A SNOW WHITE CHRISTMAS (1980)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

Perhaps fittingly, a day or so after I eulogized Filmation in this review, I learned of one of the company's most mediocre productions while searching the title A SNOW WHITE CHRISTMAS for this unrelated review.

This TV special was in theory a sequel to the traditional Snow White story (though not without some influence from the classic Disney version), taking place maybe fifteen-sixteen years after Original Snow White married her Prince Charming (now "King Charming," which doesn't have the same ring). But the star of the story (such as it is) is the couple's teenaged daughter, who's also called by the same name as her mother, though I'll call her Snow White Jr. for slightly greater clarity.

Somewhat like the original, Snow Jr. is largely a passive figure harried from pillar to post by a more active enemy, the same "Wicked Queen" who tormented Jr.'s mother. (The Queen is voiced by Melendy Britt, best known for doing the dialogue for She-Ra.) The Queen wasn't killed at the end of the original story, but just went away somewhere for the time it took for Snow Jr. to become a young woman. The villainess immediately takes up residence in her old castle, hangs her magic mirror on the wall, and asks if these days she the Queen is the fairest in the land. This time, the nasty glass informs her that she's outclassed by *two* fairer females. 

Borrowing a trope from Disney's Maleficent in its version of "Sleeping Beauty," the Queen curses the whole kingdom of Charming and Original Snow with a freezing spell. Only Snow Jr escapes in the company of her maladroit comedy relief Grunion. They wander around pointlessly until they're taken in by the Seven Giants (improbable cousins of the Seven Dwarfs). Not much happens until the Queen learns that her old enemy's daughter is still free. In one of the few developments that really resembles the folktale, the Queen tries three times to kill Snow White, and on the third effort succeeds in sending the young woman into a death-like sleep. I won't trouble to state how the princess is brought out of this state, except to note that the film eschews any rescues by handsome strangers.

The Giants finally get off their asses and storm the Queen's castle. This version of the envious evildoer has already been showing off world-class magicks, and she conjures up a trio of demons. However, Filmation finds a solution to avoid an expensive battle-scene, as one giant's mammoth hiccups scare the demons away. In an eleventh-hour revelation, we learn that the Queen has been expending too much power against the advice of her mirror, who seems to function as a familiar, the one touch of originality here. The Queen and her mirror destroy themselves with a magic overload, after which, as mentioned, Snow Jr gets revived and all's right with the world.

The animation is uniformly poor, the script lacks humor or pathos, and almost all of the character designs suck. One podcast review said Snow Jr looks like a conflation of Hanna-Barbera's Judy Jetson and Filmation's Sabrina the Teenage Witch (though I see only the latter influence), while another review said that this version of the Queen favors Evil-Lyn from the HE-MAN cartoon, though HE-MAN was two years down the road. The Queen, given a severe beauty (but not an overt copying of the Disney version), is actually IMO much better looking than either of her rivals. So on balance the only significance I find in this snowy Xmas (in which the holiday has scant relevance) is as an anticipation of how Filmation would soon ramp up its production of femmes formidables in the eighties before the company closed its doors in 1988.