The Great Mouse Detective/Trivia

Trivia

 * This film is sometimes considered, by fans and animation historians, to be the unofficial start of Disney's second Golden Age, also known as the Disney Renaissance. This is mostly due to the fact that this movie had saved Disney Animation Studios from going completely bankrupt at the time, and it should be noted that this film did play a big impact on the Disney Renaissance as well.
 * This was the last animated Disney film to heavily use Jimmy MacDonald's classic Disney cartoon sound effects. Though some later Disney films did use the sound effects for humorous moments (like most notably Aladdin). However, The Brave Little Toaster, made one year later, was the actual last animated movie to use the "Castle thunder" sound effect and a few remaining classic sound effects.
 * While the film's script took roughly 4 years to develop, the animation took only 1 year to finish, thanks to use of computers at the time.
 * This film is the first in the Disney animated canon to feature the voice talents of Frank Welker.
 * Despite the fact that this film, and the book it was based off of, are considered parodies of Arthur Conan Doyle's novels involving the character Sherlock Holmes, this film is deeply beloved by the Sherlock Holmes fanbase with its various similarities.
 * During the climatic clock tower scene, this was one of the first major use of computer animation (the gears of Big Ben) in a feature-length animated film. It was also the first time traditionally-animated characters were put inside a computer-generated background. This was acknowledged by Roy Disney in a special video-exclusive introduction on VHS and DVD releases of Fantasia 2000.
 * However, it should be noted that this is not the first Disney animated film to use CGI; that title goes to The Black Cauldron.
 * "Let Me Be Good To You" was almost cut because though brief, the lyrics and some animation was considered "too adult" for a Disney animated family film, the animators avoided a PG rating and got the scene kept in by appealing to the censors on the grounds that the segment was a Caberet song and harmless in lyrics, and because the character animated singing it was a mouse, not a human and thus not questionable.
 * "Let Me Be Good To You" was originally to be sung by Madonna, but the directors decided that this was not contemporary enough for the audience to enjoy. After Liza Minnelli was briefly considered, Melissa Manchester was hired as the new singer of the song. "Let Me Be Good To You" was also once entitled, "Look At Me".
 * This movie was originally accompanied with the Mickey Mouse short Clock Cleaners (1937) during its original 1986 release.
 * In some parts of Scandinavia, some of the film's content was considered by censors to be unsuitable for younger children. In Norway, the film was banned for children under 12, which led to Disney not doing a Norwegian dub; the studio had also considered releasing it straight-to-video there as there were no censorship restrictions on videotapes at the time. Denmark censors requested 30 seconds of cuts, while Finland and Sweden released it without any restrictions.
 * Ratigan kills the character Bartholomew. This is most likely a homage to one of Price's famous roles in Pit and the Pendulum (1961) in which his character is also trying to kill a man called Bartolome.
 * This was the last Disney Animated Feature Film to star Candy Candido released 13 years prior to his Death in 1999.
 * This film was released that same year as Don Bluth's An American Tail a few months, both films revolve around mice in large city searching for their family members and coming across a large cast of characters, but the plots do have some very noticeable differences.
 * On the subject of An America Tail, while An American Tail was more financially successful at the box office, The Great Mouse Detective garnered more favorable views from movie critics, most notably Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.