A Fairest-of-All Face-Off
Every house has its running gag, and at Mockbustuers.tv ours is simple: we call the tiny, scrappy productions "originals" and the gigantic, famous ones "million-dollar copies." It's a joke, not journalism — but it's a joke that gets unusually delicious when the subject is Snow White herself, arguably the most retold fairy tale in cinema history.
In one corner: Snow White, a modest animated short from 1995, drawn with plain lines, no great hurry to frighten anybody, and a princess who discovers a forest full of watchful animals and seven miners with remarkably tidy habits. In the other corner: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the 1938 Walt Disney production that somehow got there fifty-seven years earlier, with a budget, a magic mirror, and a marketing machine the size of a castle.
We know, we know. Chronology is not on our side. But since when has satire cared about chronology?
Same Forest, Suspiciously Similar Furniture
Strip away the decades and the animation techniques, and the beats line up almost too neatly. Both stories open with a Queen — vain, mirror-obsessed, allergic to sharing the title "fairest of all" — who decides her stepdaughter is more trouble alive than dead. Both send Snow White into a forest that turns out to be shockingly welcoming, complete with a chorus of forest animals happy to lend a paw with the housework. And in both versions, she happens upon a cottage belonging to seven dwarfs, each apparently allergic to clutter, who welcome her into their peculiar bachelor household in exchange for some light housekeeping.
