ByEllen Gutoskey|Mar 20, 2020, 6:00 AM EDT
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In 1998, Disney broke from its own mold by introducing Mulan, an independent, resilient heroine who isn’t fond of frilly dresses and doesn’t want (or need) to be saved. With a riveting story about risking it all for your family and a rousing soundtrack featuring Lea Salonga and Donny Osmond, Mulan quickly became a modern animated classic. In honor of Disney’s live-action remake, revisit the wonder and magic of Mulan with these inspiring facts.
1. Mulan is based on the story of Hua Mulan, a legendary female warrior in China.
Like the Disney character, Hua Mulan is said to have disguised herself as a man in order to spare her father from going to war. The earliest known record of her story was “The Ballad of Mulan,” a Chinese folk song from the 6th century that details Mulan’s 12 years of heroic service in the Chinese army, after which she dutifully returns to her family. According to All That’s Interesting, the epic tale continued to crop up in Chinese songs, plays, poetry, and other works for centuries, especially during periods of unrest when the public needed extra hope and inspiration. However, since various versions of the story have been around for more than 1500 years—and it began as an oral tradition, rather than a written one—nobody knows for sure if Hua Mulan was indeed a real person.
2. Disney’s Mulan wasn’t always quite so independent.
In its earliest stages in the late 1980s, Mulan was going to be a straight-to-video animated short called China Doll, about an oppressed young woman in China who finds happiness after a British soldier sweeps her off her feet (and out of China). None of Disney’s top animators wanted to work on it, and children’s book author and Disney consultant Robert San Souci eventually floated the idea of basing the story on Hua Mulan’s. That garnered enough enthusiasm to get the project out of the incubator, but it would take a fair bit of brainstorming for filmmakers to develop Mulan as a plucky, independent heroine.
“There was another storyline that had her running off to war to escape a bad situation at home, either bad parents or a forced marriage. That didn’t work,” co-director Barry Cook told the Los Angeles Daily News in 1998. “Then she was driven by a romance she had with the captain of the soldiers. And that just ruined everything.”
3. Mulan helped launch Christina Aguilera’s singing career.
In late 1997, soon after 16-year-old Christina Aguilera had signed a deal to record a demo with RCA Records, her new music producer got a call from a friend at Disney looking for a young singer who could belt a certain hard-to-hit note: a high E above middle C. He asked Aguilera, who recorded herself singing the same note in Whitney Houston’s “I Want to Run to You” and sent the tape off to Disney. It landed her the gig of singing a pop version of Mulan’s “Reflection” that Disney could (and did) release as a single, which was so successful that Aguilera ended up including it on her self-titled debut album in 1999. Later, Aguilera would call that high E “the note that changed my life.”
4. Mulan was the first feature-length film created by Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida.
In 1989, Disney opened a satellite animation studio right in the backyard of Disney/MGM Studios in Orlando, Florida. Though primarily established to support Disney’s flagship studio in Burbank, California, and create animation for Disney World attractions, Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida also produced three of its own feature-length films—Mulan in 1998, followed by Lilo & Stitch in 2002 and Brother Bear in 2003. According to co-director Tony Bancroft, the distance from Burbank helped the Orlando animators find their own rhythm while making Mulan.
“Early on in the project, they weren’t paying much attention to us,” Bancroft told the Los Angeles Daily News. “They were concentrating on Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, so we had a little more leeway to experiment. There wasn’t quite the same amount of pressure.”
Bancroft and Cook even made cartoon cameos in the film—they’re the fireworks attendants that Mushu scares off while Mulan is racing to save the emperor.
5. Mulan’s family temple features the names of many artists and animators who worked on the film.
When Mushu strolls through the Fa family temple, banging his gong and shouting at the ancestors to “rise and shine,” the tombstones glow with sparkling Chinese calligraphy, which is actually a list of people who helped bring the movie to life.
6. Mulan was voiced by two actors—one for speaking, and one for singing.
Lea Salonga, the Tony Award-winning star of Miss Saigon, was originally cast as the sole voice of Mulan, but filmmakers realized while recording that the deep voice she used while Mulan was impersonating a man wasn’t quite what they were looking for. The speaking role went to Ming-Na Wen, who had piqued the interest of Mulan’s filmmakers with her narration at the beginning of 1993’s The Joy Luck Club. “When we heard Ming-Na doing that voice-over, we knew we had our Mulan. She has a very likable and lovely voice,” producer Pam Coats told Deseret News. It wasn’t the first time Salonga tag-teamed a Disney princess role with another actor; she also provided the singing voice for Linda Larkin’s Jasmine in Aladdin (1992).
