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Marge Champion Goes Back with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Brian Gallagher

When Marge Champion was in her teens, she did some work for an animation studio's first feature film, which is now a modern classic. The 90-year-old Champion was the character movement model for Snow White in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which makes its Blu-ray debut and kicks off Disney's new Diamond Collection Blu-ray/DVD line on October 6. I had the honor of speaking with Champion over the phone about her work on the film and this fantastic new Blu-ray release, and here's what she had to say.

Everyone I've talked to that's worked for Disney has had a fairly interesting story about how they first started working there, so can you tell us how you first became involved with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and maybe your first impressions of Walt Disney?

Marge Champion: Well, my father, Ernest Belcher, had a big, big dancing school here, when I was growing up. He knew Mr. Disney, and I guess they sent a scout around to pick out two or three girls from my father's class. We all went over to audition, and they gave us some kind of interview and showed us all kinds of storyboards. She looked just like Betty Boop, at that time, with little round eyes and eyelashes and a very tiny waist. We went through whatever they asked us to do, not all at the same time, of course. I was 13 and I hadn't even heard from them until I was 14, and then I had forgotten all about it. They said to come and get measured for a costume. I found out later that they had done the same thing with 200 or 300 other young girls and, for whatever reason, I never quite knew why, they had chosen me. Walt Disney himself had talked to my father because a couple of his daughters had went to my dad's dancing school for a few months and he knew him slightly. They weren't close friends or anything, but he knew my dad. He was very protective of me and he told me to call him "Uncle Walt," because I was too young to call him Walt, which everybody else at the studio did. That was really the beginning and from then on, I worked one or two days, maybe three, a month.

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Source type Website
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Language en
Document type Interview
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Id 4236
Availability Free
Inserted 2019-03-19