Snow White's dashing true love was originally a very fresh Prince.
Storyboards unearthed for Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs show a very different introduction to the gallant Prince from the 1937 classic animated film. Early plans had him stealing a kiss from the beautiful Snow White immediately upon meeting her.
The startling kiss never made it to the film.
"He was a bit of what you would call a masher. That was way too forward for the Prince," says Fox Carney, manager of research at the Walt Disney Animation Research Library. "A viewer would think, 'If I were Snow White and the Prince came up and kissed me without having met me, I'd slap him.' That wasn't the story you'd want to tell."
That wasn't the story Walt Disney ultimately did tell with his first full-length animated feature film. But the storyboards, revealed in the digital HD release of Snow White and Seven Dwarfs (Jan. 19, followed Feb. 2 by a new Blu-ray), do show the intense creative process that Disney and his team of filmmakers and story artists went through to introduce the pivotal Prince.
The meeting between the Prince, who hails from another kingdom, and Snow White propels the story. As sequence director Larry Morey said at the time, according to transcripts from Walt Disney Archives, "We want to see what we can do to put as much interest in it as possible."
The creative journey to perfect this meeting travels through imperfect concepts, Carney says.
"You have work out a lot of ideas, fail sometimes," he says. "You have to allow even the bad ideas to come out so you can work through those and get to the point where it does it work."
Other ideas that animators initially incorporated for the first meeting included the Prince taking part in some light comedy — stepping on his horse's head to look over the wall at Snow White and stumbling so that the horse catches his leg. Another had the Prince giving various exclamations upon seeing Snow White's beauty, including "Odds bodkins" and "That's she, by gad."
Ultimately, these ideas were cut, and in the actual film, the Prince approaches Snow White as she's singing I'm Wishing into a well. He finishes the song rather than going for the peck. The first kiss, meanwhile, became the climatic Love's First Kiss, which breaks Snow White out of an eternal slumber curse placed by the evil Queen.
"It's a very gentle kiss that brings Snow White back to life," says 96-year-old Marge Champion, who served as Snow White's live model for animators.
Naturally, this all leads to happily ever after. Carney believes the end smooch is one for the ages.
"It's the kiss of true love, one of the key kisses in animation history," he says. "That kiss became the one to which all others compare."