7. BD Wong shared the role of General Li Shang with Donny Osmond.
For General Li Shang, Disney cast the speaking role first: BD Wong, a 1988 Tony Award winner who has most recently gained critical acclaim for his guest appearances as Whiterose in Mr. Robot. To find a nice, strong singing voice for Shang, filmmakers unearthed old audition tapes from 1997’s Hercules. They came across one by Donny Osmond—who had lost out on that role because his voice was a little too deep—and decided he’d be a perfect match. Osmond, thrilled at the opportunity, accepted the role immediately and recorded the now-classic tune “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” on a day off from playing Joseph in a touring production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
8. Jackie Chan voiced Li Shang for the Chinese version of Mulan.
Hong Kong actor, martial artist, and all-around legend Jackie Chan not only dubbed Li Shang for the Mandarin and Cantonese versions of Mulan, he recorded “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” in both languages, too—and even filmed a music video.
9. Mushu was supposed to get his own song in Mulan.
Eddie Murphy’s memorable performance as Mulan’s pint-sized dragon sidekick, Mushu, almost included a song called “Keep ’Em Guessing,” where Mushu taught Mulan how to masquerade as a man. Unfortunately, Murphy wasn’t interested in showing off his singing talents.
“We wrote three different versions of it,” lyricist David Zippel told Entertainment Weekly. “But that’s because we didn’t understand at that point that it wasn’t that [Eddie Murphy] wasn’t liking our songs, he just didn’t want to sing in the film.”
10. Mulan has a habit of touching her hair because Ming-Na Wen does.
Disney animators often pull characteristics from the voice actors when designing their characters, and Ming-Na Wen was no exception: After noticing Wen had a habit of touching her hair, the artists decided that Mulan would, too. “Very true,” she confirmed on Twitter. “I still touch my hair a lot.”
11. Mattel’s Barbie doll version of Mulan was originally much bustier.
Mattel’s first pass at a Mulan doll was basically Mulan’s face on Barbie’s large-chested, tiny-waisted body, which didn’t sit well with producers. They didn’t succeed in convincing the company to create an entirely new figure for Mulan, but they did settle on a compromise: Instead of using Barbie as the model for the doll, Mattel used Midge, the more evenly-proportioned pal of Barbie that Mattel had rolled out in 1963 to prove Barbie dolls didn’t only exist to be sex symbols.
“We were disappointed that we couldn’t get our own Mulan body type because we wanted it to be true to the character and true to the culture,” Coats told the Los Angeles Daily News. “But at least she’s less buxom than the original version. I think there will be people who appreciate that.”
20 Things Every ’70s Kid Remembers That Have Completely Disappeared
Before smartphones, streaming, and the internet took over, everyday life was filled with simple pleasures and technologies that have all but gone extinct.
ByPaul Anthony Jones|Nov 1, 2026, 8:00 PM EST
It’s only natural that things change over time, but the pace of change over the last few decades has been head-spinningly quick.
In many ways, that’s made the world easier; staying and getting in touch with people, finding your way around, learning and finding things out, and even shopping and ordering what you want are all now far simpler and more readily available than they were in the past.
But that has had the somewhat less pleasant and more jarring consequence of consigning many of the technologies and experiences of yesterday to history, especially those from the 1970s. Here are 20 that have all but disappeared.
LANDLINE TELEPHONE CORDS
Long before cell phones became a thing, every house had a landline, which was really the only way of keeping in touch with friends and family. Thankfully, the cord on some landline telephones was so long that if you needed a quiet conversation away from your parents, you could take the handset in another room and close the door without stretching it too far.
CALLING THE HOUSE TO SPEAK TO ONE PERSON (WHO MIGHT NOT EVEN BE IN)
Unfortunately, having a landline meant you couldn’t get in touch with one person specifically, but had to call the entire house before narrowing it down to the one member of the household you wanted to reach. (Cue lots of awkward conversations between you and your best friends’ parents—especially if your friend didn’t happen to be in at the time…)
CALL CHARGES
One aspect of the telephones of the past that won’t be missed, however, is the often eye-watering difference between local and long-distance calls. Want to talk to your friend a few streets over? You could talk for hours for a pittance. Want to speak to your aunt or uncle two countries away? Give it ten seconds, tops.
KEEPING THE PHONE OFF THE HOOK
One more telephone-related aspect of the past that’s a little less simple these days? If you didn’t want to be disturbed, you could just take the phone off the hook and be uncontactable for however long you wanted. (These days, the best you can do is a do-not-disturb setting, or just turning your phone off altogether!)
