FAIRY-TALE SWEETNESS

If you were seeking proof of Walt Disney's lasting influence on popular culture you'd need look no further than his first feature-length animated film from 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Before the Disney version, there were dozens (probably hundreds) of interpretations by various artists and illustrators as well as at least five early motion picture versions - one of which (made in 1916) had made a striking impact on the youthful imagination of a young lad in Kansas City named Walter Elias Disney.

What all these pre-Disney versions had in common is that they didn't have anything much in common! None of the Snow Whites looked alike and the dwarfs were just seven little men with no names. After Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, virtually everyone knew that the story's heroine wore a yellow dress with blue-and-red puff sleeves and that the dwarfs were called Happy, Grumpy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Bashful and so forth...

And so it's gone on for seventy years and will do so, now, for all time: check out the Snow White on your local ice-cream van and, when Christmas rolls round, the fliers for any Pantomime version near you and you'll see I'm right.

Over those seven decades, Disney's Snow White and her seven dwarfs have been recreated in many different media from topiary to glass, marble to ice and, here, in SUGAR!

Some friends gave me these items of (very unofficial) Disney merchandising at least ten years ago, but I've never had the heart to eat them. So they sit on a shelf gathering dust and must have become so fossilised by now that they'd probably break the teeth of all but the most macho mouse!

I have to confess, however, I'm not entirely sure which dwarf's which - apart from the bespectacled Doc and the beardless Dopey...

Image: © Brian Sibley 2010, uploaded from my Disney flickr Photo Album.