Snow White - How Disney's ideologues destroyed their own movie

You know, sometimes in life you just can't catch a break and it seems like everything you do to fix the situation only ends up pushing things from bad to worse to catastrophic. It's like I once saw a drunk guy stagger out of a late night takeaway with a kebab in hand only to lose his grip on his prized lump of artery clogging saturated meat and fumbled to catch it before it fell to the ground, causing him to lose his balance and stumble face first into a plate glass window.

To think about that poor unfortunate drunken Soul who had to retreat home with no food, a bloody nose, bruised eagle and the mocking laughter of some people ringing in his ears, I'm reminded of Snow White actress Rachel Zegler, who made it to be single-handedly tanking the box office prospects over multi-million dollar movie to the point where even industry experts warned that she's rapidly turning into box office poison. See, one of the weird little side effects of the Hollywood strikes is that there's not a whole lot of news and controversy coming out of Tinseltown right now, which is given the internet a bit more time to reflect on other things.

You find some examples for this in past interviews on the subject of Snow White that were largely ignored ate the time, but have soon come back to haunt Disney and Rachel in recent weeks, and damn, have they provided fertile ground for backlash and mockery. Quote (Rachel Zegler): "I was scared of the original cartoon, I think I watched it once and then I never picked it up again!" Quote 2: "I just mean that it's no longer 1937 and we wrote a snow white that not going to be saved by the prince and she's not going to be dreaming about true love, she's dreaming about the leader she knows she can be and the leader that her late father told her that she could be if she was fearless, fair, brave and true."

No offense Rachel, but you're making it pretty tough for people to like you. Now I don't pretend to know what exactly was going on in her head when she said stuff like this, maybe she was just a bit nervous and overwhelmed by all the attention and didn't know how to respond with the kind of slick blandly diplomatic answers that a more experienced celebrity might have given, maybe it's because she's young and idealistic and just blurted out the first thing that came into her head about the movie and the character.

Whatever the reason is, I don't really want to dump on her too much for all this controversity. Yeah, she's really creating the impression of a spoiled, entitled, narcisstic actor who totally doesn't appreciate the amazing opportunity she was given, yeah, her comments on the actor's strike were pretty poorly judged for someone getting paid more from one movie than most actors making their entire lives and yeah, the thing she's saying about Snow White make it seem like the very antithesis of the animated classic that stood the test of time a lot better than her own movies likely to, but really, when you get right down to it, she's just another dumb actors saying what she thinks people want to hear!

The bigger problem is the studio culture that someone like Zegler represents because you can bet your left ass cheek that most of these talking points were handy to her directly by the PR People at Disney! Yeah, she might not have phrased them in the most elegant way, but the sentiment they represented is dead on bran for a company that's become the studio equivalent of a snake eating its own tail desperately cannibalizing their back catalog of classic movies in an increasingly futile attempt to stay relevant while at least the old guard is distancing itself from this woken madness for understandable reasons.

See, when it comes to their other live-action remakes of animated movies, they were generally smart enough to stay pretty quiet about the little changes they were in for modern audiences. Yeah, sometimes actors and writers would slip up and say a bit more than they were supposed to and things got a bit more overt with Peter Pan and the Little Mermaid, but for the most part they were content to pay tribute to the originals and Market the remakes as respectful adaptations.

Right from the off though, they seem to have taken a very different approach with Snow White, it feels like they're making a concerted effort to cast the original movies as some horribly dated relic of a bygone era that we're all supposed to look back on and laugh at with the benefit of our modern enlightened hindsight. Rachel certainly doesn't think much of it and neither does Gal Gadot if their interviews or anything to go by. Ironically, there's something weirdly outdated now about turning the main character into this fanatically independant power Hungry Girl boss who doesn't need a man.

It's the kind of talking points that were all the rage five or six years ago when this whole movement in Hollywood was still in its infancy, but that was then and this is now, so the strong female lead isn't the fresh New Concept it was back in 2016! In fact, even in the mainstream media there's a growing acceptance that this kind of bland superficial archetype has run its course to the point where it's been become kind of a meme in its own rights, which is probably why Bob Iger & the rest of Disney tried in vain to call Rachel Zegler back to save the new movie, which later hit the wall nevertheless.

Either way though, I can't help wondering is this really the attitude you want to display towards one of the most beloved animated movies of all time, the one that literally made Disney what it is today? Do you really want to be seen on the accomplishments of previous generations when your own efforts are probably never going to reach the same Heights of cultural influence? I ask this because at a certain point it really just comes across as a jealous envious attempt to drag down other peoples work rather than elevating your own.

As marvelous so aptly puts it in one of his videos this isn't a passing of the torch, it's a torching of the past, it's a deliberate attempt to rewrite history and destroy the legacy of the thing you're so desperate to supplant, while conveniently forgetting that there's a reason movies like Snow White have been enjoyed by generations of audiences. The stories they told are Timeless and Universal instead of trying to catch the ever-changing Winds of the political and social Zeitgeist. They were written for modern audiences, they were written for every audience, from the 1930s to the 2020s and that's precisely why they worked so well!

As much as you and your friends might look down on them and mock them for not aligning with whatever fads and Trends happen to be the current thing, the inconvenient truths is that they'll still be remembered long after your lesser efforts have been forgotten!

At the end you are but a passing Ripple in the pond of History whereas they are history.