Dishonest conservative news outlets looking to drum up controversy for the generation of outrage against liberal Hollywood have railed against a so-called "woke" version of "Snow White." Now the controversy has delayed the film by a year.
Specifically, commentators seemed vexed by the fact that Snow White isn't white enough, and that the "Seven Dwarves" were dwarfy enough. Or something.
But the whole outrage is based on pure ignorance. Fox news, for example, seems to think that the Disney cartoon from 1937 was the original. In fact that telling of the story was radically whitewashed and sugar-coated beyond recognition, in keeping with the mores and sensibilities of that era.
In the closest thing we have to the "original" story, published by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in 1812, the evil queen sends a huntsman out to kill Snow White and bring back her lungs and liver, which she intended to eat. The original featured intimations of cannibalism.
When Snow White was finally killed by the queen, she was still seven years old. And so it was a seven-year-old corpse that the prince fell in love with and tried to buy from the Dwarves. The original featured intimations of pedophelic necrophilia.
Snow White was seven years old when she married the prince. The original featured an adult man marrying a child bride, something right out of the Taliban.
To exact revenge, Show White and her adult husband then had the queen tortured and executed by forcing the queen to step into red-hot iron shoes and then dance until she "fell down dead."
By contrast, the Disney version from 1937 was "woke." Any notion that adding a patina of diversity or any nod to the morals and sensitivities of 2023 are nothing compared to what Disney did in 1937.