Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

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Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one of the most influential films of all time.

Now, today we are discussing Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

That's the 1937 version, not the more recent controversial film that I'm sure we'll cover at some point.

If you have not yet listened, I would encourage you to check out our brief primer on Walt Disney and his rise to pre-feature film Glory that's available on our feed.

If you know a lot about Walt Disney, feel free to jump right into this episode.

Now, my fearless co-host, Lizzie Bassett, is still fending for her newborn child, so today I'm going to be bringing in a couple of very special guests.

Elena Cravello and Chelsea Davison are accomplished television writers whose credits include Ted, both of them, The Tonight Show, starring Jimmy Fallon, Grayson Frankie, and many more.

And they are also podcast hosts.

And we're big fans of their podcast over here at What Went Wrong.

Podstruck, a rom-com rewind, is a podcast where they rewatch classic rom-coms discussing the good, the bad, and the totally sexist.

Of all the movies that convinced a generation of women that you're not ugly, you just have glasses.

Elena and Chelsea, thank you so much for joining us.

Hello.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you for having us.

This is like a dream come true right now.

We love your podcast.

So this is great.

We appreciate that.

And thank you for sticking to the script.

This is like one of the maybe four podcasts I actually listen to every week.

Well, our children are friends.

So I do require that.

Well, we are very excited to have you, particularly because it's not technically a rom-com, but I would argue that Snow White does have a lot of the tropes and archetypes of a rom-com.

Absolutely.

And Walt Disney kind of like leaned into some of those, as we'll discuss in the writing process.

So I'm curious.

I'm sure you guys saw this movie as children.

Yep.

What was your, what's been your relationship to Snow White?

And how did you feel upon re-watching it for the podcast?

So I am a huge Disney fan and always have been.

Like my dream.

I've had two dreams for my whole life and I'm not accomplishing either one, but one was to win an Oscar for best actress.

Oops, not going to happen.

Chelsea, it could still happen.

I believe in you.

I'm not acting, but it could somehow happen.

And two was to create, to write a Disney film.

And that one, I'm like, who knows?

Who knows?

I'm a writer now.

Yeah, that could happen.

That could happen.

But Disney was something that, you know, the first movie I really fell in love with was The Lion King.

I watched it on repeat.

And from there, I felt like it became so core to who I am.

And the way I think a lot of people are very shaped by Disney.

I'm not necessarily a Disney Parks adult who goes every six months or six weeks.

I don't know how often they're going.

Sometimes people go every day, Chelsea.

They're crazy.

Yeah, I guess so.

I'm not a true fan, but I think I have done a lot of rewatches through the catalog of all the Disney movies.

And so this is one that definitely is iconic, is

important for paving the way, but maybe not a favorite for me.

Ooh, got it.

All right.

Fighting words.

Yeah, I'm kind of a Disney adult, not in the way that I go all the time, but I go like once a year, or I try to.

I grew up going to Disneyland like once a year because my grandma lived 20 minutes away.

But for me, Snow White, it's funny because it's one of those movies I definitely watched growing up.

But then, you know, we had Ariel.

We had the Little Mermaid.

We had Aladdin.

Like we had so many classics growing up that this kind of just got shoved to the back of my mind.

And so re-watching it this time, I was kind of, I don't know, I was like, this is a really charming movie.

I really enjoyed it.

And I also thought there are moments where Snow White's face is real amorphous.

Like they could have used some more lines in her chin.

I was like, let me get in there with a Sharpie.

I can fix this a little bit.

You want to contour her?

No, I don't want to give her contour.

Let's make those cheekbones pop.

No, but there are just parts where her face kind of turns into a little bit of a blob.

And I was like, oh, they ran out of time or something.

They did run out of time.

Oh, I knew it.

And we'll discuss.

So as you guys mentioned, we kind of came up during what's called the Disney Renaissance, right?

Which was a period of time marked by a rebirth in Disney's high-quality animation.

So you mentioned The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, the Lion King.

This continued through Pocahontas and kind of famously ends more or less with Hercules and the Emperor's New Groove.

It's a 10 to 12 year period where Disney really dominated at both the box office and the Academy Awards.

Obviously, Snow White came 50 years before that, 1937.

It ushered in the golden age of animation.

And as you mentioned, it does feel, I think, a little quaint when viewed through today's lens and the animation has improved.

But I hope I can convince you that this movie is one of the most revolutionary movies in Hollywood history.

Oh.

And I hope I will convert you to my position now, which is appreciating this film as, you know, as groundbreaking as Jurassic Park was in 1993 when we first saw dinosaurs, you know, on the big screen in a convincing way.

Wow.

And, you know, like many, if not most Americans, this movie was a staple of my childhood.

It was a a VHS tape I knew very well.

But

like you mentioned, Elena, I was very biased toward the more recent and somewhat more male-oriented releases from Disney, like Aladdin, the Lion King, Beauty and the Beast.

And so I have to say, it had probably been 30 years, 28 years since seeing Snow White, and I rewatched it with my daughter, and I was completely blown away by it.

So, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a feature-length hand-animated cell animation fairy tale.

It was produced by Walt Disney under his Walt Disney Productions banner, released by RKO Radio Pictures, and based on Snow White by the Brothers Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm, respectively.

It was directed by David Hand, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Maury, Pierce Pierce, and Ben Sharpstein.

Written by Ted Shears, Richard Creedon, Otto Englander, Earl Hurd, Meryl DeMaris, Dorothy Ann Black, and Webb Smith, the film starred Adriana Casalotti as Snow White, Harry Stockwell as the Prince, Lucille Laverne as the Queen, Roy Atwell as Doc, Pinto Colvig as Grumpy, Otis Harlan as Happy, Scotty Matra as Bashful, Billy Gilbert as Sneezy, Eddie Collins as Dopey, and Moroni Olson as the Magic Mirror with Stuart Buchanan as the Huntsman.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered on December 21st, 1937, and as always, the IMDb log line reads, Exiled into the dangerous forest by her wicked stepmother, a princess is rescued by seven dwarf miners who make her part of their household.

And that is basically the entire movie, interspersed with a number of fun gags and set pieces.

But before we dive into the making of all of this, let's get to the sources.

So there are innumerable incredible books about Disney, Walt Disney, his origins, its origins, and this film.

But these are the primary sources used for this episode.

Walt Disney, An American Original by Bob Thomas.

Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, An Art in Its Making by Martin Krause and Linda Witkowski.

The Vault of Walt, unofficial, unauthorized, uncensored Disney stories never told by Jim Corkis.

Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the Making of the Classic Film by Richard Hollis and Brian Sibley, Walt Disney The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neil Gabler, and The Hollywood Reporter's 80-year retrospective on the film published in 2018, along with still the fairest of them all, the making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs featurette.

And there are a number of other videos online that talk about the technology and innovations behind the film.

Again, we're going to post a number of those to our Patreon if anybody's interested.

So let me take you guys back 1933.

Walt Disney's kind of had a bunch of success, but also a lot of struggle for the last 12 years or so.

And he decides it's time to make a feature film, an animated feature film, which had never been done in the United States, and I believe had only been attempted twice around the world up until this point.

Now, Walt, savvy businessman that he is, knew that he couldn't risk an entirely new format on a brand new story.

So he did what any smart producer would do, and he decided to base it on IP.

Something that I'm sure you guys have dealt with countless times as screenwriters in Hollywood.

Yes.

Yeah.

So he decides he's going to adapt a fable, a myth, or a fairy tale because he wants to animate an existing story.

that was already known and beloved in countries around the world.

So he wants to make sure it's something timeless.

And I think this is for a couple of reasons.

One, animation is ridiculously expensive at the time, it's super time-consuming.

And two, he needs to make sure it's still going to be relevant when it's finished two, three years down the line after he starts it, right?

Because there's nothing worse than like starting a script or a movie, and then all of a sudden, like the moment has passed for this thing, right?

We've all been there.

Yeah, also, you do have to be a madman to want to do a feature animation.

Like, I remember making those little flip books when I was little.

Yeah, that would just be like

a little, you know, stick figure moving an inch.

So, oh, yeah, doing a full movie in hand-drawn animation is insane.

Yeah.

So Walt is trying to figure out what to adapt.

Some sources say he considered Rip Van Winkle, but Paramount owned the rights.

Yikes.

I know.

Thank God.

And it's a snooze fest, huh?

Yeah.

I know.

Bad.

So he settled on a 19th-century story featuring a female protagonist, an evil queen, and whimsical woodland creatures, but it was not Snow White.

Any guesses?

Sleeping Beauty?

Good guess.

Alice in Wonderland.

Oh,

that's right.

Wow.

I think of that because, you know, obviously they do make that movie.

And I think of it as being so 60s trippy.

Like, I can't imagine what the 30s version of that would have been.

Opium dens?

I don't know.

Yeah, kind of, right?

Flappers and prohibition.

Actually, that sounds awesome.

So not only that, it was going to be kind of in a different style.

Basically, he thought, let's have the lead actress be live action, like with our Alice comedies that we did before, and let's have everything else be animated around her and he even had an actress in mind which was world-renowned mary pickford oh wow who was basically the biggest actress of the silent era oh i want to see that i want to see this so waltz stars on the rise but mary pickford's star was in decline and i'm not sure if you guys know this but the reason being she kind of failed to make the transition from silent film to the talkies because mary pickford's voice and specifically her singing voice were not up to snuff.

