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Ponder, If You Will, the Monumental Effort and Stupidity It Took to Ruin 'Snow White'

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March 18, 2025

Ponder, If You Will, the Monumental Effort and Stupidity It Took to Ruin 'Snow White'

by Stephen Kruiser
PJmedia.com


I have been watching the drama over Disney's reboot of "Snow White" with both fascination and dismay. It's not the good kind of fascination either. It's more like viewing a train derailment from a high rise building a couple of blocks away — you don't want to see it, but you can't stop looking.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," is one of the most famous adages that we all seem to learn very early in adulthood, if not earlier. It's not universally applicable, of course. A misapplication of that idea could lead to stagnation or — the rapid demise of Blockbuster Video comes to mind here — complete destruction.

It's a good rule to follow in most cases though. A recent example would be my St. Patrick's Day dinner this week. I told everyone that I had perfected my corned beef and cabbage in the Crockpot, but wanted to experiment this year. I did the corned beef on the smoker and it was not at all a good mix with the cabbage and carrots. In modern culinary parlance, it didn't pair well. When describing my disappointment to my sister, I said, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

The Walt Disney Corporation has been horribly infected with wokeness, and this has put them in the "fix it" mood. If it had just been the corporate suits or the creatives who caught the woke sickness things might not have gotten this far. There probably would have been some friction, then a compromise that didn't yield anything too awful. Unfortunately, everybody but the people who clean up the theme parks was hit with it, and the rush to swirl down the toilet was on.

There is another adage that has been around for a long time but is pretty much garbage: any publicity is good publicity. The red flags for "Snow White" were flying very early. My good friend and partner in thought crime Stephen Green was chronicling that almost two years before the movie's premiere. No studio wants to be dealing with damage control that far in advance.

Last week, Stephen wrote about some warning signs that the movie could be a financial disaster. Here's his take on perhaps the biggest thorn in Disney's side for this update:
The first problem is that Disney hired a big-mouthed wokester to play Snow White and then failed to keep her on a publicity leash. Say what you will about the long-dead Hollywood studio system, but they knew how to groom actors for stardom. You never heard Cary Grant or Katharine Hepburn bad-mouthing beloved cultural icons during the production or publicity of a picture they were making.
Like all 20-something woke leftists, "Snow White" star Rachel Zegler mistakenly thinks she knows things and is virtually incapable of keeping her ignorant mouth shut. It's not just that Zegler was badmouthing a classic, she was badmouthing the classic. "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" was not only a seminal achievement in animation, it was Disney's first feature film, and the movie that made the studio a powerhouse in the film industry. It's beloved, iconic, and almost any other superlative you can throw at it.

In stark contrast with the new version, the premiere of the original was a star-studded affair when all of Hollywood's stars were huge. It received a standing ovation.

Here's something from History.com to give you an idea of how the evening went:
In short: Yes. Audiences responded to both the comedy and the tragedy in Snow White.

“I was sitting behind Carole Lombard and Clark Gable, and they were laughing like kids,” recalled Snow White animator Ward Kimball about the premiere. “And when the dwarfs came to the bier when Snow White was dead, I began to hear people crying and blowing their noses. We had achieved something so believable that people had a great sorrow when Snow White was poisoned?
As the article goes on to note, Walt Disney was presented with a special Oscar the following year "to acknowledge 'Snow White's' significance."

That is what Disney's young, idiotic star and its woke corporate cancer decided to give the finger to with this reboot.

It took a systemic failure on the part of the Walt Disney Corporation to create this dark cloud. First, it was a creative failure. Revered classic movies should remain revered, not remade. Sequels are lazy. Last year, Francis Ford Coppola apologized for being "the jerk that started numbers on movies," when he began the sequel craze with "The Godfather Part II."

The wokeness that ended up plaguing Disney to the point that made it want to take a you-know-what all over the movie that made it famous didn't take root overnight. It was allowed to fester and grow because the studio is in the California coastal bubble and the people in charge lost touch with real America.

Remaking "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" into something that was such a departure that its star felt that she had the green light to verbally vomit all over the original was the product of a corporate and creative ethos that had reached the conclusion that it didn't need to entertain half of America. The half that was most likely to spend money on its movies, by the way.

This wasn't just a bad decision, it was an inevitability once Disney decided to take a hard left turn and confuse politics with entertainment.

Look, maybe "Snow White" will overcome all of this. Leftists may mount a campaign to encourage each other to pay to see the movie 20 times. If anything that can be spun as success comes out of this then Disney won't learn any lessons.

I hope "Snow White"does flop and Disney makes a decisive course correction. I'm really not in the mood for "Cinderella and Her Transgender Antifa Prince."

http://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2025/03/18/ponder-if-you-will-the-monumental-effort-and-stupidity-it-took-to-ruin-snow-white-n4938033

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