The personalities of the dwarf characters in
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs represent the seven stages of
cocaine addiction.
Claim: The personalities of the
dwarf characters in Disney's animated film version of Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs represent the seven stages of cocaine
addiction.
Status: False.
Origins: Our fascination for
associating wholesome, innocent icons of popular culture with
hidden depravities and unsavory backgrounds seemingly knows no
bounds. Thus we have tales that nature-loving pop singer John
Denver was a Vietnam-era sniper, that genial children's TV host
Fred Rogers served as a Green Beret, that the actor who portrayed
geeky Paul Pfeiffer on TV's popular The Wonder Years grew up to
become shock rocker Marilyn Manson, and that the host of
Nickelodeon's preschooler favorite Blue's Clues died of a drug
overdose.
As the epitomical producer of popular children's fare, Disney comes
in for more than its fair share of such rumors: scandalous tales
about both Walt Disney himself (e.g., that he was booted out of the
military, that he was a Nazi sympathizer, that he was an
illegitimate child) and many of the films produced by the company
he founded.
A common motif among Disney legends is the claim that various
Disney animated films were drug-inspired; that Disney and his band
of animators were users of hallucinogens such as LSD, and their
experiences with drugs formed the basis for such fare as the
fantasy world of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the colorful
visual interpretation of musical themes in Fantasia, and the
surreal psychedelia of Alice in Wonderland.
On a literal level, not much can be said to address these rumors
other than to cite a litany of negative evidence. Walt Disney and
his principal animators are well-known figures about whom much has
been written, and no one who knew or worked with them claimed (or
even suggested) that they partook of recreational drugs. And
although drug abuse was enough of a social concern to prompt
didactic scare films such as Reefer Madness and The Cocaine Fiends
back in the 1930s, the "drug" of choice in Walt Disney's era was
far more likely to have been alcohol than anything else. (Recall
that the hallucinatory "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence in
1941's Dumbo is triggered when the diminutive pachyderm
inadvertently imbibes a tubful of champagne.) As for LSD, it wasn't
even brought to the USA until 1949, too late to have been the
driving force behind Disney's classic animated films (although
alternative hallucinogens such as mescaline were certainly
obtainable.) Of the notion that the imagination displayed in
Disney's animated films was drug-induced, animator Art Babbitt, who
drew the dancing mushrooms in "The Nutcracker Suite" portion of
Fantasia, said: "Yes, it is true. I myself was addicted to Ex-lax
and Feenamint."2
Drug rumors were undoubtedly fueled because Fantasia and Alice in
Wonderland received mixed reviews upon their initial releases, and
neither was much of a financial success until their re-releases
(and availability as rental films) in the early 1970s drew crowds
of college students who found the films' melding of color, light,
music, and imagery made them ideal psychedelic "head" flicks. So
much so, in fact, that Disney's marketing began to pitch these
films to those audiences:
. . . after [Fantasia's] 1969 rerelease proved a cult hit among
college-age kids looking for a hallucinogenic experience,
conservative groups began picketing movie theaters for screening
Disney's animated "drug fantasies." Hippie-era moviegoers liked to
sit in the front row, even on top of each other, smoking pot and
offering advice to Mickey.
The company asked the theaters to promote the film not as typical
Disney fare, but "now you sell Fantasia as you did Easy Rider. Hip
youngsters come to see it as a special kind of trip."
Disney didn't exactly discourage the connotation. Psychedelic
posters and other ad materials featuring Chernobog and the dancing
mushrooms called it "The Ultimate Experience," while the
promotional kit quoted one underground review: "Disney's Fantasia:
A Head Classic: Representation of sound as color does resemble
tripping on STD, LSD, THC and various other letters of the
alphabet."1
and
Long afterwards, fans continued to ask the animators if they were
"on something" when they made [Alice in Wonderland]. It's not such
an odd question, considering that all the things in the book and
movie that suggest drugs: Alice ingests potions, wafers and
mushrooms that change her size or alter her consciousness, her
perspective constantly changes, she loses track of time, space and
her own identity. There's the hookah-smoking caterpillar. In fact,
the entire story, a dream framed by the "real world," might be seen
as a hallucination or trip.
So, it wasn't surprising that in 1971 Alice in Wonderland was the
top renting 16mm film in every college town across the country,
playing to capacity crowds in heavy smoke-filled fraternity houses,
university theaters, discos and private homes, where it sometimes
ran over and over again for an entire weekend.
After the smash cult revival of Fantasia, Disney withdrew the 16mm
prints of Alice and targeted a 1974 theater rerelease. The studio
prepared ads with copy such as "Down the rabbit hole and through
the talking door lies a world where vibrant colors merge into
shapes of fantasy, and music radiates from flowers," "Nine out of
ten Dormice recommend Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland for visual
euphoria and good, clean nonsense," and "Should you see it? Go ask
Alice," a reference to Jefferson Airplane's song "White
Rabbit."1
Also of significance is that all the plot aspects of Alice in
Wonderland that "suggest drugs" were present in Lewis Carroll's
original work; Disney merely adapted them for the screen.
As for the original example, Walt Disney didn't "invent" Snow
White, of course -- the film was based on the European fairy tale
collected by the Grimm brothers over a century earlier. Disney did
flesh the story out to feature film length, though, and he was the
one who created names and distinctive personalities for each of the
seven dwarfs. But the suggestion that the dwarfs' names correspond
(intentionally or otherwise) to the symptoms of various stages of
cocaine addiction is bunk. Cocaine addiction might be considered to
have identifiable stages, but no standard set of physical symptoms
accompanies each stage. Many types of drug abuse (and physical or
mental illnesses) can produce symptoms such as changes in
sleep/wake patterns (sleepy), mood swings (happy, grumpy),
alteration of personality (dopey, bashful), and allergies (sneezy)
-- eventually necessitating a trip to the doc.