I can relate.

So, some people say that Pickford actually offered to underwrite the cost of making the movie

because I think she knew that she needed something like this.

And Disney was viewed as, you know, kind of a genius at this point.

The Mickey Mouse Club had a million members worldwide.

Wow.

And so this was going to be, oh, a vehicle for me to stay relevant in this business.

I love that hustle.

I love it.

Yeah, a lot of hustle.

She was very vocal about it.

In March of 1933, she told the New York Times that audiences were craving a family film and that making the movie with Walt would take time.

Quote, people have had enough of gangsters and sex plays and are of a mind for something nearer their own thinking and living.

It is time we did some pictures that children want.

Alice in Wonderland is simple and it is sophisticated.

It can be made into a film for the adult as well as the child.

So I think she's really pitching kind of what Pixar, right, would end up doing 75 years later.

Mary Pickford is a genius.

I mean, I love her.

She's amazing.

Well, and that's what we're still trying to pitch for quadrant, you know, to executives.

It's for everybody, the whole family.

Yeah.

And I'm over gangster movies too.

I'm like, I can relate to all of this.

And part of what she may have been subtly hinting at was the introduction of the Hayes Code.

So I'm not sure how familiar you guys are with the Hayes Code, but it was basically like a set of decency laws that were passed in Hollywood in 1934 at the behest of the Catholic Legion of Decency, designed to like clean up Hollywood's morally reprehensible and wayward films that were going on screen.

So if you look kind of pre-1934, there's quite a bit of transgressive and progressive filmmaking out there that includes really interesting topics, including dark female protagonists, abortion, gangsters.

Wow.

homosexuality, et cetera.

And that kind of goes away in the mid-30s.

And I think Pickford is aware of that.

And she's aware of the fact that Walt's, you know, kind of coming up.

So she's making a very shrewd business decision.

But unfortunately for her, Walt ultimately gets cold feet.

So they did costume tests with Mary Pickford.

She'd actually even gone to a Hollywood party dressed as Alex,

which is starting to feel like she's really selling.

You know what I mean?

This thing.

Yeah.

How Jeremy's strong of her.

At a certain point, it's too thirsty.

It's like, calm down, Mary.

We get it.

Yeah.

And I don't know.

It doesn't seem like that's why Walt backed out, but there are a few factors.

One, Paramount and Columbia are also doing their own live action adaptations of Alice in Wonderland at the same time.

So Walt may have just thought, too much competition.

I don't want to, you know, have my animated film be directly compared to a live action film at the same time.

He also was worried about the budget.

He says, and quote, other obstacles.

Pickford is heartbroken.

She apparently said to him at the time, quote, your apparent lack of enthusiasm in our last meeting, together with the many obstacles you seem to anticipate, was the crushing blow to my cherished hope.

Oh my gosh.

End quote.

I hope she was wearing the Alice in Wonderland outfit when she was.

I know.

It's very tragic.

Now, I think what actually happened was Disney found a better story for his first feature film.

So in early May of 1933, Disney's company wrapped up a little short for their silly symphonies called Three Little Pigs.

And Three Little Pigs was a major milestone for Disney animation for a couple of reasons.

One, it was an American retelling of a 19th century English fable.

So it kind of followed that same method.

They'd simplified the story, they sanitized it, nobody dies.

The pigs were anthropomorphized, right?

So, okay, we have animals kind of acting like people for the first time.

And it was made musical.

And so obviously nowadays, right, like half of the Disney equation is the music.

You mentioned the Lion King, Aladdin, the Little Mermaid.

That was not an original ingredient to a lot of the Disney shorts, but they had an original song for the three little pigs called Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf by Frank Churchill.

This song

went viral.

Yeah, it's a banger still.

Yeah, it is a banger.

It gets stuck in your head.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And the big bad wolf became synonymous with the Great Depression.

Oh.

And so it became this like working man's mantra

as everybody across the country was listening to it.

This movie made $150,000 in its first year, which was three times what the average Disney Silly Symphony made in its first year at the time.

Wow.

Wow.

And also in context, I'm sure that was like a billion dollars.

Let me do the math really quickly because I have some of those numbers.

Yeah, you say $150,000 now.

I'm like, oh, okay.

I'm like, oh, yeah, let's please.

$3.3 million in its first year.

It is a short film.

Wow.

So this was just played at the beginning of screenings of feature films at theaters.

That's wild.

Imagine making a short film now and making $3 million off of it.

That's absurd.

Like, people only lose money on short films now, if I can speak from experience.

So United Artists, who was the distributor for that film, couldn't even keep up with the demand.

Theaters had to share a print, physically running it from one location to another in between screenings and showings, just because so many people wanted to see this movie.

Wow, that is so crazy.

You need a short film about that, just like seeing these guys who work at the theater running back and forth.

I know.

So, by June of 1934, Disney has publicly hinted at Snow White.

He told New York Magazine that they had a new story they were using.

They were going to have a full symphony with fine singers.

He said it would take 18 months to make.

Wrong.

He said it would take $250,000 to make.

Wrong.

And there was a lot of speculation as to what he was going to cover.

And so some other names apparently considered Babes in Toyland,

Bambi,

the Iliad, or the Odyssey.

Oh my gosh.

Gulliver's Travels.

Okay.

But none of them had what Snow White had because none of them had the seven dwarves.

Oh, well, I mean, Gulliver's Travels has tiny people, like a thousand dwarves.

I thought you were going to say the love story.

It does have the love story, which is great, but it seems like after the success of the anthropomorphic Little Pigs in Three Little Pigs, Walt realized, oh, we need a vehicle for the comedy and the gags in these stories, and the seven dwarves can give the humor opposite Snow White's love story.

And I would say it's kind of one of our early iterations of the best friend character in your rom-com.

100%.

We have a segment on our podcast podcast where we give out the Judy Greer Award for side character quirkiness, achievement in side character quirkiness.

And as I was watching this, I was thinking this, this movie is packed with them.

There's clothes rack deer, googly-eyed raccoon,

off-key baby bird, and all the seven dwarves.

And my pick for the Judy Greer Award was Grumpy.

Oh, that's a good one because he kind of comes full circle on her, right?

He has a little bit of an arc, and he has, he's got little quips throughout.

Yes.

Yeah.

He does.

He's very funny.

He is funny.

He does have an arc.

I like dopey personally, like just as like the purist.

Me too.

Dopey's kind of the obvious.

That's what the movie wants you to pick.

But the thing with dopey is he's not that dopey.

His clothes are just too big.

Like you would be dopey too if your clothes were this big.

He just needs a tailor is really all he needs.

He apparently, it's not that he can't talk.

Walt said that he simply never thought to.

Yeah, I can see that.

Which is just a different approach.

So So here's Walt's quote on the dwarves.

The seven dwarves we knew were natural for the medium of our pictures.

In them, we could instill boundless humor, not only as to their physical appearances, but in their mannerisms, personalities, voices, and actions.

In addition, with the action taking place in and around the dwarf's cottage in the woods, we realized that there was great opportunity for introducing appealing little birds and animals of the type we've had success with in the past.

Lastly, the human characters were fanciful enough to allow us a great deal of leeway in our treatment of them.

End quote.

So Snow White kind of fits the bill across the board, and it's also a bit of a sentimental choice.

Walt had seen an earlier film version of this story when he was a teenager, and he had been left with a lasting impression.

Now, are you guys familiar with the original Snow White fairy tale as told by the Brothers Grimm?

No.

No.

All right.

Let's dive in.

Okay.

So

it was first published in 1812 under the title Snevichen.

Oh.

Snow White.

There was an English translation called Snowdrop published in 1823.

And by the time Walt Disney approached it, there were already multiple film adaptations of this story.

So this was not like an original story.

This is a star is born.

It's been done, you know, four times up until this point.

I would love to see Lady Gaga play Snow White.

Oh, she'd be fun.

I'd actually rather see her play the queen.

Yeah, you're right.

So there's a 1910 French version, which I'm not going to try to pronounce.

It's 15 minute long short film.

There's a 1913 American version, which was 40 minutes long, in which children played the dwarves.

Importantly, this is also the first version that introduces the idea of the prince saving Snow White with a kiss.

Oh.

In the original version, the prince accidentally knocks a piece of the poison apple out of her mouth as he lifts her from the glass coffin, which then resuscitates her.

Much more like German engineering, much less romantic.

Yeah, I feel like they're like, the logistics, how would a kiss even work?

Obviously, it doesn't make any sense.

Going back to the mechanics of a pitch, right?

And like, what is the logic here?

Right.

So there were a bunch of stage adaptations, including a 1912 stage play starring Marguerite Clark.

And that kind of became the basis for Paramount's one-hour-long adaptation released in 1916, which is the version that Walt had seen as a kid.

Oh, by the way, one other thing.

Very dark ending.

to the original Grimm's fairy tale.

So the witch does not die falling off a cliff as she does in this film, right?

Where she kind of is trying to do the boulder and she kind kind of, it's she dies by her own hand, so to speak, in this version of the film, right?

She's trying to give you the boulder, she's doing something bad, the cliff breaks, she's punished for it.

In the book version, she gives Snow White, she tries to poison her like three times.

She gets the poison apple, she leaves, the prince wakes her up, and then they're going to get married, the prince and Snow White.

