Trivia / The Jungle Book (1967)

• Awesome, Dear Boy: When Louis Prima was approached by The Sherman Brothers to play King Louie, his immediate response to hearing the song and the pitch was to ask them, "What do you wanna do, make a monkey out of me?" When the brothers sheepishly admitted it, Prima's followup was, "You got me!" Prima later stated that he felt he had been immortalized by the character.
• Billing Displacement: In the voice talent list, Baloo was up first when he doesn't appear until about a half-hour in to the movie; Mowgli, the protagonist, is billed seventh (fifth placed at the bottom in the second credits page).
• Casting Gag: The vultures are clear No Celebrities Were Harmed versions of The Beatles. While getting the real deal to voice them didn't pull through, there was still a musician from The British Invasion voicing one of them, Chad Stuart of the duo Chad & Jeremy.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: The Hebrew dub has the vultures done by an Israeli pop band. Of course, the original English version isn't exactly innocent either.
• Crossdressing Voices: Averted in both the original English version and many other dubs with Mowgli, but played straight in the Mexican Spanish dub of the first film, albeit this is averted as well in the sequel.
• Cut Song: A ton of cut songs are found on the DVD. Here is one of them.
• The Danza: Louis Prima as King Louie.
• Development Gag: Louis Prima brought his band to the Disney soundstages to convince Walt Disney to cast him as King Louie. The animators copied their performances on the dancing done by King Louie and his posse in "I Wan'na Be Like You".
• Died During Production: Walt Disney passed away towards the last leg of the film's production, one day after cast member and frequent Disney voice actress Verna Felton passed away; this is the final film to involve both of them to an extended degree.
• Disowned Adaptation: Per word of Chuck Jones in his book Chuck Jones Conversations (who did his own animated adaptations of Kipling's stories), Kipling's daughter hated the Disney movie for being an In Name Only adaptation of her father's work and for pronouncing the name "Mowgli" incorrectly.
  "Before we started our film, I discovered that Kipling's daughter was still alive and called her. In an elegant, British Dowager-like voice, she confirmed my pronunciation (of Mowgli's name) and added "and, I hate Walter Disney." It was the only time I ever heard anybody call him Walter. In her lifetime, she said nobody ever pronounced anything but Mauwgli."
• Half-Remembered Homage: After finding the more faithful first draft too dark for family viewing, Walt Disney told his entire staff not to read the original Kipling stories at all. The film was said to be "Inspired by…" rather than "based on" Kipling's works.
• Kids' Meal Toy: McDonald's had three Happy Meal tie-ins with the film:
  • In 1990, four wind-up toys of Baloo, King Louie, Kaa, and Shere Khan were released as a tie-in with the film's theatrical re-release. It also included under-3 toys of Mowgli and Hathi Jr.. In 1993, there was a European version of this promotion that included Kaa, Shere Khan, Mowgli, and a slightly different King Louie holding a banana.
  • In 1997, a set of six Nerds candy dispensers were released as a tie-in with the film's 30th anniversary VHS release. These consisted of Mowgli, Baloo, Bagheera, King Louie, Kaa, and Hathi Jr..
  • In 2000, there was a German promotion that had plushes of eight characters from the film; Baloo, Bagheera, King Louie, Kaa, Shere Khan, Colonel Hathi, Hathi Jr., and Ziggy the Vulture. Oddly, the same toys were used to promote the film's spin-off Jungle Cubs in Sweden, despite a few characters (Hathi Jr.) not existing in the series, due to the fact that most of the adult characters are portrayed as children.
• Playing Against Type: Sterling Holloway, who typically put his highly unique voice to friendly characters like Winnie the Pooh and Mr. Stork, plays the sinister Faux Affably Evil Kaa, who's all the creepier for it.
• Recycled Script: The sequence where Baloo and the monkeys kept taking Mowgli away from each other is a shot-for-shot remake of a similar sequence from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Disney ended up limiting the appearances of King Louie when the widow and family of Louis Prima, the voice of Louie in the original film, sued them over the stunning similarities of Prima's voice when Jim Cummings voiced Louie in TaleSpin. This resulted in Disney writing him out of the sequel, replacing him with an Expy named King Larry in House of Mouse, and having most appearances of him reduced to complete silence until the remake in 2016 (which uses a version of Louie far distanced from Prima's take).
• Throw It In!:
  • The Scatting in "I Wan'na Be Like You" was supposed to have Phil Harris simply repeating what Louie Prima had done, but he refused to do so and just made his own noises, making for a back-and-forth.
  • Sterling Holloway improvised some of Kaa's dialogue, including the complaints about his back pain.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Vultures were originally planned to be voiced by The Beatles and sing a rock song, but the band would end up passing on the offer due to busy scheduling (as well as John Lennon reportedly getting insulted at the invitation). The Beatles-inspired character designs for the Vultures were kept in the finished film, however. The song was also changed to a barbershop quartet, because Disney thought 60s rock would date the film too much - and the result instead which actually dates the film even more since barbershop was already out of fashion in 1967 and today is regarded as extremely niche with little influence on today's music, while the Beatles ended up becoming the most famous and influential band in music history.
  • A rhino character named Rocky, who would have accompanied the Vultures, was originally going to be in the film. A segment on the Platinum Edition goes into detail on his removal; he was originally going to be led to try to run Mowgli over in another action scene which was felt to be too much given it was between the monkey temple set piece and the climax, and it was also speculated that Disney grew disillusioned with the character due to no longer finding him funny.
  • Before that, the film was a closer and much darker adaptation of the book. Bill Peet, who had been with the studio since Pinocchio and was the one who brought the idea of adapting The Jungle Book in the first place, wound up having a long argument with Walt Disney on his refusal to lighten up and ended up leaving the studio altogether. This also affected the score, as Disney felt Terry Gilkyson's songs aside from "The Bare Necessities" were too dark, leading to only that remaining as the Sherman Brothers were brought in.
  • Louis Armstrong was originally considered for the voice of King Louie, but Walt Disney decided against it to avoid the potential controversy of casting a black man as an ape who wanted to become human^note Louis Prima was Italian American, so any controversies would already be moot.
  • Andreas Deja on his blog posted a long list◊ of actors considered for the role of Shere Khan, including (but not limited to) Don Adams, John Carradine, Hans Conried, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Don Rickles, and Larry Storch.
    • Interestingly, two of the listed actors actually DID get to voice Disney villains who shared Khan's sophisticated-but-dangerous characteristics, one before The Jungle Book's release and one afterwards; Conreid voiced Captain Hook in 1953's Peter Pan, and Price voiced Professor Ratigan in 1986's The Great Mouse Detective.
  • There were plans to include Tabaqui the jackal in the film, as a comic-relief character trying to eat Mowgli (a role eventually given to Kaa), but he was ultimately scrapped because he was deemed too similar to the wolf from The Sword in the Stone.

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