played bit characters in several previous Disney films, with Fidget being his final Disney role but also his most prominent one, and Mr. Flaversham was voiced by Alan Young, who had already played Scrooge McDuck in Mickey's Christmas Carol, and would be brought back for his most famous outing as the character only a year later. Furthermore, two of Ratigan’s thugs were voiced by Wayne Allwine and Tony Anselmo (Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck).
• Swan Song: This was Candy Candido's final film appearance before he died of natural causes in 1999.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Madonna was considered to voice Miss Kitty and perform the song "Let Me Be Good To You". This isn't as far-fetched as it may seem when one listens to Madonna's jazzy showtunes on the Dick Tracy soundtrack.
  • Olivia was originally planned to be older, acting as a potential love interest for Basil, but it was later decided she should be a child to make her more sympathetic.
  • John Cleese was the first choice to voice Basil. Peter Cook and Michael Palin were also considered.
  • Patrick Macnee was considered for the voice of Dawson.
  • Ratigan's original design was very thin and frail-looking. They changed it after Vincent Price was cast to reflect Price's larger build. Glen Keane also says that he based it partially on Disney's CEO at the time, Ron Miller, who was an ex-football player and had an imposing and muscular physique.
  • Originally, Ratigan was a very ugly mouse mistaken for a rat, instead of a rat willingly passing for an ugly mouse.
  • Michael Eisner wanted Michael Jackson to voice a character who would enter the saloon, confront Basil, and sing a song at the tavern.
  • Back in the early 2000s, there were originally plans for a Stealth Sequel to the film titled, The Search for Mickey Mouse, which would've had Basil team up with Minnie, Donald, and Goofy and go on a globe-trotting quest to search for the titular mouse after he was "mouse-napped", all while encountering a wide array of Disney characters along the way. Unfortunately, the film would get canceled after the animators decided that incorporating the insanely large number of Disney characters into a feasible 90-minute script was deemed too difficult.
• Working Title: Basil of Baker Street.

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