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Well, this is the day that fans of 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs have been anticipating–or dreading–for a couple of years. Snow White, the Walt Disney Company’s $250-plus million live-action remake of its first full-length animated film, opens nationwide today. Much has been written about the off-screen animosities between stars Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, as well as comments each actress has made on other topics. I’m not here to discuss that, though.
Likewise, I’m only going to briefly mention the controversy surrounding the Dwarfs themselves, who have been erased from the new picture’s title. Worried about how traditional “little people” depictions would fare in the 21st century, the filmmakers early on planned to use live actors, most of whom were “normal” height. When this tack met with, at best, tepid fan reaction, the House of Mouse switched to CGI renderings meant to be (all together, now) Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy and Sneezy. I say “meant to be” because–let’s be honest–without the names audiences would have trouble matching them up to their classic cartoon counterparts (Grumpy is Walter Matthau, Happy looks like Babe Ruth as a lawn gnome, Sneezy looks Scottish, and Dopey appears to be the offspring of Ross Perot and Alfred E. Neuman).
Ah, yes, the names. In the nearly nine decades since its release, the original Snow White remains one of Disney’s best-loved animated fables. This is due in no small part to a step the studio took to make their version of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale–already over a century old by the 1930s–unique. You see, up to that point the septet of diminutive miners who became the runaway princess’s guardians had no distinctive personalities or physical traits. Heck, they didn’t even have names until the authors of a 1912 Broadway play went ahead and dubbed them (no kidding) Blick, Flick, Glick, Plick, Snick, Whick and, um, Quee.
When the Disney crew set out to make their debut feature, they sought to balance the dramatic aspects of the story with comedy, and one of the best ways to do this would be to be to make sure each dwarf was his own person, with distinguishing quirks and seven distinct voices (well, six voices, anyway). Naturally, Walt himself and his advisors were also aware that these new characters would be easier to copyright for marketing purposes.
Over the course of the three-year production process, the creators came up with dozens of names for their pint-sized protagonists before whittling it down to the final roster. Who, then, were the potential dwarfs who didn’t make the animators’ cut? Get ready to be amazed and a little bemused, because at one point or another someone thought each of these would make for a viable character:
Awful
Baldy
Biggo-Ego
Burpy
Chesty (Imagine if Russ Meyer had made a Snow White movie)
Daffy (Warner Bros.’ duck debuted in April that same year)
Deafy
Dippy
Dirty
Dizzy
Doleful
Dumpy
Flabby
Gabby
Helpful
Hickey
Hoppy
Hotsy
Hungry
Jaunty
Jumpy
Lazy
Neurtsy
Nifty
Puffy
Sappy
Scrappy (no relation to the ’30s cartoon kid from Charles Mintz’s studio)
Shifty
Shorty
Silly
Snappy
Sniffy (not to be confused with Warners’ cartoon mouse Sniffles)
Snoopy (good grief!)
Soulful
Strutty
Stuffy
Swift (today, of course, this would be Swifty)
Tearful
Thrifty (why do I just know he’d have had a Scots accent?)
Tubby
Weepy
Wheezy
Wistful
and, lastly, Woeful
No doubt about it, it definitely could have been a very different film. Funny how a lot of those rejected names wound up being used for the Smurfs, isn’t it?
Incidentally, here’s what studio story notes had to say about Awful: “He steals and drinks and is very dirty. The other dwarfs have impressed on him that he is a soul beyond redemption. This fact he never questions. He feels powerless against the evil in him and accepts his damnation cheerfully. He is the perpetual fall guy for the others. He is blamed and punished for everything that goes wrong and, even when punished for somebody else’s misdeed, he takes his medicine with a cheerful ‘I deserve it.’” What child wouldn’t have delighted to see him on the screen?
And what about Jumpy, who was actually one of the last possibilities to be dropped from the roll call? “He is in constant twitchy fear of being goosed, but is not goosed until the last scene. Whenever he hears a noise behind him, he starts, and his hand automatically protects his fanny.” And yet he didn’t mind sharing a bedroom with six other guys.
As for the decidedly un-PC Deafy: “He always tries to make clever remarks, but he misinterprets other people’s attitudes toward him. He feels, lots of times, that they are saying something about him, or that they have made some remarks, which they haven’t at all–he takes exception to the most ridiculous things. Throughout the picture Deafy and Grumpy are always clashing. Deafy will pick up one word of the conversation in the early part, and whereas the conversation topic might have changed completely, he still sticks to the first thing that he heard, and in this way we hope to get some comical situations out of Deafy.” Hey, Mr. Magoo got several decades’ worth of jokes out of being myopic.
Hardcore Disney buffs will appreciate that Dippy was one of the candidates, since Goofy’s original name was Dippy Dawg. Had the animators gone with Gabby or Snoopy, they would have beaten the Fleischer Brothers’ Gulliver’s Travels by two years and Charles Schulz by 23. And finally, the less said about Hickey, the better.
Are you planning to see the new live-action Snow White? Do you have a favorite dwarf from the 1937 film, or a favorite rejected name? If so, let us know in the comments below.