My Year With The Mouse

I’ve been avoiding Snow White for a while because I had remembered it being scary and after the scary Pinocchio disaster with poor Theo, I knew I’d have to do Snow White alone.

Which turned out to be a good call because it WAS scary.

The entrance kinda looks like Pinocchio, actually

And again, much like Pinocchio, I had basically very fuzzy memories of the story. My memory went like this:

An evil witch hates Snow White and there’s a magic mirror in there. Snow White ends up in the woods. There are bird. Also dwarves–seven of them to be exact. She goes to live with them and they mine diamonds and tend to whistle while they work. Then the witch has this apple she wants to give Snow White which will kill her (remember, this is my memory here) and the witch turns herself into a hag, Snow White eats the apple, somehow the hag dies, then Snow White is out in the woods again until Prince Whoever comes along. Also there’s some sort of glass coffin. The end.

All things considered, I think I remembered the story better than Pinocchio, albeit with a few gaps there. Anyway, the exterior of Snow White has a little fun thing–

If you watch this window closely, the evil witch appears

Couldn’t really get a good picture of it.

Anyway, the line is generally pretty short, much like (wait for it, wait for it) Pinocchio.

A couple of switchbacks but otherwise pretty straightforward

Oh, another thing you should know is that Snow White is one of the original Disneyland attractions, there on opening day in 1955. How about that?

In the line there’s the first page of the story, but it’s all in brass or whatever so you can’t really read it.

Or at least you can't read past the first two pages

Before you get on the ride there are some more cute details, like the Dwarves’ cabin, or at least what I assume to be the Dwarves’ cabin.

Whistle while you guess what this is

And then another story explanation.

Which does not in the least bit prepare you for the scary part except for the skull on the table

Then you hope on your ride vehicle, which is like a log kind of thing named after the dwarves.

So basically a DwarfMobile

You pull down your safety bar, which basically is your signal that all of your pictures will turn out like this:

I AM AN AWESOME PHOTOGRAPHER!

So I gotta say, I put away the camera at that point because taking more pictures would have been fruitless.

Anyway, you’re supposed to BE Snow White in the ride which is why Snow White herself never appears. Some of the scenes are scary, but there’s this one where the evil witch who looks all witchy but pretty and human is looking at herself in the mirror, and then she turns and she’s this old hag with the apple all of a sudden and I’ll admit it, I screamed a bit.

The old hag, who manages to be pretty scary in all of her scenes, comes up in most scenes, which makes it scary. And then the ride ends. Which is like, whaaaa? Because it’s totally truncated. And they left off the most important part which is Prince Whoever’s kiss. And really, since you’re supposed to BE Snow White, I mean how would they simulate that. Whatever it would be, it would most likely be scary.

I know I’m harping on the scary. Why is that? You don’t have a whale eating you like Pinocchio (god, what is UP with my obsession with that ride?) but I think it’s more of the psychological scary. Yeah, the hag looks scary and menacing for sure, but the fairy tales like Snow White touch on a deeper fear–abandonment, eating a poisoned apple, death threats from a stepparent, twisted sense of beauty and what we’ll do to attain it, coming close to death (calling Bruno Betelheim!), and the ride taps into that as well. Plus there’s no happy ending. It just…ends. It’s weird.

And here’s my question and maybe one of my sharp-eyed readers can tell me the answer: why haven’t they ever finished off this ride? Is it because of space? Is it because they don’t want to tamper with a true original? Who know. It’s weird.

And scary.