And the witch is speaking to the magic mirror, and she says, Who's the fairest one of all?

And he says, The prince's bride.

She says, Oh no, this can't stand.

So she goes to the wedding where the prince reveals her for who she is and then binds her feet in iron shoes that are like molten hot from a fire and forces her to dance at the wedding until she dies.

Oh my God.

And then everybody just goes on and does the rest of the wedding after she's dead.

And that's the end of the story.

Wow.

Wow.

I was going to say it was very my best friend's wedding of her to just show up, but then it takes a wild turn.

Yeah, it's very dark.

Dark.

Kind of like the real version of the little mermaid where, you know, it hurts every step is like stepping on glass for her to use these legs.

But the prince likes when she dances.

So she's just like, okay, ah,

whatever it takes.

Or like the red shoes I always loved growing up, which is like she dances till she dies.

I mean, not in molten hot shoes.

There's a lot of, yeah, classic dance horror.

Dance horror.

There's a lot of like a monkey's paw or like, yeah, like you have to pay for the thing that you want, right?

There's a cost in all of these stories.

That's the fairy tales had that dark element to them that, as we'll get to, Walt wisely removed in trying to sell this to a more mainstream audience.

So Walt's got his story and he has his team.

Now, at this point, he had 40 animators, 45 assistant animators, 30 inchers and painters, a 24-piece orchestra, a 27-person crew that included camera operators, electricians, and sound technicians.

He had 187 people in total.

Six years earlier, his studio had been a team of six.

Wow.

Wow.

So this is how much he's grown in six years.

Well, and I have to note, I noticed at the beginning of the movie, he has a whole title card at the top just thanking his staff.

And I was like, wow, you don't get that anymore.

No, and it's, it's really interesting.

We'll talk a little bit about it at the end, but there's this question.

I mean, what was becoming a studio head more than anything else before he had even formed his studio, right?

You can tell that's what he's doing.

More than being a producer, he's developing a new medium and he has people, he's not really doing the drawing at this point.

You know, he's not doing the directing.

He's in charge of all of it, really.

And I think that the Disney brand being synonymous with his name, there were instances of animators feeling like he got all the credit.

And it led to some fractures in important relationships for him earlier in his career.

And I think maybe that card is a way to address some of that feeling that, like, Walt, because it's his name, Disney Pictures, even though he's not doing the drawing, is taking credit for everything.

That's interesting.

It's just crazy because now it's all these figureheads.

Like, we don't know any of the people who work on films.

We're always just like this one genius did it all by himself.

Exactly.

I was going to say or herself, but usually it's a guy.

Yeah, if anything, like he was ahead of the auteur theory that would eventually dominate Hollywood, right?

In 1930s, Hollywood, the director was not particularly important, especially not to sell to an audience.

It was the stars, and that's the whole star system.

But everybody else was a contract player for these studios and Walt kind of existed outside of that.

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So the problem is, despite all of his successes, Disney never made a profit.

Or if they did, it was very small because anytime he made money, he would pour it back into improving the quality of his films.

So he would always say, my goal isn't millions, it's better pictures.

According to Disney, it took a Mickey Mouse comedy 12 months to break even because it was so expensive to make these.

So the downside to making this movie was a lot of short-term risk, right?

Because it was going to take a lot longer to make and release this, and it was going to be a lot more expensive.

So he's going to have to rack up a ton of debt before he can ever release this movie.

And we're coming out of the Great Depression right now.

And and we're eventually, you know, gonna be heading into World War II.

So it's a risky time.

So he sits his wife, Lillian, and his brother, Roy, down.

Roy Disney obviously ran the business side of things.

Yes.

And he says, okay, I'm gonna tell you, I'm gonna be straight with you.

It's probably gonna cost $150,000 to make this movie.

And they're like, oh my God, because this was basically 10 times what it costs making a short one.

And then he's like, but it could also cost $250,000 to make this movie.

And they're like, no,

that's insane.

We cannot do this.

Roy is shook, it seems, but Walt is adamant.

And so they go and they take out a loan from Bank of America to finance the film.

And it will not be the first loan that they take out.

So, to be clear, this is not like Columbia.

This is not RKO.

This isn't a studio financing it.

This is Walt and his brother taking out a loan from Bank of America to finance this film.

This is an independent film at the end of the day.

I love this.

This is Francis Ford Coppola, baby.

This is, he's doing it.

So there's a lot of different timelines floating around for when they officially started working on adapting the story.

But according to one source that I'll stick with, Neil Gabler, Walt shared his original vision of the story with a handful of his storymen and artists sometime between spring of 1933 and summer of 1934.

So you guys have worked in a bunch of writers rooms.

And it sounds kind of like that's what Walt was building to tell this story.

He brought in all of these really accomplished, you know, story writers, pitched them a version of the story and basically said like, okay, you take a sequence, you take a sequence, you take, you know, and they're almost like breaking a season of television.

And I was curious if you guys could speak a little bit about your most recent experience, for example, like Ted or something like that, kind of working in a group to break a story.

We're both like,

sure.

I was just going to say, and this is probably not related specifically to Ted, but for a writer's room coming up with a movie, I'm surprised there weren't more dick jokes in this movie.

Yeah, fair.

There definitely could have been.

I mean, but for example, like when you guys are working with with a showrunner, is it kind of like top-down dictated, you know, hey, we know this is the arc of the season and then we're going to kind of hand off sections?

Like, how do you guys work through it?

Well, so it depends on the show, I think, because I think some showrunners, some creators have a vision for what they want.

And some are coming in kind of with a blank slate of open collaboration and want to be pitched ideas, whether that's personal stories from the lives of the people in the room, whether that's, you know, something off of a seed of an idea they bring.

So it really depends on, I think, the person in charge and kind of how they want the process to go.

And I think it also really depends on what season of TV it is.

In order to pitch the show, you have to pitch the first season and the second season usually.

So they might have very strong ideas for the first couple of seasons, and then it starts to get a little more nebulous.

when you get into season, say, six or seven.

Not that that happens that often anymore.

But yeah, I think often it's blue skying, quote unquote, for the first couple of weeks, which is just throwing out big ideas of where the season could go.

And that's usually the time where it's a little more open.

But I find showrunners usually are pretty decisive and they'll say pretty quickly, like, no, we're not going to do that.

Or they might have an ending idea of this is where we're going to end the character.

So let's figure out what happens in between.

I've also, a lesson it took me a while to learn is that often if the person in charge is like, ah, I have an idea, but it's not quite right.

I don't know, something about blank.

They're wrong.

It's not that.

It's going to be that.

So your job is to say, whatever you just said, that's now the greatest idea I've ever heard.

And let's work on it.

Like too often, it will take days of people pitching other things before realizing, oh, no, they really wanted to do the idea that they said, not this, but dot, dot, dot.

Also, I think a good good thing in a writer's room is, you know, when you're the writer, you're the hired writer, you're not the one making the decisions.

And I think so often people get so hurt when their ideas aren't used.

But I'm like, that's not your job.

Your job is just to come up with as many good ideas as you can.

And then they're either going to use them or not, but like, don't take it personally.

And I think the writers I know who like take things so personally in the writer's room, I'm just like, no one wants to work with you.

Like, that's not a fun energy to be around.

Like, you got to roll with it when your pitch doesn't work too.

Well, I think Walt definitely fell into the category of like, he knew what he wanted, broadly speaking.

And then he was telling people, like, go fill in the gaps, right?

Like, I need what's this scene going to be?

What's this gag going to be?

What's this, you know, beat going to be?

And so for the first six months, he's got a small team of people.

This includes Dave Hand, Webb Smith, Harry Reeves, Ted Sears.

These are mostly older animators recruited out of New York, who then transitioned out of animation into the story department.

And then in the animation team, they were replaced by kind of the younger up-and-coming animators.

So they were called the old school group at Disney.

So by August of 1934, they've completed the first official outline of the story.

According to one Disney animator, Ken Anderson, Walt then, in the winter of 1934, brought in a much larger group, so kind of more like the full team.

They go to a soundstage and quote, he proceeded to intrigue us from eight o'clock until early midnight, acting and telling, even anticipating the songs and the kind of music.

And he so thrilled us with the complete recitation of all the the characters he had created that we were just carried away.

We had no concept that we were ever going to do anything else or ever want to do anything else.

We just wanted to do what he had just told us.

End quote.

That's what Chelsea said.

Yeah, I think he knew what he wanted, and he, you know, got up and he performed it.

And I'm sure he downplayed, oh, guys, I mean, it's not exactly going to be this.

It's going to be

like

loosely.

So maybe if you like it.

And everyone's like, oh, yeah.

It's perfect.

We love it, Walt.

Now, he had once described Snow White as having the perfect plot, but that did not mean perfection could not be improved upon.

Now, to his credit, Walt was very much an iterative person.

He was always trying to improve things, be it his animation techniques or the stories that they were telling.

So, one of the best decisions he makes is he decides that the anonymous dwarves, they're anonymous, they don't have names in the original story, will be named.

Now, this idea wasn't kind of his original idea.

It stems from a 1921 edition of the the story in which an English artist drew the dwarves with names embroidered on their pants.

Basically, household items.

Plate, bread, spoon, fork, knife, wine.

Yeah.

And Walt was like, I think we can do better than that.

