DVD Review - Snow White & amp;amp; The Seven Dwarves

by Marty Demarest


Say what you want about the Walt Disney Company; one thing that they know how to do better than almost any other entertainment mega-corporation is repackaging their wares. But every so often, they manage to do something truly worthwhile in the course of stretching out the company's resources.


Even compared to the 50th anniversary edition of Snow White released on video several years ago, the two-disk Snow White and the Seven Dwarves Platinum Edition is astonishing. Gone are all the small specks and lines of dirt that were photog-raphed into the original film negatives back in 1937 and have persisted ever since. They've been digitally removed frame by frame, leaving pristine images which have also been color-corrected, resulting in a finished product that is as luminous as anything you can see on the big screen. And while the sound has been remixed into 5.1 Dolby Digital, the original English mono track is still available with just a few clicks of the remote's buttons.


But what really makes the somewhat pricey set worth acquiring for lovers of the film are the hours of extras Disney has included. Even younger kids can take an Angela Lansbury-guided tour of the dozens of special features on the disks. Some of the highlights include several sequences, which were fully drawn by the animators but never made it into the film, in which the uncolored line drawings convey the passion and delight with which the animators did their groundbreaking work.


There is also a magnificent discarded sequence of "Someday My Prince Will Come," using only the storyboards; split-screen scenes comparing the concept drawings to the finished film; and several documentaries.


By the time you've started exploring the trivia game, the sing-along scenes, and the camera tests for the live models, it becomes clear that Disney has not only made a film for the ages, but an enduring DVD as well.