Seven Wise Dwarfs
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Seven Wise Dwarfs is an educational short animated film made by the Walt Disney Studios, and commissioned by the National Film Board of Canada, released theatrically on December 12, 1941 as a short film for educating the Canadian public about war bonds during World War II. The short features the seven dwarfs from Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 4 years after the characters made their screen debut. The short was released for the first time on home video in the Disney boxed set Walt Disney Treasures series : the 2 DVD On the Front Lines - The War Years. The DVDs were released in the 3rd wave of publishing of the Disney Treasures on May 18, 2004.
The film shows the dwarfs mining for gemstones, and later investing them in Canadian War Savings Certificates, all the while singing a variant of the song Heigh-Ho from the original movie. The movie ends in a pastiche of war scenes, each of which ends with an educational caption appearing on screen, usually coincidentally (like letters appearing from cracks made by bullets). The changed lyrics to the song typically talks of investing in the war effort by purchasing war savings certificates, and uses marketing phrases like "Five for Four" (a phrase coined to reflect a long term return of 5 Canadian dollars on every 4 invested - it is also the name of another short educational film advocating the same cause in Canada during the war).
The sequence typically shows Dopey the dwarf doing things in a clumsy, belated and different fashion for slapstick (as in the original movie). Featuring the voice talent of Pinto Colvig as Doc (he had been cast as Sleepy and Grumpy in the original movie), the film is directed by Dick Lyford and Ford Beebe. Quite a bit of the short consists of reused work from the 1937 Snow White film.
Characters: Grumpy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Doc, Dopey, Happy, and Bashful the dwarfs.
[edit] External links
- Entry at the Internet Movie Database