So he wants to come up with names that will, quote, immediately identify the character in the minds of the audience.

And they came up with an initial list of 50 names.

And I'm just curious if you guys have any guesses you'd like to throw out of alternate names that are very much like the final names?

You know, they're often two syllables.

All right, so it's not like Reginald or something.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Like they're, you know, things that describe immediately descriptive names.

Okay, I got a couple.

Me too.

All right, let's hear them.

Okay, stinky.

I had stinky on my list.

Is stinky on here?

I don't think I see stinky.

Well, they really all should have been stinky.

But there is dirty.

Oh, there is dirty.

Wow.

they all should have been stinky because they have like a seven-minute section that's just them learning how to wash themselves.

I know, so we'll give you stinky because they have dirty.

Thank you.

What do you have, Chelsea?

Okay, all right.

Dirty weirdly feels harsher to me.

Yeah, I agree.

I had weepy.

Weepy, yes.

We have a weepy.

Very good.

That's good.

Okay.

Braggy.

No,

braggy.

Do I see?

Braggy.

Oh, but you know, big O ego.

Big O.

Big, Wait, Big O Ego or just Biggie?

Big O Ego.

That's the full name.

Oh my gosh.

So that's Braggy.

I feel like that totally works.

Okay, baby.

Like, I'm thinking Spice Girls now.

Right, right, right.

No,

no.

No baby.

We have a Gabby and we have a Blabby, but I don't see a baby.

Okay.

My last guest was horny, but I'm guessing that's not on there.

No.

There's always a horny dwarf.

Was flirty the tamer version?

There was, I don't think there is a flirty.

There was one controversial name that did make it into the finished film that we'll talk about.

I'll read you the list.

Scrappy, happy, hoppy, sleepy, weepy, dirty, cranky, sneezy, sneezy, wheezy, hungry, lazy, grumpy, dumpy, thrifty, shifty.

Dumpy.

Dumpy.

Yeah, nifty, woeful, doleful, wistful, soulful, helpful.

Oh.

Bashful, awful, snoopy, goopy, gabby, blabby, silly, dippy, graceful, nerdsy.

Nurtzy.

Sappy, gloomy, flabby, crabby, daffy, tearful, gaspy, busy, dizzy, snappy, hotsy, jaunty, puffy, strutty, biggie, biggie, wiggy, big o ego, chesty, jumpy.

Chesty!

I know.

Wow.

They had puffy and biggie.

Wow.

Yeah, they did.

So.

Five of the final names were on this list.

Happy, bashful, sneezy, sleepy, and grumpy.

Those were on the original list.

The outline also describes the queen as, quote, stately, beautiful, in the way of a benda mask.

Have you guys ever seen a benda mask before?

No.

All right, let me show you a picture here.

What is that?

Do you see that there?

Oh, it just kind of looks like a lady's face.

Yeah, they were popular during the 1920s.

Creepy.

And you can see like very Art Deco sort of style.

I'm sure you've seen photographs of them before.

So it kind of reduces all the features down to a very smooth, kind of beautiful facade and is very, I think, evocative of what the final animation looks like.

Totally.

Absolutely.

Now, rule of threes is a big rule in screenwriting, as you guys are, I'm sure, aware, but Disney decided that he needed to cut down a little bit on this.

Now, in the original story, the queen tries to kill Snow White three times.

Poison Apple is one of them, the final choice.

The first, though, is that she puts her in a bodice that is so tight that it suffocates Snow White.

Oh, wow.

But the dwarves come back and cut her out of it in time before she dies.

Oh, the second one is she gives her a poison comb.

Yes.

Yeah, that leaks poison into her head.

You know what?

I think Fairy Tale Theater did Snow White and did this version because I like knew this in the back of my brain.

I remember this.

Yeah.

And then the dwarves came and got the comb out just in time.

And so maybe it's like a mercury-laced comb.

I'm not sure.

And then the poison apple was the one that Walt Disney kept.

He also added scenes that could show off what you could do with animation that you couldn't really do in live action.

So when she's going to the forest, you know, she ends up traveling through the kind of morass of monsters, right?

All the trees and stuff that look like monsters that scare her.

They also originally wanted to do a scene called Upside Down Land.

This is trees with roots in the air, and this is kind of reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland.

And then Sleepy Valley, which, quote, had vast poppy fields, slumbrous music from the wind, sowing through the trees.

Wizard of Oz, anybody?

Yeah, Yeah, seriously.

So by November of 1934, things were solidifying.

The characters were further developed.

They had added another dwarf, Doc, the kind of leader of the bunch.

Songs were starting to be written, and the story was organized into 18 sequences, one paragraph each.

So focus turns to crystallizing the story after Snow White met the dwarves.

Walt was adamant that physical comedy was superior to comedic dialogue.

So he always wanted like physical gags over dialogue gags if possible, because everybody could appreciate a physical gag.

Running gags, character building gags, action gags.

That's why you just get like the whole sequence, for example, of dopey going up the stairs with the candle shaking.

You know, we're right behind you.

Yeah.

And they all just like linger down there.

Stuff like that.

You know, that would be very fun.

So Jumpy becomes sneezy.

And finally, dopey was added.

Now, dopey was the controversial name I mentioned.

Dope.

Any ideas what that word also means?

Oh,

like drugs.

That's right.

drugs this is like the 90s dare seminar

don't do dope exactly so dopey was like a relatively modern word in the 1930s and it could be misconstrued that it was a character who was addicted to drugs like dopey especially because he doesn't talk yeah seems to be something wrong with him

Walt defended the choice even going so far as to claim that the word appeared in Shakespeare.

Oh, did it?

I don't think it's true.

No, I looked up the origins of the word dopey, and it looks like it was not introduced to English until the 19th century, and it comes from a Dutch word called dupe, meaning thick sauce.

And then it eventually became dopey in English.

Well, they didn't have Google back then, so you could just say something and people would believe you.

You could say anything.

Absolutely.

So Snow White was described as a Janet Gaynor type.

Yeah, absolutely.

Also, she looks a lot like Claudette Colbert.

Yeah.

And a little bit of Betty Boop, I feel like, is in the air as well, which we'll get to why.

Definitely.

She is 14 years old.

Oh.

That's specifically described.

Sure.

That's why she's ready to get married.

Exactly.

She's almost past her prime.

Yeah.

She's ready to go to pasture, really.

Well, we're going to get to almost being past your prime at a very young age when we get to casting Snow White.

The prince was described as a Douglas Fairbanks type.

and was supposed to be 18 years old.

Oh.

So that's the, you know, the age gap.

It's appropriate for a fairy tale i would not pass today's standards i was gonna say that's actually better than like half the rom-coms we watch yeah yeah exactly that age gap is actually more appropriate than a lot of the other things um now the queen is described as a mixture of lady macbeth and the big bad wolf which i think is a fantastic combination yeah her beauty is sinister mature plenty of curves she becomes ugly and menacing when scheming and mixing her potions magic fluids transform her into an old witch-like hag hag.

Her dialogue and action are over-melodramatic, verging on the ridiculous.

So, originally, she doesn't become a hag in the books, but they changed it to a hag for stronger contrast.

I think she just puts on a disguise to look like a peddler or a merchant in the books.

They're like, no, no, no, no, no.

Like, let's make her the witch sort of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love that because the thing she wants is to be the most beautiful.

And in order to become the most beautiful, she has to become the most hideous in order to kill Snow White.

There's just some beautiful irony, poetry in there, irony, poetic irony.

But she does do it too soon because she changes herself into a hag before she even makes the apple.

I'm like, girl, slow down.

You can do that.

It is funny.

I think they wanted to show this is how evil this apple is because this hag is, you know, making it here.

And the hag is like such an interesting staple of horror all the way through, you know, you think about the shining, the woman in room 237.

Even something like barbarian, you know, for example, like what could be more horrible than this like giant naked woman with pendulous breasts chasing me through the underground, you know, so they're definitely hitting on something that's been deeply seated in our, you know, kind of cultural lore for a long time.

Yeah, we hate older women.

Yeah, that's the most terrifying thing in Hollywood.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

And so they cut a bunch of stuff from the beginning of the story.

I mean, the story actually begins with Snow White's birth, the death of her mother.

And so they remove a lot of that and they just put it in the preamble with the book that they do at the beginning.

Which I also have to note, an orphan is a key element to almost every rom-com.

We've realized most leads are orphans.

So Snow White fits the bill.

Yes.

Exactly.

Like you just kind of want this character with no history that you can, you know, kind of throw in there.

Now, at the same time, roughly, the studio released a silly symphony that featured its first human character.

And this was like a really important moment for Disney because they're testing a human character before they're going to go do it in a feature film.

It was Persephone, a Greek goddess, and it's called Goddess of Spring.

And let me just play you a clip and show you where we were at in terms of quality of representation of human movement.

Ooh, I'm excited about this.

So she basically moves like an inflatable tube man at a car dealer.

Wow, yeah.

Like, talk about dopey.

She looks insane.

It's a little olive oil from Popeye.

Oh, yeah.

Very much so.

Or like my sister said, D from It's Always Sunny, the way she dances.

She's limbless is essentially what it is.

Right.

So she doesn't really, she doesn't move according to human anatomy.

Yeah.

Right.

She's like her elbows just flow in the wind.

It looks like she's underwater.

She doesn't have bones.

Yeah.

