Disney recycles scenes in different movies and hopes you don't notice

A dancing scene from Sleeping Beauty, 159 was recycled in the Disney movie Sleeping Beauty. Photo / Disney

If you've ever watched a Disney movie and thought, 'that scene looks familiar,' you were probably right.

The studio has been recycling scenes from previous Disney movies for more than 50 years.

As demonstrated in YouTube videos by Movie Munchies, scenes from Sleeping Beauty were recycled for Beauty and the Beast, a dance scene in Snow White popped up in Robin Hood and scenes from Cinderella were used once again in 101 Dalmatians.

According to Floyd Norman who worked on a number of Disney films including The Sword in the Stone, The Jungle Book and Robin Hood, there's one man in particular to blame for the scene recycling.

"That was Woolie Reitherman," Norman said to geekdad.com.

Reitherman directed such films as Winnie the Pooh, 101 Dalmatians and the AristoCats and liked to "play it safe" by using old scenes.

"It's actually harder and takes longer to redraw an existing sequence," Norman said.

"It's a lot faster and easier to just do new animation, and it's a lot more fun for the animators. But Woolie liked to play it safe and use stuff he knew would work. That's all it was."

Reitherman's not the only offender though.

The co-director of Beauty and the Beast admitted that they recycled a dance scene from Sleeping Beauty because they were struggling to finish the film on time.

"The scene from Beauty and the Beast that we re-used was done for time, but not money," Gary Trousdale wrote.

"We were just days from our final deadline to deliver, and we had an entire dance sequence (the last scene of the movie, not the ballroom) to do. Everyone was booked and busy, and we knew damn well that Woolie had established this precedent, so we took the Sleeping Beauty dance, re-sized and re-positioned it, and gave the note, 'Note to Clean-up: clean up Aurora as Belle, clean up Prince Charming as Beast'."

Who knew?