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20 Things You Didn’t Know About Disney Princesses (2/2)

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The tiara drops but the trivia never stops in part two of Disney’s princess deep dive.

TheThings Celebrity closes out its two-part rundown on Disney Princess lore, and the back half is stacked with the kind of production trivia that makes you rewatch the movies differently. Picking up at entry number 11, the video runs through casting stories, historical corrections, and character quirks spanning from 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs all the way to the modern era of Anna and Elsa.

The list leans hardest into two stories: how a teenager landed the most famous voice-acting role in animation history, and how far Disney’s Pocahontas strayed from the actual documented life of the Powhatan woman it’s loosely based on.

• More than 150 girls auditioned for the title role in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but the part went to Adriana Caselotti after she was overheard by Disney’s casting team while eavesdropping on her father’s phone call.
• Snow White became the first animated character — and the first Disney Princess — to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in 1987, timed to the film’s 50th anniversary.
• Pocahontas is the only Disney Princess pulled directly from a real, documented historical figure, and the film’s romance with John Smith has no basis in the historical record.

Adriana Caselotti Wins Snow White Role

The casting search for Snow White’s speaking and singing voice was one of the largest of its era, with Disney’s team fielding auditions from more than 150 hopefuls before the studio’s 1937 release. The role ultimately came down to a teenager with no formal audition tape to her name. Adriana Caselotti’s father, Guido Caselotti, worked as a vocal coach, and while he was on the phone with Disney’s casting representatives, his daughter began calling out loudly in the background in a high, childlike register just to demonstrate her range.

It worked instantly. Disney secured her for the part on the spot, and Caselotti’s performance became the template for what an animated princess was supposed to sound like for decades afterward. Fifty years later, in 1987, the studio marked the film’s anniversary by giving Snow White a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — the first time any animated character, let alone a Disney Princess, had received the honor.

Pocahontas and the Gap Between Film and History

Of every character in the Disney Princess lineup, Pocahontas stands alone as the one drawn from an actual historical person rather than a fairy tale or folk legend. That distinction is also what makes the gap between the film and the record so stark. The real Pocahontas was a Powhatan woman whose documented life bears little resemblance to the romanticized arc Disney built around her and John Smith.

The line everyone quotes — “Mirror, mirror on the wall” — was never actually said in the film. The real line from the Evil Queen is “Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?”

Mulan, Cinderella, and the Details Fans Miss

Mulan’s climactic avalanche sequence against Shan Yu’s army gets its own callout in the countdown for just how much combat Disney packed into a PG-rated family film — a scene animators built around the character single-handedly triggering the collapse that buries an entire invading force. Cinderella gets a smaller, stranger footnote: her glass slipper is famously tiny, a detail animators leaned into to sell the idea that only one foot in the kingdom could fit it.

Those kinds of granular choices — a shoe size, a body count, a line reading — are exactly what separates this kind of retrospective from a highlight reel. It’s less about retelling the plots everyone already knows and more about the production decisions nobody advertises.

Modern Princesses and the Royal Lineage Question

The countdown also digs into the voice casting behind Frozen‘s Anna and Elsa, unpacking how the sisters’ royal lineage shaped the way Disney approached their characterizations differently from earlier princesses in the catalog, where royalty was often more of a backdrop than a plot engine. That distinction matters more in Frozen than almost anywhere else in the franchise, since the entire story hinges on succession and who’s fit to sit on the throne in Arendelle.

It’s a thread that runs through Disney’s more recent output generally — composer Lin-Manuel Miranda’s work on Moana‘s songbook and the studio’s continued willingness to let its newer heroines carry entire kingdoms on their shoulders, rather than waiting on a prince to solve the plot.

Adriana Caselotti went on to voice Snow White in exactly one film — Disney reportedly kept her from taking other major voice roles to protect the character’s identity, which is part of why that 1987 Walk of Fame star carries as much weight as it does. Fifty years after her father’s phone call got her the job, she was still the only voice Snow White ever had.