Snow White and the Seven What?

Last night Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was on TV. Amelia had never seen the movie, so after the boys were in bed we sat down together to watch it.

Snow White was the first movie I ever saw in the theater, obviously not a first-run, since it was originally released in 1937. My sister Judy and my cousin Laurie took Cathy and me. We were probably seven or eight at the time.

I remember being terrified during the scene where the dwarfs chase the wicked Queen disguised as an old hag up the cliff and she falls to her death.

But I had forgotten a lot of the movie. Quite a bit of it is pretty scary, though Amelia seemed to overlook a lot of that. Her first comment was that Snow White had a funny voice. She's right. It's high-pitched and warbly, and not something I ever remember noticing.

Because I was watching with a three year old, the movie quickly became a game of Twenty-Thousand Questions. I was tired by the time we hit the first commercial! She had questions about everything. Why did Snow White run from the prince? Who was in the mirror? When would she get to see the dwarfs? What was the huntsman doing with the knife? (Thank you, Walt Disney, for introducing the idea of murder to my young child.) Why did the dwarfs have such big noses? Why was the old hag/Queen rowing the boat? 

Ninety minutes of non-stop questions. We probably got pretty close to 20,000.

But the best part of the movie came when the seven dwarfs finally appeared on screen. Snow White thinks seven children live in the house, and when she meets the dwarfs she says, "Why you're not children! You're little old men!"

Amelia said, "They aren't men. They are dorks."

Jeff and I laughed out loud. She doesn't even know what a dork is. She was just mispronouncing "dwarf." We worked on it, but she still mostly said "dwork" instead of "dwarf."

I'll never hear the title of the movie again without laughing.

To offset all of Snow White's naive hand-wringing "Oh, dear whatever shall I do?" and waiting for her prince to come save here, tonight we started watching Mulan.

It's a nice contrast when it comes to the main character, as Mulan takes charge of her own destiny, but since it is set in China it has brought a real onslaught of cultural questions. We only watched the first 20 minutes, but I'm sure I'll have to pull out "I don't know, Amelia. We'll have to look that up," before this movie's over!

© Trippin' Mama 2010