Headin’ South/Production/development history

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Development of Headin' South started in early 1938, a year after Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Hollywood's first full-length animated motion picture, was a critical and commercial success, which caught the attention of Dora Wilson, who decided to produce her own animated feature to replicate Disney's success. She first asked Republic Pictures, the distributor of her Dreamtoons shorts, to be the distributor for the project, but it was turned down. Wilson asked many other movie studios for an distributing deal for the film such as Paramount, Columbia, United Artists and 20th Century Fox, which also rejected it, until Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) successfully pitched the movie.

Fellow animation producers Walter Lantz, Paul Terry and Leon Schlesinger all also considered producing animated feature films, but after seeing the disappointing box-office performances of Walt Disney's new films Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940) and Max Fleischer's Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941), they cancelled any potential animated feature projects. However, Dora Wilson was the only of them who still continued the project.