RETURNING REUSABLES (IN EXCHANGE FOR HARD CASH)
These days, we all have household trash cans for recyclables, and recycling centers will handle most of your reusables cleanly and easily. In the past, though, it wasn’t uncommon for stores and restaurants to have their own in-house schemes for reducing waste, with stores often holding a few cents’ deposit on glass bottles and glasses, or giving a few cents back for returned cans. Some states have taken over these measures themselves, of course, but the days of taking them back to the stores you bought them from are largely long gone.
LASERDISCS
Watching films on discs is by no means anything new—it’s just the DVDs and BluRays of the 21st century are a lot smaller than the LP-sized LaserDiscs of the late 1970s.
CB RADIO SLANG
There was a time when CB radio was so widely used (one in five Americans owned a short-distance radio in the mid 1970s) that the chatter and slang you’d hear over them began to slip into everyday parlance. Whether that’s a “10-4,” a “meat wagon,” or a “good buddy,” many of these snapping turns of phrase have sadly fallen by the wayside.
TV ANTENNAE
On the subject of sending messages over the airwaves, there was a time when television sets came with movable antennae, Simpsons-style. In the era of smart TVs, though, these have largely become a thing of the past (so no need to wrap your TV aerial in aluminum foil anymore to improve the signal…)
CHANGING TV CHANNELS AT THE SET
Speaking of TVs, although the first commercial television remote control was made available back in 1950, by the 1970s many homes’ television sets still required manual channel-changing—variously achieved by either pressing, turning, or switching a series of (often rather noisy) control buttons or dials on the set itself. The technology might have changed, but we still talk of “tuning in” to television shows today even in the digital age.
APPOINTMENT TV
Digital and cable television, as well as streaming and catch-up services, have also done away with the so-called “appointment TV” era of the past too. There was a time when missing your favorite show meant precisely that—you’d missed your one chance to watch it, and would be left scouring the TV guide for weeks to come hoping to catch a rerun.
TV GUIDE MAGAZINES
With that last one in mind, TV guides are gradually disappearing too. Why pick up a printed magazine listing each and every show when you can watch whatever you want, whenever you want it—or, failing that, just surf the in-build TV guide at the bottom of the screen until you come across something you want to watch.
TELEPHONE DIRECTORIES
Not that TV shows were the only thing you had to browse by hand in weighty, information-heavy printed guides in the 70s, either. Business directories like the Yellow Pages listed every business in town across hundreds of pages, while the domestic phone directory did precisely that for home addresses. Want to know anything along those lines today, and it’s all online.
ROAD MAPS
Another printed resource that’s all but vanished today are road maps. Once the staple of every long-distance trip, and of every car glove compartment, these are becoming increasingly rare (outside of rural walks and hikes where mobile coverage and internet access might not be guaranteed!)
TRAVELER’S CHECKS
Another vacation staple of the 70s was the traveler’s check, which, unlike cash, had the added safety net of being reimbursable if lost or stolen. Ever more commonplace technologies like credit and debit cards, PIN numbers, and wireless payments have made these once widely used exchanges a thing of the past.
HITCHHIKING
Once a staple of many a cross-country trip (and many a movie based around it), hitchhiking reached peak popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, when someone thumbing a lift (or at least, trying to) was a common sight at practically every highway on-ramp.
SMOKING ON PLANES
Going on an overseas vacation in the 1970s, meanwhile, often meant enduring the smell of cigarette smoke on the long plane journey too. Not that airplanes were the only place where smoking was once tolerated—back in the seventies, smoking was all but universal, and you’d see people lighting up everywhere from shopping malls to (ironically enough) hospitals.
CIGARETTE VENDING MACHINES
In fact, smoking was once so widespread that these were all but universal too.
CHRISTMAS CATALOG SURFING
Wintertime, of course, means Christmas—and there was a time when Christmas meant perusing department store catalogs and circling everything that you’d like Santa to bring you. (These days, you’re perhaps more likely to drop it all in an online shopping cart and sit back and wait for it to be delivered.)
SEASONAL FRUIT
At the slightly healthier end of the seventies scale, however, the seasonality of fruits, vegetables and other produce was once far more widely followed than it is today. Nowadays, with industrial greenhouses, climate-controlled polytunnels and GM foods engineering ever-hardier varieties, even the softest of summer berries are often still available in the depths of winter.
HAVING NOTHING TO DO (OR ANYTHING TO PLAY WITH)
One of the effects of all this click-and-buy consumerism, however, is that real, genuine downtime seems to be a thing of the past. In an era of endless scrolling, streaming, and messaging, few of us find ourselves without anything to do and end up having to make our own fun armed with whatever toys, paper, and coloring pens we might have once had at our disposal.
Read More:
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4 Wild Misconceptions About the 1970s
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The 21 Best Movies of the 1970s
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