The Patriot Post® · Snow Bait and the Seven Diversity Hires

Someone leaked new set photos from Disney’s live-action remake of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.” Since it is Disney’s new goal to retcon every original animated story and suck the life and spirit out of it and replace it with a woke joke of a film that on one will see, “Snow White” will be no different. Make no mistake: There’s a strategy here, and it involves a good bit of bait.

Rachel Zegler, who is playing the iconic princess Snow White, is an American actress of Colombian heritage. She considers herself Latina. She has an amazing singing voice, which was first showcased in her role as Maria in the 2021 film adaptation of “West Side Story.” Honestly, we can’t wait to hear her sing Snow White’s songs.

However, Snow White is a descriptive title for the character, and Zegler is not exactly the palest white. It’s a little different than race-swapping “The Little Mermaid.” In the original fairytale, the princess Snow White is described as having “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, hair as black as ebony.” We could give Disney the benefit of the doubt and assume it is going to attribute the descriptors “snow” and “white” (i.e., purity, innocence, and indelible beauty) to her character. Perhaps it’ll keep it simple and say her name is Snow White because she was born in the winter. It’ll be interesting to see how Disney refits the name to the character.

That’s not the only unusual casting choice based on the photos. Snow White’s seven friends, the dwarves, who are the heroes of the film in the original fairytale, are not what you’d expect. If the photos are anything to go by, the dwarves are no longer dwarves in this remake but “magical creatures” played by actors of typical height, one actress, and one lone little person.

So it’s “Latina Snow White and the Seven Magical Creatures of Various Heights, Races, and Genders.”

Outrage has ensued, and that was Disney’s plan all along. To fall for it is a trap.

Disney marketers are delighted to create this kind of controversy. It’s free publicity, but it also gives them an opportunity to expose the “undesirables” in their fan base and quickly label them racists. That in turn discourages others from thinking critically, opting instead to follow the “enlightened” crowd.

Disney sees itself as righteous for adding diversity to the popular Disney Princess franchise. Frankly, it’s not the color of the princess’s skin that is really distressing to audiences — though Disney is happy to call its critics racist. It’s the sanctimonious attitude of shoveling leftist cultural values on the rest of us. Disney is saying that diversity for diversity’s sake is the highest virtue. Diversity of thought is the real value, and that is precisely the opposite of what Disney wants to portray. Executives and creators want a uni-culture, and they will force you to like it.

It’s also a direct attack on our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” is particularly important in the Disney library of films. It was the first full-length animated film. Released in 1937, this classic retelling of the Brothers Grimm fairytale was, according to the History Channel, the “No. 1 animated film of all time.” It was a film our grandparents and parents grew up on. Like all things of those generations, woke-infested companies like Disney are obsessed with taking something beloved and historic and retrofitting it to modern sensibilities. It shows a contempt for generations whose values they deem backwards, racist, and bad.

In the pursuit of all things woke, leftists who are the dominant “culture”-makers are incapable of writing their own stories. Woke leftists are moral relativists. Because of that, morality is loose and only based on individual truth. They have no solid foundation to base their stories on, so their tales get lost in the metaverse of woke maxims and “morality.” As our Thomas Gallatin has said: “That’s why they’re terrible story tellers. You can’t tell a good story if you have no consistent ability to tell a narrative.”

Wokesters are also great at destroying culture and not creating new culture. They go in and take classic stories of all sorts and gut them. They take out religion and cultural norms and anything else they find slightly offensive (recall Roald Dahl and taking out the word “fat” or the whole controversy over Dr. Seuss). Then they insert their own values of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The irony of this is that the diversity is only skin deep, the equity is unrealistic (man cannot be women and vise versa), and the inclusion is not really adding to the story. The story becomes inane and hollow.

Also ironically, the original Disney film also sanitized the original Brothers Grimm fairytale. In the original story, the Wicked Queen doesn’t only try to have Snow White murdered by the huntsman — and later eats the heart the huntsman gave her. The Wicked Queen also disguises herself as various peddlers and tries to kill Snow White two more times — with the dwarves saving the princess each time on the brink of death — before eventually succeeding (Snow White does come back to life because of the prince). Disney also leaves out the portion where the Wicked Queen is invited to Snow White’s wedding at the end and is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she dies. Good riddance to a murderous queen, but it’s rather violent and vengeful.

The difference between this rewrite from fairytale-to-animated-film versus animated-film-to-live-action is that the first one is done for children’s good. It takes out most of the violence while keeping the essence of the story. The new rewrite is not done for children at all, but merely to satisfy political correctness and to virtue signal.

This is the real reason that Disney is going down the drain. It has lost its original purpose for being. Creating entertainment for children is a distant backseat to forcing its cultural and political views on its audience, even though the results have been flop after flop.

Disney will blame its lack of success on everything under the sun except what the real issue is. It no longer makes content for children that parents trust. Each new film reinforces that sad fact.