Disney’s Snow White: Thinking about the Brand

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Disney released Snow White, the latest live-action remake of one of the studio’s classic animated films last weekend, with the controversy about the leading ladies’ political differences  still simmering.  (Rachel Zegler [Snow White] and Gal Gadot [Queen] appear in civilian clothes on the right.)  The flurry of commentaries seemed more or less agreed that the House of Mouse was trying to force a poison apple down the public’s throat. The likelihood of successfully updating this particular fairy tale for the 21st century seemed doubtful because it has as many problems as Sleeping Beauty, with a passive princess awakened with a nonconsensual kiss after a century of slumber. The box office take last weekend dropped significantly.

Zegler as Snow White and the dwarves, who were not played by actors with the syndrome but created by through a combination of techniques including C. G. I.

For Disney, the top priority has to be sustaining the brand with periodical reinvention of its classics.  Reviewers who are under the spell of Disney magic point out that the studio must create for a new generation the experience of seeing the original in new dress because of its investment in theme parks, merchandise, etc.  The business logic is impeccable, but the strategy never would have been possible if Disney had not availed itself of stories in the public domain and then taken their commodification to  new levels.

Adriana Caselotti, the voice of Snow White, posing with the book that figures in the opening sequence. She was not credited in the film.

Watch the 1937 original Snow White and it’s clear as the nose on a dwarf’s face that transforming a sparely worded 10-page story into an 84-minute film requires sacrificing good scenes,expanding the action and elaborating details out of whole cloth.   Adding and subtracting has always central to the Disney approach to adaptation and sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s mixed.  Hard to argue with eliminating Grimm’s quiet opening of the queen embroidering during a snowfall and beginning with the brooding spirit in the magic mirror telling the stunning evil queen what she never expected to hear.   A few details in Grimm allowed Disney to spin the vertiginous scene of Snow White running through the dark woods.  Grimm briefly describes how the queen crossed the mountains to find her stepdaughter at the dwarves’ cottage, while in the film the crone punts down the misty river with the vultures watching overhead.  Probably few people would object to the last change.

The ”liberties” the Disney team took in the famous scenes that frightened children work brilliantly because they are true to the story’s spirit and structure; the ones in the scenes with Snow White haven’t aged as well, because of the way the nonhuman is domesticated by sentimentality and physical humor.  (That’s my take).
The superfluity of birds and mammals Disney added  have rounded, juvenile features that make their faces sweeter than they would be in nature.  At Snow White’s bidding they wash the dishes and do the laundry and no one thinks of biting anyone else.  Grimm’s “good little dwarves’” are transformed into a band of comically dim, bearded sidekicks in need of civilizing by the good little mother and housewife Snow White.  These miners couldn’t hold their own in Middle Earth or Discworld because their dwarvishness has dwindled away to next to nothing.The collection has a nice selection of merchandise for the original animated film, marked in prominent places that it is authorized merchandise. All of them except one appeared in 1938 on the wake of the film’s release.

Whitman Publishing Company issued a 280-page retelling of the fairy tale by the “Staff of the Walt Disney Studios based on the Walt Disney Motion Picture” in the Big Little Book series (Cotsen 87872).  Printed on acid paper that is brown and brittle, the  illustrations were printed with such a coarse screen that the dots are quite visible.  The quality of the cover art on the binding is much better, and the Queen is featured on the spine and the back board.The dwarves were featured on a get-well-soon card published by White and Wycoff.  Cotsen’s  copy is annotated by “B. W.” (presumably the giver) and Snow White has been identified over her head as “Teacher” (Cotsen 37944).   On the inside, Snow White is sitting in bed underneath a patchwork quilt with the dwarves lined up at the foot of the bed.  Could the art have been adapted from the scene where the dwarves build her a bed that was cut in the final version? Carrochio the Italian publisher in Milan produced an activity book,”Biancaneve ei sette nani,” complete with a detailed backdrop, props, and multiple figures with stands (Cotsen 40143). Snow White’s iconic gown on the cover is blue, when it should have a yellow skirt and a blue bodice.  The Queen isn’t anywhere in the sheets of cut-outs, which means it is impossible to tell the entire story.  Little dramatists would have to cut directly from the merrymaking after dinner to the arrival of the prince on horseback.If Snow White were not such a good little housekeeper, there would have been no Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Recipe Book  (Cotsen 15526), courtesy of Armour, who sold canned ox tongue, boiled beef, corned beef, and ham under its “Veribest label.”  The back story is Snow White discovers a large supply of corned beef in the cupboard and promises to show the dwarves all the ways she can prepare it if they will teach her how to make their favorite dishes (mostly versions of hash).  Some fresh vegetables besides potatoes are used in some of the recipes.  Sneezy has to be reminded of the principles of good hygiene in the kitchen and Grumpy has to turn it into a contest of who is the best cook–him  or the princess. Disney could not resist promoting the art of the film in the Sketch Book published by Collins dedicated to the “eternal spirit of childhood in all of us” (Cotsen 4999).  For each character, the color plate tipped onto thick brown paper is followed by three to four pages of reproductions of original sketches, with brief descriptions of the leading characteristics.  One of the surprises in the stacks was a set of Snow White cards published in China (Cotsen 94564).  The illustrations are redrawn from the studio renderings and must be an unauthorized use.  Sometimes the mighty Disney lawyers are caught napping. Disney’s stream of live-action remakes of its classic animated films demonstrates that  truly great tales can’t be obliterated by heel and toe chopping, the addition of all kinds of business to the script, or a stream of products children never knew they needed until…   All the relentless activity of the last 84 years might suggest a quiet read of the Grimms to reacquaint ourselves with the story that started it all.  It has to be an improvement over the project Disney abandoned to make Kung Fu version…

