Leading article: Snow drift
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Your support makes all the difference.Heigh ho, it's off to work they go again. Hollywood is reported to be developing an "edgy" version of Snow White, which will, we are told, be more Brothers Grimm than Walt Disney.
But Walt Disney's vision was not without its horrors, as anyone who remembers the Pleasure Island scenes from Pinocchio will attest. And never mind the Emperor of Exmoor, there are some adults who are still trying to recover from the death of Bambi's mother. Alright, Walt might have cut out a lot of the cannibalism, rape, incest, paedophilia, slavery, mutilation and death that were a feature of the original Teutonic folk tales. But Hollywood audiences have hardly been starved of such delights over the past half century.
And this inspires the thought that if fairy tales are to become edgier, could this represent an opportunity to blunt some of the existing Hollywood product which might be said to suffer from a surfeit of "edge"? Some suggestions: "Saw 7: tales of an unemployed carpenter" and "Terminator 5: rise of human-machine co-operation". And the great prize: a Batman movie in the style of the 1960s TV series, complete with "pow" signs and Neal Hefti theme tune. As the great Samuel Goldwyn put it: "Let's have some new clichés".
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