Magic mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all? Fifty years ago 20 million moppets and moms put their money on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. A star-studded first-night audience dabbed at tears as they left the theater, and their colleagues voted the movie's creator. Walt Disney, an Oscar-plus seven dwarf-size ones. The film heigh-hoed to $8.5 million in box office receipts during its first year, making it the biggest moneymaker until Gone With the Wind. Critics had scoffed that no one would sit through a feature-length cartoon. Disney bet the house of Mickey that they were wrong, and then made sure that every frame-24 for each second of the 83-minute movie-counted. The dream sequence at right was only one casualty of Disney's quest for a lean story line. Most of the two million sketches and drawings done for the movie wound up on the drafting room floor. […]