No bones.

Exactly.

And this was really hard for animators to know because even though you could do exaggerated motions for animals for the silly symphonies, the humans needed to be grounded enough that we would recognize that they're people.

So Walt had formed an animation school out of Disney in 1932 that was eventually headed up by this guy, Don Graham, who was actually an art teacher.

He didn't come from cartoon animation.

He came from the art world and he was a real stickler on even if you're going to do a cartoon, you have to base it in the reality of the thing that you're animating, be it a person, you know, or an animal or whatever it is.

And his school was intense.

He would run classes from 8 a.m.

to 9 p.m.

13 hours a day.

Wow.

Just drawing these characters.

And he was a real hard ass.

Oh my God.

And it wasn't just the young animators that were getting sent to the school.

Walt would send all of his animators like back to school to constantly get retrained

in new techniques.

Yeah, it's like an apprenticeship, right?

You're having to learn this thing.

And they were getting graduates because it was the depression who came from like pretty prestigious backgrounds, painting, illustration, architecture.

And then there were, of course, like newspaper cartoonists who got brought in.

And there was one artist who had a real strength for animating women.

And he was, of course, the creator of Betty Boop.

And so, I don't know if you guys are that familiar with Betty Boop, the character.

She's got like very wide-set eyes, very round, like heart cherubic sort of face.

So, Grim Natwick, who had animated Betty Boop, was at first the person who was assigned animating and drawing Snow White.

So, the first renditions of Snow White look a lot like Betty Boop, like a lot like Betty Boop.

That's really funny to me.

Very, very strikingly.

I mean, even the final version still looks a lot like Betty Boop.

That's true.

It was just even more so.

I would just love at the end of Snow White.

She's just like, boop, boop, it'll do it.

Speaking of rom-coms, she was blonde at one point.

Oh, Snow White was?

Snow White was blonde at one point.

They did a version of her blonde.

They also did a version of her as a redhead.

Wow.

Which I don't think you'd get a redhead Disney princess until Ariel after this.

Yeah, it's

there's not a lot of them.

No.

Not a lot of representation in Disney and also not on The Bachelor.

That's true.

Which is hard for Chelsea because she is a redhead.

I am.

Yes, she is.

Now, the queen at one point was drawn in a more cartoony style and they kind of made her comically plump.

I'm thinking something maybe closer to like, think Ursula, right, later in Disney, but they changed her to be more conventionally beautiful and they made her much more angular.

And so you get get that kind of like Angelina Jolie, maleficent, you know, sort of look that she's very stately in compared to the youthfulness of Snow White.

And she's got a great manicure, which I just noticed while watching.

Oh, she does.

And I also think, too, it's like it makes a real great contrast with the hag as a result.

Right.

Right.

So like you see how far she has to fall.

Now, by early 1935, the studio began composing music.

They were casting voice actors and they were writing the official script.

So casting director Roy Scott helped Walt find his actors.

Singer Harry Harry Stockwell was cast as the prince.

Harry Stockwell was actually the father of Dean Stockwell, if you're familiar with him.

And then the actress Lucille Laverne was cast as the queen/slash the hag.

But of course, the most difficult role to fill was Snow White.

The problem was that Walt needed somebody who could speak like a 14-year-old, but sing opera,

which is a very difficult combination to find.

So they would apparently run a a wire from the soundstage where the auditions were happening to Walt's office so he could listen to the auditions without being influenced by the actresses' appearances.

Smart.

Wow.

Because he was concerned that if he saw how old they looked, he might just think, oh no, they're not appropriate when they might have had the right voice for it.

Wow.

Which is actually very, very smart.

And kind of the opposite of the typical casting couch nonsense that you hear, you know, in Hollywood.

So apparently he turned down a then 14-year-old Deanna Durbin.

I don't know if you guys are familiar with Deanna Durbin.

She would actually become the world's highest-paid female star by the age of 21, surpassing Shirley Temple.

What?

How do I not know who this person is?

I've never heard of her.

She, you know, she had a pretty short career in the 1930s.

You can look up some of her films.

I think she was kind of out of acting by like 1948, but he said she was too mature.

He said she sounded like she was between 20 and 30.

I think she was 13 when she auditioned.

She was probably smoking, you know?

Yeah, she was

me, Snow White.

Yeah.

Now, actress Virginia Davis, who had played Alice in the early Alice comedies for Disney, claims she did an early vocal test for the part, but she turned on the role due to a contract dispute.

And it should also be noted that Virginia had been replaced in those Alice comedies by a cheaper actress, something that she and her family were very upset about because Walt had convinced them to move to California specifically to be in his movie.

Yikes.

So he does have a bit of a history of using actors, you know, as meat puppets, as we'll learn.

Now, we don't know when, but it seems like it was early in the process when Roy Scott reached out to a vocal coach named Guido Castellotti, the most Italian name you like to hear, and says, do you know anybody who could play Snow White?

And as it so happens, Castellotti's teenage daughter, Adriana, was eavesdropping on the call.

And she picks up the phone and she goes, ooh, me, and she starts singing.

on the phone call and Castellotti's like get off the phone and Roy says hey who knows send her down let's you know

take a a listen.

Again, I love the hustle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'd love to play you guys a brief clip of Cassilotti singing.

This is actually later to show that she still had it.

And she'll tell a little bit of that story as well.

I'm wishing for the one I love

to find me today.

Hello, this is Snow White speaking.

Please don't run away.

I won't hurt you.

I'm awfully sorry.

I didn't mean to frighten you, but you don't know what I've been through, and all because I was afraid.

I'm so ashamed of the fuss I've made.

What do you do when things go wrong?

Oh, you sing a song.

Bye, Grumpy Summer.

Hello, my real name is Adriana Casalotti, and I was the voice of Snow White in Walt Disney's film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

And let's see what I tell you.

The way I was the fortunate fortunate one to get the job as Snow White,

my father was a singing teacher in Los Angeles and one day one of the Walt Disney representatives called his studio and asked if he knew a little girl who could sing and speak like a child would and yet she should have had some operatic training

because

they needed someone who would be able to sing many high notes and whatever it was they were going to do.

And I didn't know what they were talking about, of course, but you see, I had lifted the other phone, the extension upstairs.

And when I heard this, I said, Papa, how about me?

And I went,

and Papa said, don't get off of the phone for heaven's sakes again.

I'm speaking to someone about business.

I said, I know you are.

Please let me try out.

Maybe I could be in that.

And so a man on the other side of the phone said, send her down.

You never can tell.

Maybe she could be somewhere fit into this, even if we don't have have her do the leading part.

Wow.

So she goes on for a while.

She's very funny.

Wow.

She sounds like a modern day comedian, Joe Firestone.

Oh, yeah.

What's interesting is that she was very terrified that she was too old for the part.

So Adriana was 18 when she auditioned for this, and she knew Deanna Durbin, you know, didn't get it eventually because she sounded too old.

So she lied to everyone.

She told them she was 17.

Now, according to Adriana, she was actually one of the first people to audition.

She says she was the first person in that interview.

Walt liked her, but wasn't convinced.

So they ended up auditioning 147 actresses

for the role.

And they couldn't best her.

So in the end, Walt came back to her and said, All right, you're my Snow White.

Wow.

And she was cast.

Just a no-name, her, you know, first credit for this film.

147.

Wow, I feel bad because watching it again,

the queen's voice acting is so great.

It has so much gravitas.

And then you hear Snow White, and it sounds like an Alvin and the Chipmunks recording where someone just sped it up.

You're like, this is not a human.

What is happening?

And the fact that that was an intentional choice.

Oh, very intentional.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

Very different.

Different time, you know, obviously what they're going for.

I think personally, she has an incredible voice.

It's very out of step with our times for sure.

But like her vocal control is pretty amazing for that age.

And it's closer, I would describe it, it's much closer to like anime, for example, than it is to traditional American animation now.

But regardless, the pressure is starting to get to Walt.

And so in the summer of 1935, he basically comes to the edge of another nervous breakdown.

You guys missed this, but he'd already had one nervous breakdown up until this point.

So in the summer of 1935, he and Roy take an 11-week vacation in the middle of developing this movie, right?

They're like, all right, tensor's down.

We're going to Europe with our wives for 11 weeks.

What?

That's insane.

I know.

Wow.

So he goes to Europe.

He sees the popularity of his cartoons abroad.

He comes back like doubly motivated.

He came back with all of these children's books, which I would have to imagine influenced the painting style of the backgrounds in Snow White.

And of course, the castle itself is based on Alcacar of Segovia, a medieval castle in Segovia, Spain.

So I think we can see the influence of Europe very much on the final product by way of this trip that Disney took in the middle of production.

It's like these watercolors that I was still blown away by.

Amazing.

Beautiful.

Because I think of Bambi and some of these other ones that came later as having these, you know, such lush, colorful backgrounds.

But even in this one, straight out of the gate, it is just.

breathtaking.

It's pretty amazing.

So he comes back and he's like, I'm good.

Let's make this movie.

His doctor calls to remind him about his thyroid injections.

Walt tells the the secretary to tell the doctor, quote, I'm cured.

He can shoot those things up his butt from now on, end quote.

And it's at this point, I believe that the budget has already ballooned from $250,000 to $400,000.

Well, probably because they also had that three-month vacation to Europe rolled into it.

Exactly.