 

Some New Thoughts on the Jacob’s Ladder, that Mysterious Toy

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The Jacob’s Ladder is an old-timey pastime that has made a surprising comeback recently. Twenty years ago wooden versions were available only from retailers making a stand against modern soulless plastic toys.  Jacob’s Ladders now can be obtained in different designs and materials quite inexpensively because they have been redefined as a “sensory” or  “fidget” toy that can help relax and focus autistic children. It is also  recommended as a good distraction for small, restless travelers or pupils having trouble sitting still. The kinetic illusion has been demystified by all the bloggers who have posted step-by-step illustrated instructions for crafting a Jacob’s ladder at home.

Cotsen has three or four old Jacob’s Ladder toys and I decided to try and confirm the date of manufacture for the earliest one, which is supposed to be late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.  Here is Cotsen 28398 viewed from the side:

Digging up material about the toy’s origins and history is a lot hard than finding instructions for making one!  Almost every scrap of information I  found was suspect, starting with the claims that the toy dates back to the Pharoahs.  The name, it is confidently asserted, was inspired by the account of Jacob’s dream in Genesis, but the earliest use in the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in 1820 and makes no reference to the Bible.  From the colonial period, the Jacob’s Ladder was supposed to have been a favorite Sabbath toy, so the wealth of  nineteenth-century American texts on-line would surely yield up a reference,  advertisement, or picture or two.   But searching on “Jacob’s Ladder toy” and all the alternative names–Aaron’s Bells, Chinese Blocks, Click-klack toy, Magic Tablets, Tumbling Blocks–failed to turn up anything useful. The pile of authoritative books on the history of toys in my study were no more helpful.

The most unlikely finds–two pieces by Charles Dickens, a short story “A Christmas Tree” from Household Words (1850) and an essay, “Toys, Past and Present” from All the Year Round, October 1 1876– turned out to contain pure gold.  The Jacob’s Ladder hanging on the tree in the short story describes it as “made of little squares of red wood, that went flapping and clattering over one another, each developing a different picture, and the whole enlivened by small bells, was a mighty marvel and a great delight.”  The passage in “Toys, Past and Present”  explains in greater detail how the marvelous effect was created and why gave so much pleasure: “It consisted of six oblong pieces of wood, adorned with pictures on both sides, and so connected with tapes that when the top piece, which was held in the hand, was turned down, all the others would turn down likewise by an apparently spontaneous movement, causing a new series of pictures to be presented to the eye, which was highly gratified by the change, as were also the ears by the clattering of the wooden tablets and the tinkling of some little bells which they were decorated.”

Dickens would have had no trouble recognizing this as a Jacob’s Ladder. There were differences, of course, between the ones with which he was familiar and the one in Cotsen. The six pieces of wood were covered with colored paper instead of painted and there was no sign that it had ever had bells.  It does click when the blocks tumble down.  The most important similarity is the presence of pictures on both sides of the pieces of wood. Dickens doesn’t say anything about the subjects or style of the pictures.  The prints on the Cotsen Jacob’s ladder were likely cut out of lottery sheets, a kind of ephemeral engraving, and glued to the paper covering of the boards.   Not much is known about lottery sheets beyond that they were being produced for children to “play with” as early as the late seventeenth century.  These sheets certainly would have lent themselves to craft projects of all kinds, but the presence of cut-outs from commercially available prints on a toy like this probably doesn’t prove it was homemade.  Cutting up lottery prints may have been the a cost-effectivel method of applying illustrations to a toy before technology existed to print directly on the wood.

There is another possible  source for the prints pasted on the boards…  There is a certain resemblance between the engravings in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book (G. Bickham, jr, 1744) and Nancy Cock’s Song-Book (T. Read, 1744) and perhaps a copy of such a small book was sacrificed to make the object…Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library has a German Jacob’s Ladder with two little rings piercing the long edges.  Bell fasteners, perhaps?  It has been dated to the same period as the English example in Cotsen.Another thing Dickens’ two descriptions establish is how much the appearance of a modern Jacob’s Ladder has changed in the twentieth century. The essential wooden (or plastic) pieces and the tapes are the same, but the use of bright contrasting primary colors is one of the hallmarks of the modernist toy aesthetic the Bauhaus developed. It is possible to find modern Jacob’s Ladders with patterns or pictures painted on the surfaces of the pieces, but pieces of unfinished wood or in solid colors with contrasting colored tapes are much more common. Bells must have been eliminated along the way as a swallowing hazard, as well as too expensive, too troublesome to attach securely. In 2019, Mr. John Armstrong, a toymaker in Omaha, Nebraska, wrote me a wonderful note about the history of this marvelous toy:

I just read and enjoyed your article on Jacob’s ladders from earlier this year.  I can push the origins back a few more hundred years for you (not to ancient Egypt).  Click on the link below and you will see a painting by Bernardino Luini from the early 1500s.  The puzzle the child is holding should look familiar.  Although only two boards long, the basic concept is there, all the way down to inserting a bit of string behind the two ribbons so it will appear and disappear. On Wikipedia it is said that Luini worked with and was influenced by Leonardo.  Could that have been the origin of such a clever toy?

We will probably never know, but what an intriguing idea!