Trivia / The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad

• Celebrity Voice Actor:
  • Basil Rathbone, aka Sherlock Holmes, narrates "The Wind in the Willows" segment.
  • Bing Crosby (with help from the Rhythmaires) narrates, sings, and does a majority of the voices for "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" segment.
• Completely Different Title: "The Toad and the School Teacher" in France.
• Non-Singing Voice: A variation. Ichabod's singing lines are provided by Bing Crosby, while his laughs and screams during the final sequence are done by Goofy's voice actor Pinto Colvig.
• Playing Against Type: In the second German dub, Eberhard Prüter, who usually played a Gentleman Snarker or Grumpy Old Man, voiced Shrinking Violet Mole.
• Post-Release Retitle: Disney's The Wind in the Willows was reissued in 1978 as The Madcap Adventures of Mr. Toad.
• What Could Have Been:
  • If World War II hadn't swallowed up so much of Disney's workforce they would've developed these shorts into two full-length features rather than truncate them into their current form. The Mr Toad section of the movie was originally going to be much different - for one thing, the jailer's daughter was the one who gave Toad his female disguise instead of Cyril. For more information, see article here.
  • After his role as emcee of sorts in Fun and Fancy Free, it was proposed that Jiminy Cricket again play that same role for this film, but it was dropped.
  • When it was decided that the adaptation of Willows would not be a feature-length film but rather part of a package film, discussions were held on what to pair it with:
    • The first concept was to pair it with Mickey and the Beanstalk and The Gremlins in a film called Three Fabulous Characters, which became Two Fabulous Characters after Disney abandoned their attempt at adapting Gremlins in any movie form following the end of WWII. Willows itself was then removed from the project and replaced with an adaptation of Bongo, turning Two Fabulous Characters into Fun and Fancy Free.
    • The second concept was to pair Willows with re-tellings of the legends of cowboy Pecos Bill and engineer "Casey" Jones in a film titled All in Fun, before the Pecos Bill short was removed from the project and made the final segment of Melody Time. The "Casey" Jones short followed suit shortly after and was released on its own as a seven-minute short in 1950.
• Of the characters referenced by Basil Rathbone during the movie's introduction, 4 of them (Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur, and Oliver Twist) would be the subjects for future Disney Animated Classics, Becky Sharp being the only exception.
  • Likewise, among the American characters Bing Crosby mentions during Ichabod Crane's introduction were Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, Johnny Appleseed, Black Bart, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Bunyan and Crockett were later adapted by Disney for later projects (Bunyan became an animated short, while Davy Crockett's life was adapted into a television series and several full-length movies, reintroducing him to the American public in the process.) On top of that, both Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill had already been the subjects of their own segments in Melody Time, the film released immediately before this.
• The two authors whose work gets adapted here (Kenneth Grahame and Washington Irving) were alive simultaneously for about eight months in the year 1859.

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