So at the same time, Walt starts assembling his team of directors.

Each director is going to be responsible for like a different set of sequences in the finished film.

So all of these directors were hired from Disney Shorts.

These, you know, they'd done silly symphonies.

So, Dave Hand was brought in as the supervising director, and then under him were Peirce Pierce, William Cottrell, Wilfred Jackson, and Ben Sharpstein.

And this is actually still a common practice in animation.

There will often be two directors on animated films because it's just so much to wrangle that you just need more than one person to help manage this process, which was being developed by Disney as they were making this movie.

No one had done it before.

They would start with storyboards.

they would then get approved for production.

The storyboards then would go to the music and sound department.

They would add the action sound effects, dialogue, and background score first, which would determine the timing of the scene

and the length of the film that they needed.

Then that would go out to the layout department, who would do like rough blocking with the backgrounds, and then that would go to the animators for pilot animation.

Wow.

So it's a very complicated process, and it's called cell animation, which I'm sure you guys have heard before, which is short for celluloid animation.

What this means is the background is static.

It's usually painted and that's where you get those beautiful paintings.

And then a transparency made of celluloid is laid on top of it.

And the illustrator draws the character in the first position.

And then that inked drawing is painted in.

And that's one frame, right?

And then they got to take another transparency in and they draw the next one.

And that's two frames, right?

All the way up to 18 or 24 frames per second.

So you can imagine you're doing 8,000 feet of film.

It's a lot of drawing that you're doing

for this movie.

But you know, you really feel it when you watch these old hand-drawn movies.

Like it just has, I don't know, there's something about it when I watch them.

You feel the artistry in it.

And not saying like frozen doesn't have artistry, but you don't get that same feeling, you know?

No, there is like kind of an organic quality.

And a lot of that has to do with the fact that it's still shot on film.

And so you guys can see this online if you're interested.

If you go on YouTube, you can look at kind of the technical making of Snow White.

They're using filters to change the color temperature.

They're using like very specific technicolor processes that Walt Disney had actually exclusively owned the right to for the first two years of their existence to make these colors come to life.

So this is not in any way, obviously, digital.

It's entirely done in camera and organically.

And so you can kind of see all the imperfections, but that makes it feel like you're looking at something on a table in front of you.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

And in fact, if you go back and watch some of the early instances of animation, it's like a hand drawing on a chalkboard.

And then you watch as it slowly becomes stop motion, right?

The hand disappears and then the chalk characters start moving around, you know, that kind of whiteboard style of animation that you see on like LinkedIn now.

That was like the OG form of animation 125 years ago.

So they're trying to make these human movements and they bring in some really, really great performers to model for their human movements.

So Adriana Casalotti is voicing Snow White and she would do some movement work with her singing.

So, they could see like how she moved her hands and her face as she sang.

But when they were doing the bigger scenes, they brought in one of the animator's fiancés, Betty Kimball, and she came in and did kind of the bigger movements as a model for the animators.

And none of these people are making very much money.

For reference, Adriana did vocal recordings for 48 days, and she was paid $970 for her time.

So, she was paid $20 a day

for her contribution to this movie.

And I'm guessing no back end points.

We'll get to that.

Oh, okay.

So they also used an LA dancer named Marjorie Belcher for reference as Snow White.

Rough last name.

Yeah, I know.

Actor Lewis Hightower modeled for the Prince, and actor Don Brody modeled for the hag version of the queen.

So it was actually a male model for the hag.

And then there's no consensus on who modeled for the queen, but some speculate it was Joan Crawford's stand-in, Sylvia Lamar.

Oh, which I would completely believe.

I would have believed it if they said it was Joan Crawford.

Absolutely.

Yeah, totally.

Now, have you guys ever heard of a technique called rotoscoping?

Yes.

And I wondered if that was involved here because, especially in the dance sequences, it looks like that.

Right.

So rotoscoping, for those not familiar, refers to a rotoscope tool which projected each frame of film onto a drawing table where the animators could trace it.

So let's say you filmed an actor dancing.

You could then project each frame of that dance onto a drawing table, and they could use tracing paper and they could trace the outlines of the actor to get perfect movement from that actor's performance.

Rotoscoping nowadays refers more to cutting something out of film digitally using digital masks for VFX.

Now, not everybody liked rotoscoping.

Don Graham and Grim Natwick, who had animated Betty Boop, protested, saying this is a creative hindrance.

Like our job is to create these characters.

We don't want this technology doing it for us.

This is like the AI debate.

Exactly.

Except we all saw that animation of that floopy looking lady.

So I'm like, rotoscope all you need.

Well, so some at the company thought it would yield more realistic animation, which it did.

But actually, that's why it didn't work in a lot of instances.

It wasn't exaggerated enough.

Well, in the scenes where she's dancing and the dwarves are dancing with her, it is extremely jarring visually because the physics of their bodies are different.

Right.

So, the kind of style that had been established by Disney through the silly symphonies, for example, was very different than the way that a human actually moves.

And so, like, the way that a human moves is much less theatrical, like you said, much less physics-defying.

And so, as one animator said, it's a funny thing in animation, you have to go further than normal to make it seem normal.

Yes.

So, the rototoping I read was largely abandoned in the end.

However, I did read that they had to use some of it.

And it may have been in like that dance sequence, Chelsea, for example.

I couldn't figure out exactly when.

They basically ran out of time.

And so they needed to use rotoscoping just to finish on time at a certain point in the process.

Walt himself was actually also against rotoscoping.

And this gets back to the AI thing.

He was nervous that the public was going to find out that they were using rotoscoping and that they would be pissed and get the wrong idea about the movie, that they wouldn't think it was truly hand-drawn.

Interesting.

That's wild.

Now, the actors were also entirely in the dark throughout this entire process.

So as Castellotti later said, she did not ever see any rushes, meaning dailies.

So she never saw any of the animation until the premiere.

Wow.

She started working on the film in 1934 when she was 18, and she worked on it until 1937 when she was 21.

The studio would call her in.

She was paid $20 a day.

And then in the middle of the production, they ran out of money.

That may have been when Walt and his brother took a vacation, for all I know.

They didn't know if they'd ever be able to continue.

And I wasn't called for a year.

Walt had to go to the Bank of America to borrow another $250,000 to finish the film.

So more money is being racked up.

And in January of 1936, Walt decides not to renew his contract with United Artists over a dispute over television rights.

Walt basically was like, he had been screwed a couple of times on characters that he developed, and so he didn't want to give up any rights.

He didn't have to.

United Artists was saying, we want the rights to to put your shorts on TV, which was this brand new thing.

And Walt's like, Well, I don't really know what TV is yet, I'm not going to give you those rights.

Very smart, smart.

So, he goes over to RKO, signs with RKO.

And if you guys don't know, RKO no longer exists, but it was one of the five major studios during Hollywood's golden era.

It's libraries controlled, I believe, by Warner Brothers Discovery.

So, I'm sure David Zasloff's just whitened those on fire for tax write-offs.

But meanwhile, Walt takes out another loan.

So, like, the numbers vary on what he's putting into this movie.

I'm I'm going to go with Neil Gabler's account, Walt Disney, The Triumph of the American Imagination.

I believe this is when he took out an additional $630,000.

Oh my God.

So the budget has like tripled at this point.

I believe we did the math.

This would be somewhere around the line of $12 to $14 million

today.

Holy shit.

Sorry.

That's crazy.

As a loan, you know, a business loan for his company.

Wow.

It sounds crazy, but then you see the budget for something like Red One, and you're like, you know what?

Make your art.

You know, if your film production company is ultimately the appendix of, you know, Jeff Bezos's commerce, true, true, juggernaut, that's very different than we are,

this is our only product, self-funding, you know.

Yeah, yeah, that's insane.

So everybody thought he was insane.

Around town, the film was developing a bad reputation.

It was called, quote, Disney's Folly.

He was lambasted by many, including people putting out full articles saying that audiences would never sit through an animated feature film.

There were reports saying the harsh colors would hurt the eyes, constant gags would get tiring.

They thought audiences would walk out.

At the studio, Disney's team was putting in 15-hour days to try to finish this thing on time, and anxiety is really high.

One, Disney had a history of financial insolvency.

Disney had basically gone bankrupt.

He hadn't declared bankruptcy, but he'd basically gone gone bankrupt twice before this.

It was all those European vacations.

Yeah, everyone's like, oh my God, is this thing going to go under?

And Walt changed his mind a lot.

I'm not sure if you guys have ever worked with like a showrunner or a director like this.

Yeah.

But apparently, according to one animator, Walt would change his mind very often and usually stick with an idea for one whole day.

And then he'd come up with a new idea that was twice as good as the one he'd had before, and he'd get you all sold on that.

End quote.

So there was a lot of

tumult as they were developing this.

And these things took forever to animate.

Animators would be on specific sequences for well over a year.

Oh my gosh.

Nightmare.

So you mentioned like the bathing scene.

That would be assigned to an animator and he would be drawing that for at least 12 to 18 months.

Wow.

And so if there were changes introduced or cuts or trims, I mean, you're stripping down something that somebody has put their life into for an extended period of time.

Plus, there were new technologies being developed that Walt needed to have if this movie was going to be groundbreaking, like the multi-plane camera.

So did you guys notice in watching this film, there is an effect that's called parallax in film.

And that is when the foreground, mid-ground, and background shift relative to one another.

