Snow White A Sock In Seattle

Another Home Historian Covers Snow White in 1938

An Appeal to the many who know more than I do: Name films for which a scrap book was issued, a dedicated album to fill with souvenirs, like the one above for Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. I can’t offhand think of another movie where this was done, but surely there were some since 1937, and maybe others before. Paramount imitated most aspects of Snow White with Gulliver’s Travels in 1939, but there’s no evidence of a scrapbook, at least the pressbook doesn’t indicate one. What’s shown here is proof that at least one Snow White album was bought, and filled, by a dedicated fan in Seattle. It is a priceless record of local exploitation during 1938 and varied news articles that ran alongside ads placed by the Music Box and the 5^th Avenue Theatres. Like with Russell Merritt’s dedication to Hound of The Baskervilles in 1959, here was an anonymous viewer’s effort to gather everything Seattle did on Snow White’s behalf and memorialize it. Did he/she anticipate that Disney’s first animated feature would live forever?

You’re nearing ninety or past it if you saw Snow White first-run. We’re told since 1937-38 that the impact was huge. There had never been a talkie to roll up grosses like this. Grown-ups saw Snow White and cried. It was a genuine social phenomenon. Experts warned you couldn’t hold an audience still for an hour and a half of cartoon. That was to extent true for animated features that came after Snow White, even most of Disney’s, none of which stirred a same emotion in watchers. I sought an eyewitness to Snow White’s first salvo and found one in teacher/historian Conrad Lane, who was born in 1930 and saw the show new in March 1938. He was seven and a half years old. The place was Anderson, Indiana. Conrad had no awareness of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs before his mother took him to see it. He had certainly been to movies (earliest recollection: Footlight Parade in 1933), and liked cartoons, the recent Popeye specials (Ali Baba, Sindbad, etc.) having made a big impression. The term “freaked me out” would wait thirty years after Snow White for coinage, but Conrad says it applied here, for he was “absolutely enthralled.”

They had entered the theatre right went the huntsman failed in his resolve to kill Snow White and warned her instead to run away and never come back. Conrad says this was a most terrifying thing he’d seen in movies up to that time. Even a happy ending dismayed him, for why would Snow White leave her dwarf friends to ride off with a prince she barely knew? His mother replied, “She came back to see them once a year” (maybe Disney should have inserted a title to that effect). Next day’s print ad touted Snow White as “Held Over.” It was the first time Conrad encountered the term. Awareness of Snow White would linger thanks to bally nailed on telegraph poles between home and school. Here was no mere kid picture. Conrad’s aunt and uncle drove two hours from out of state to experience Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs at an early Indianapolis run. Disney would not in his lifetime see response like this for an animated feature. Maybe adults spent their bolts on Snow White, because Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, got nowhere near it. I wonder if, when follow-ups came, they said, “We’ve seen one of these, and one is enough.” Snow White was many kinds of a glorious novelty, but in the end, it was a novelty, “something that is new and has not been experienced before, and so is interesting,” as the books say, but how many go back for a novelty done again?

Seattle’s scrapbook keeper got much help filling pages from local newspapers. Each week they would memorialize records set at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, where Snow White stayed a month before moving over to the Music Box Theatre for three more frames. Short subjects were freshened through the run, Quintupland, featuring the Dionnes, an initial accompany to Snow White. Ads were customized to signal each holdover (“Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho!, Seattle Loves Us So!”). It became clear that patrons were going back again and again to see Snow White. Repeat biz as a foregone conclusion was incorporated into ads (“No Matter How Many Times You See It, You’ll Always See Something New”). Music Box management told local press that “no screen offering --- since the advent of audibility in the cinema, had been viewed repeatedly by so many patrons.” 1,700 ticket-buyers saw Snow White twice, 600 had been in three times, and 63 people declared they watched the feature four times, and planned to return again.

This kind of success had to inspire a copy, Paramount in most favored position with Max Fleischer’s shop at feature-ready. They tested water with the Popeye specials, and went forward now with Gulliver’s Travels, which was handsome, if derivative. A best lick at Disney may have been Gulliver getting into the Christmas 1939 marketplace ahead of a delayed Pinocchio. If Snow White was to be Disney’s sole blockbuster, at least it could draw repeatedly from that well. 1940 dates had Oscar-winner Disney cartoons for company, and a worldwide $2.4 million yielded from the first major reissue (1944) was better money than Fantasia and Dumbo took in their first release. Snow White stayed evergreen with a worldwide $2.2 million in 1952, this revival stage-managed by Terry Turner. Snow White was kept off TV but for clips and songs excerpted to tease new theatrical dates (1958), or when Walt permitted a pencil test for an unused segment to highlight a 1956 episode of Disneyland. There was nothing quite like the affection Snow White inspired, a jewel precious enough to stay locked up except where admission was paid to theatres. Frozen out were schools and film societies that would otherwise rent Snow White in 16mm, even as other Disney animated features went that route. Eight or so minutes of Snow White could be had on 8mm, in color even, but getting the whole thing meant resort to bootleg 16mm, which, depending on the skill of your duper, could serve well, since prints were often made off reduction negatives finessed from 35mm, the latter accessible thanks to Snow White continuing to run at cinemas. All a pirate had to do was take a print to his lab and run off a negative. Good enough tech work and a re-recorded track could yield nice 16mm. That’s all smoked meat now, what with Blu-ray, streaming, the rest of resources to enjoy Snow White at our leisure.

Elmer and Bugs Back in 2019 with Dynamite Dance

But who’s watching Snow White today? Would it seem too stately … slow? Likely as not, yes and yes, for sure beside hopped-up animation of a last … thirty years at least? Anyone who treasures Snow White would have had to grow that love in a theatre seat, as SW was no television staple (was there ever a broadcast?). Home video release was in 1994, the kiss-off to reissues that sustained Snow White since 1937. Wouldn’t a young parent be more likely to scoot Junior in front of whatever Toy Stories or Little Mermaids were handy? Those represent Mom and Dad’s youth better than hieroglyph like Snow White. To put it mild, you’ve got to be some serious old to hold Snow White dear, but is this not true of any Classic Era animation too long out of a wider public eye? I see where Warner Bros. is trying yet again to revitalize their cartoon stable, this time “1,000 minutes of new animation each season, which will be available across multiple platforms, including digital, mobile, and broadcast.” They’ve gone back to old-style cartooning if the online sample is to be believed, a minute-and-a-half Bugs/Elmer called Dynamite Dance. So how long will WB transfuse effort and dollars to characters long past mainstream life? There were 3-D Road Runners, a Tweety, some others, in 2010. Before that came Tiny Toon Adventures (1990-1992) and Animaniacs (1993-1998), these over twenty years ago, closing on thirty, in fact. Are there fans that grew up on Tiny Toons and consider them classics? Hard to guess … I was raised on Huckleberry Hound, but need not revisit him. The Warner figures were such a force, and for so long --- how could they simply fade away? --- yet we must wonder how many more chances WB will give the franchise. If this latest effort fails, might it be the last Looney Tune or Merrie Melody we hear?

Earlier Greenbriar consideration, over ten years back, on modern fate of classic cartoons. Be sure to review the comment section.