The 2025 'Snow White' wakes up woke -- and goes to sleep
The 2025 remake of Disney's 1937 classic cost the company $300 million and pissed off women, minorities and especially dwarfs. The current contro brings back fond memories for me.
The remake of 'Snow White' has cost Disney a lot of money and grief. Its opening at the box office was a bust and the hating of it will only make things worse.
Disney tried — and failed — to thread the impossible needle of staying true to the 1937 original without offending today's women, non-white people and, of course, Hollywood's Little People.
This fine WSJ piece tells the story well. And here are the predictable and deservedly gruesome first weekend box-office returns.
The current ‘woke’ 'Snow White' contro brings back fond memories for me.
In 1983, while proudly serving as the rogue editor of the Sunday Calendar section's Letters Page in the 1980s, I had to handle a 'Snow White' dust-up about the politically obsolete way women were treated in the '37 version. The movie, which had recently been re-released and written about, was accused of being anti-woman, harmful to little girls and reinforcing the idea of female passivity.
Smart and funny readers, as usual, proved what a valuable resource they were to the subversive and fun-filled page of letters, which I deliberately edited to entertain and inform 1.1 million readers, not put them to sleep like all the other newspaper letters pages in America.
My headline over a batch of the 'Snow White' letters -- 'Ms. White and the Seven Vertically Impaired Persons' -- caused me no trouble from the higher-ups but would probably get me fired or imprisoned today.
One of my proudest accomplishments in a long but modest journalism career, it proves that if you wait long enough, everything old becomes newsy again.
Readable versions of all the great 1983 ‘Snow White’ letters and my mini-history of my trouble-making Letters Page are here.