Yeah, so you can basically zoom in.

Right.

It simulates like a dolly effect as you're pushing in towards the castle.

The swamp will like come towards you.

How do you do that in animation?

Because those are background plates.

Yeah.

Right.

They would have to animate every frame.

So, what they would do is they would insert these backgrounds on pieces of glass, vertically stacking them above each other, and then move the camera and those panes of glass relative to one another in this standing rig, and they could create this parallax effect.

The problem was it all had to move in conjunction with one another, and the camera cost $75,000 to make and develop, which in today's money is $1.7 million

for a camera.

This is crazy.

I did notice, though, it's very cinematic, like watching it.

Like, this feels like a film, which must have been so revolutionary then.

It's worth it.

I mean, it's a pretty amazing technological innovation.

It kind of takes a pop-up book and then puts it, you know, into the story.

So cool.

So they run out of money, which you could have seen coming, you know, a mile away.

This is after they got that other loan for like six years.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Roy pulls Walt aside and he's like, well, you know, we're out of money.

We need it.

We need another $250,000 to finish the film.

And Walt's like, oh, my God.

You know, he's got to go back to the bank and basically say, like, we still can't release this thing.

So

he assembles as many bits and pieces of the completed film as possible, which is, I don't know how long, but it's not that much.

It's probably a lot of pencil and stuff.

And he puts them in a reel and he takes it to the bank and sits down with a projector and he plays it at the bank for Joe Rosenberg of Bank of America, which is just amazing.

You're basically like, watch my movie and give me another $250,000.

I believe it because otherwise I'm like, how is the bank continuing to say yes at a certain point?

They're like, we got to cut you off, man.

You're an addict.

This is what happens when you're a white man.

You could just keep asking for more money, chelsea that's how it works well so here's walt's quote on what happened after the lights came on he didn't show the slightest reaction to what he'd just seen he walked out of the projection room remarked that it was a nice day and yawned oh then he turned to me and said walt that picture will make a pot full of money end quote and they got the loan wow right but of course chelsea 250 000 was not enough to finish the film the staff had to reduce and delay their pay.

And Neil Gabler's book suggests that they actually took out, in the end, another $650,000 in financing in March of 1937.

This is like stressing me out, even though I know it works out.

This is so stressful.

Yeah.

We'll get to the final budget of the film.

It's high, even by today's numbers.

You know, it's, let me rephrase, it would be high as an independent film by today's numbers.

It's not compared, obviously, like a Pixar film.

Now, Walt did end up cutting scenes, both for creative reasons and I'm sure because they were running low on time.

So, 13 minutes of film was removed prior to the movie being finished.

He would watch the movie two to three times a day, looking for trims and timing.

One of the most tragic losses was a scene called The Soup Eating Symphony.

You can see it on the Blu-ray release of the film or online.

It's like a musical scene, the dwarves were eating soup.

It's very reminiscent of the bathing scene.

Walt felt that he needed to get back to the B story, the queen story, and the animator who'd been working on it for 18 months was devastated.

Oh my God.

Ward Kimball.

I mean, it's an amazing sequence.

You can see the pencil version online.

All the dwarves are like rushing in.

They're all eating soup in synchronization.

They're singing a song about soup.

Like, it's such good work.

And they cut it.

Wow.

Poor Mort.

That actually makes a lot of sense to me.

As I was watching it, the whole extended bit of them washing, I wrote down a note that I was like, this feels so unnecessary.

I wish we had a scene of them all at the table with Snow White, bonding, eating her cooking,

eating soup.

Yeah, I was like, eating the soup.

Maybe she's teaching them table manners.

Maybe we get to see all the different ways.

That's the scene that got cut.

But I don't think you get the grumpy arc if you cut the bathing, which I think they wanted.

I think they wanted the grumpy arc because they also cut a meeting scene where the dwarves are meeting and they decide to build a bed for Snow White and then a scene where they build her a bed too.

So they cut a number of sequences there.

Those I agree with.

Yeah.

We don't need to see them building a bed.

They were barely going to make it even with those cuts.

So as late as September of 1937, animators were still drawing.

And in November, backgrounds were still getting approved.

The movie was scheduled to premiere in December.

Wow.

So they're finishing less than a month ahead of this release.

So RKO had pushed Walt for a Christmas release.

Very smart.

They tried to force his hand on marketing.

You guys said the romance earlier.

Well, that's what RKO thought people wanted to see.

They were like, this should not be sold as a fairy tale.

You should just call it Snow White, and you should not make mention of these dwarves because people aren't going to know what the heck this movie is.

So, a trailer for the film was released 10 days before Snow White's premiere.

It called the movie, quote, the most daring adventure in screen entertainment since the birth of the motion picture, one of the greatest pictures ever made, and claimed that the film was widely praised by public and critics alike at its premiere in Hollywood.

Some of those things are true.

The guy from Wells Fargo loved it.

Yeah, exactly.

Bank of America, please.

Oh, sorry.

That's true.

Now, there were some last-minute jitters.

There was a literal on-screen jitter when the prince shimmied.

It was an error in the animation when he kind of like bent down to kiss Snow White and like his torso wiggled back and forth for a minute.

This flaw bothered Walt so much that he actually pulled the print after release and replaced it and replaced all the prints across the country

just to fix this one error.

There was a staff screening where one of the staff left on an anonymous feedback card stick to shorts

to Walt.

But regardless, Snow White was ready for its debut.

So on December 21st, 1937, at the Cathay Circle Theater in Los Angeles, there were costumed dwarfs, a set of their cottage.

Mickey and Minnie and Donald Duck were all in attendance.

And of course, no one was more nervous than Walt Disney himself.

Let's listen to an interview he gave from the red carpet where he actually forgets the names of some of the dwarves because he is so nervous.

Some of the characters in the picture, particularly

Snow White and possibly the seven dwarfs.

What about them?

Well, our favorites are the little dwarfs.

There's seven of them.

We've got names for them all that sort of fit their personality, such as Doc, who's the pompous leader, and then there's

old Happy, the smiling little fellow.

Yeah.

And

Grumpy, the old sour puss, the woman hater.

Yeah.

And

I can't remember him all here tonight.

And

little Dopey.

Yeah, what about Dopey?

Well, he's sort of our pet, you know.

Was that so?

Yeah.

Well,

what are some of his lines in the picture?

Some of his funny lines, for instance.

Well, he hasn't any lines.

He doesn't talk.

Why not, Walt?

Well, I don't know.

I guess he just never tried.

Well, that's as good a reason as any.

Are you going in to watch the preview yourself, Nelt?

Yes, and have my wife hold my hand.

All right, I'll do that.

luck to you.

So, Walt had bet the farm on this movie, the final budget.

Any guesses?

Oh, man, I should have been doing the math.

$10.

$2.5 million.

Good guess.

Like eight trips to Europe.

$1.48 million was

the official number.

I don't think you were way high, as long as you're within an order of magnitude.

In today's dollars, that's like $33 million.

Wow, wow.

And it's possible that number is higher.

The 1.48 was from one source.

There are a number of sources on this.

Yeah, because I swear as you were telling this story, you're like, and then they went back for another 180.

Yeah, and then another 150.

That's a low end probably estimate.

But the point being, if this did not work,

Disney was done.

There was no way that they were going to make up that money on, you know, more shorts at this point.

The audience settles in.

It's got a number of Hollywood celebrities.

They sit down.

They watch the film.

And everybody's swept away.

Nobody's seen anything like this before.

Nothing like this has ever existed before.

They gave the film a standing ovation.

People laughed.

They cried.

They were stunned.

I mean, think of the release of Toy Story, you know, the first time you saw that.

Again, Jurassic Park, the first time color film, you know, Dorothy, when the movie goes from sepia to color, to technicolor in The Wizard of Oz.

It really was revolutionary.

It was the first feature-length hand-drawn animated film widely released in the United States.

A couple of notes.

There was an Argentine film made with paper cutouts.

You were saying, like a flipbook, Elena, earlier, called El Apostol, and that was released in 1917.

And there was a German film using silhouette animation that came out in 1926.

Nothing even close to this.

And I don't want to disparage those films.

For example, El Apostol sounds like a fascinating political film with honestly a really interesting production history that we should cover that was unfortunately lost to time.

But the truth is, from a technical perspective, Snow White was so far beyond anything that anybody had done at this runtime at this point in time.

They had made between, if you think of, for example, Persephone doing her inflatable tube man dance three years prior, one historian has said it felt like they did 20 years of technical achievements in three years.

And so nobody nobody saw it coming.

It just blew everybody away.

I bet the bank saw it coming.

How much we've given you, it better be good.

The bank saw it coming.

To be fair, Bank of America, Joe Rosenberg, Variety wrote, So perfect is the illusion, so tender the romance and fantasy, so emotional are certain portions when the acting of the characters strikes a depth comparable to the sincerity of human players that the film approaches real greatness.

New York Times said, I can recall no more joyous picture than Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

I suspect Santa Claus himself must have had a hand in its making.

Wow.

It was praised for being appealing to both adults and children.

So it did achieve the very thing that Mary Pickford was talking about.

And that kind of becomes the Disney formula.

It was the first film to run at Radio City Music Hall for more than three weeks.

It ran for five weeks there.

Film critics across the nation voted it the best film of the year.

And it even had the first feature-length soundtrack ever to be released on phonographic record.

Yeah, it's a great soundtrack.

The songs are all bangers.

Someday My Prince Will Come.

Yeah, well, and also even just, I mean, hi, ho.

Whistle while you were.

Like the one when they're bathing themselves, like these are all earworms.

No, it's good, Chelsea.

Chelsea has some notes.

Now, it was not Chelsea, as your face suggests, all sunshine and rainbows upon the release.

Adriana Casalotti, who voiced Snow White, and Harry Stockwell, who voiced The Prince, were not given tickets to the premiere

and they had to sneak in.

It's It's possible this was an oversight.

I could not find confirmation that this was intentional.

Now, what is known is that Walt wanted the animated characters to be the stars, not the humans behind them.

And this was very much something he pushed for.

He did not want the illusion that these characters were real to be broken for the audience.

He didn't want the audience to see the actors behind them.

He wanted to fall in love with these characters.

Now, lawsuits did follow.

First music publisher, Thornton W.

Allen Company, claimed that parts of their copyrighted song, Old Eli March, were deliberately copied in Snow White's Someday My Love Will Come.

I don't know if that ever went anywhere.

It doesn't seem like it did.

But perhaps more distressingly, in October of 1938, Adriana Castellotti and Harry Stockwell sued Disney and RKO for $200,000 and $100,000 respectively because they claimed the soundtrack was made without their consent.

What?

So they said that their contracts only permitted the use of their voices in the film itself.

Oh.

And that they should have been paid royalties on the soundtrack.

I mean, yeah.

Yeah.

But Disney and RCA slash, you know, RCA owned RKO countered, no, read the contract again, guys.

It covers all rights to use of your voices.

Oh, man.

So Disney was very shrewd, and he always made sure that he owned everything.

Oh, my God.

I feel so bad for them.

It wouldn't be the last time that an animated film profited off of the underpaid labor of the people that made it.

No.

Now, in the United Kingdom, the film was partially censored, fearing that it would cause nightmares.

Yes, authorities decided that kids under 16 couldn't see the film unless accompanied by an adult.

Wow.

I mean, I just tried to watch it with my two and a half-year-old, and he made me turn it off when we got to the magic mirror.

Yeah.

The face in the mirror was too scary.

So, you know, I relate.

Yeah.

Now, in a positive innovation, Snow White was the first film to be made into a, quote, talking book for the blind.

Oh, wow.

So they created this Braille book that had circular discs covered in Braille, similar to a phonograph, that would spin at the rate where they would describe what was happening on screen to the blind audience member in conjunction with the sound, you know, and the audio coming from the screen.

Yeah.

So it was a way for a blind person to, quote, see what was happening on screen while listening in a theater with a bunch of other people to the soundtrack of the film.

That is

a really neat innovation.

Like a record with Braille almost.

Exactly.

That's exactly what it was.

That's cool.

Now, the film in the end became the highest grossing film to date.

It was responsible for $8 million at the box office in its initial run worldwide.

At the time, this was like $150 million.

This would be.

absolutely destroyed by Gone with the Wind.

So this was not a long-held record, but this was an era when a kid could go to the movies for eight cents.

So even though it had cost $1.5 million, it was a runaway success.

Now, Disney's name became synonymous with the highest quality animation.

A new medium was forged in Hollywood.

As we discussed earlier, it ushered in a new golden age of feature animation, which would continue all the way through the 1960s and then be reborn again with the Disney Renaissance in the 80s.

But

before we get to the very end, you guys, we always do a segment that we like to call What went right

and so chelsea i'm gonna force you to start because i feel like you didn't enjoy this movie quite as much as the rest of us appreciated it as a relic go after her on social media um

this felt like a like respect your elders moment where like i pay homage to it but like am i gonna be like yeah let's watch it again this weekend like No.

All right.

So let's pay respect to our elders, Chelsea.

And what would you say went right in the making of Snow White?

In which a lot went wrong.

Well, I already shouted out the art, but I do think the art is still the crowning achievement.

It is so beautiful.

The care that went into this movie is so clear.

So I love that.

I shouted out the voice acting of the queen.

I love her.

And you know what?

I'm going to say for its time, there is some good female representation.

It's a woman in charge of this kingdom.

She's not only a witch, she's kind of a chemist.

Like

she's got beakers.

It's a little steampunk down there.

She's got her own little animal sidekick.

So, you know what?

I wish they had a scene together where they spoke, maybe passed the Bechdel test.

But you know what?

I love to see it.

And I would argue, you know, Snow White is really in charge at the cottage, you know, with the dwarfs.

They can say that they, or Grumpy can try to exercise his authority.

Right.

He can talk about her womanly wicked wiles and how women are poisoned.

I was like, uh-oh, incel alert, Grumpy.

But

yeah, they did have some incel vibes.

Yeah, but ultimately, you're right.

Snow White is like, uh-uh, you're going to wash.

And she's a convert.

She's a boss.

So good for her.

Very good.

All right, Elena.

How about you?

Well, like I said, I think the music is really good.

I mean, there were songs in there I hadn't even realized I knew, but watching it, I was like, I know this entire song.

So, I mean, maybe that also just means I watched this a lot as a child, but I thought the music was really amazing.

And also the accuracy of Snow White cleaning their house and they show up and they're pissed about it.

Like I feel that often with my husband.

I'm like, where did you put my clothes?

I know where they are when they're on my bed and now I don't know where they went.

Nothing really changes.

I agree.

I think the music's fantastic and it does set the precedent of, you know, earworm as a marketing vehicle for Disney films that they would follow all the way.

You know, we were just listening, watching Beauty and the Beast again with My Daughter, which is an amazing movie and has some of my favorite, favorite music of any Disney movie in that.

And I think it all started here.

Yeah.

I'm going to give mine to Walt Disney.

We spoke a little bit about some of his more problematic,

the problematic elements kind of Walt in the first half of this episode, but he was truly an innovator and risk taker who, at a time when Hollywood had an established formula and a star system, and they said, Here's how you do it: you know, you get your biggest star that you can, then you get another big star, and then you get another one, and then you just hire a bunch of people that we've already got under contract and you pump out a movie, and they kind of turned it into a bit of an assembly line.

And he said, I'm going to do something entirely different.

I'm going to show the world something that they've literally never, I mean, no one, you've mentioned, it's funny, Chelsea, you mentioned like, oh, I would have rather rather seen that scene than this scene.

And I agree with you.

There are some structural moments where you think, oh, okay, like maybe we could have done this instead of this.

There was nothing to reference.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Like, there was, there was no other movie.

They couldn't say, yeah, well, you know, in Toy Story, the act break is here.

So maybe we need it.

You know, they were doing it entirely on their own for the first time.

You know, things that worked as gags and filler scenes.

You know, a dialogue scene, a walk-and-talk could fill five minutes and a, you know, a talkie at the time, maybe.

And they can't do that in this movie.

they have to come up with other ways to tell their story it felt so inspired by vaudeville with the amount of slapstick guys

he was a huge he was a vaudeville chaplain buster keaton fan and that really shows so it's like you're right he's not referencing movies he's referencing

stage acts performance exactly yeah even in the animals like the deer and the little birds and i think that ties in too with the exaggerated movements and like you know performing for the back as opposed to the front like that all kind of ties in.

All right, guys, that brings us to the end of our coverage of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

A far less controversial than its remake, which just came out, Snow White, which is, I'm glad it's finally out and we're like, can be done talking about it.

Chelsea and Elena, can you remind our audience where they can find more of you and more of true rom-coms?

This we're kind of faking as we own them.

That's okay.

We give a wide berth to rom-coms in our podcast, too.

Yes, yeah.

Totally agree, Elena.

You can find our podcast anywhere.

You listen to podcasts, Podstruck, a rom-com rewind.

You can follow us on Instagram at Podstruck Pod or TikTok, Podstruck Podcast.

So, check out our podcast.

We're about to cover How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, one of our favorites.

We just did a whole subcategory of rom-coms from the 80s.

And continuing with the Disney theme, we're actually going to be covering Enchanted coming up soon, which has so many references in it to Snow White.

It pays homage in so many ways and is much more of a rom-com than Snow White is.

So come check out Podstruck, a rom-com rewind, and we'll see you there.

All right.

All right.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, thank you so much.

I did want to take a moment, now that our guests are gone, to address the recently released Snow White live-action adaptation.

Obviously, the film has become a lightning rod for a whole host of issues.

I don't want to get into that here, but

what I will say is that I do find it funny that there was such an uproar over changing the story of Snow White, a story which has changed over and over again across history, and which I would argue is maybe the least important part of why the original Disney Snow White is such an enduring film.

Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is obviously a very powerful and resonant story, but I think its staying power stems from the discovery of the Disney formula, its combination of music and remarkable artistry, and of course, the use of humor and drama hand in hand to guide an entire family through a story.

And on the snow white of it all, if you like Disney live-action adaptations, I think the new one's just fine.

And if you don't, I'm not the biggest fan.

You probably won't like it.

All right, guys, what do we got next?

We will be back in two weeks with Dirty Dancing, a very fun episode.

hosted by Lizzie Bassett, recorded before she went on maternity leave.

I'm very excited.

Nobody puts a baby in a corner.

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What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing and music by David Bowman.

Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer with additional editing from Karen Krupsaw.