We jump right into the 80’s with a special that aired on December 19, 1980 on CBS, opposite ‘Benson’ on ABC and the second episode of the short-lived Marie Osmond-centered variety show ‘Marie’ on NBC. Network tv did just anything it wanted back in the day. The cartoon was produced by Filmation, the production company behind ‘Star Trek: the Animated Series,’ the ‘Ghostbusters’ cartoon that forced the movie adaptation to use the title ‘The Real Ghostbusters,’ and most importantly for our purposes ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.’
It’s true of most of Filmation’s cartoons from the 70’s but this really is a dry run for ‘He-Man.’ From the character designs to the animation shortcuts it’s almost uncanny how direct the comparison is. It even stars a child of royalty who’s forced to do battle with an evil magician along with a goofy sidekick and some powerful friends. Really, though, these similarities are less a case of that show cribbing from this one and more that both of them really nestled into some standard fantasy adventure tropes and got comfortable.
The history of Filmation is long and complicated and largely irrelevant for the discussion today as the people most responsible for this cartoon, the director, main producer, and writer, weren’t involved in ‘He-Man’ or ‘She-Ra, although writer Marc Richards did write one episode of the former. This is more akin to Hannah-Barbera, where the production cycle used to churn out television episodes on a consistent basis created such a strong house style that it, more than any individual’s creative input, determined how the show turned out. The fact that this wasn’t a series actually helps it because it doesn’t feature very many of the reused animation cels the company would become notorious for.
Filmation played a very dangerous game with this special, as although they don’t state it explicitly this is a direct sequel to the 1937 Disney movie ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ They sand the edges a little, age up the characters and change their designs, and are vague enough with the backstory that they got away with it, but you can tell what they did. They pushed their luck harder later on in the decade by planning a line of direct-to-video sequels to more Disney movies, starting with 1987’s ‘Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night.’ To be clear they claimed they were not actual sequels and when sued by Disney they actually won the case by arguing that their film was based on the original novel, which was in the public domain. It did spook them enough to be a little more careful with the next film in the line, ‘Happy Ever After,’ which was also a Snow White sequel but unrelated to this one. By the time that was released Filmation had folded and no more films were produced in the line.
The special starts at the Noel Ice Festival an unspecified number of years after Snow White bagged herself Prince Charming. There’s an etymological wormhole we could go down about the word ‘noel,’ pointing out the long French tradition of birthday songs called noels, derived from the Latin natalis, that existed before the word became associated with Christmas in English-speaking countries, but we won’t. Why they’re being coy and not referring to it as a Christmas festival in unclear because seconds later Snow White the Younger, daughter of the first and apparently unoriginal Snow White, exclaims how much she loves the ice festival and her companion Grunyon agrees, saying it means it’s just a couple of weeks until Christmas. He mentions stockings, and that is as specific as the special will ever get about how Christmas is celebrated in not-Eternia.
Normally I’d go off on some tangent about the existence of Christmas traditions in a quasi-European feudal state with magic and mythical creatures but the special really isn’t about that and I don’t care.
Grunyon is all set up to be the kind of quirky sidekick character that’s meant to be the comic relief and just comes off as supremely annoying (looking at you, Orko), but aside from some introductory pratfalls he’s really only there to have expository conversations with Snow White for the audience’s benefit. He’s more or less fine. Snow White is pretty anodyne herself, basically a background extra from the 60’s Archie cartoon transplanted into a fairy tale who’s vaguely pleasant in a non-specific way. Her age is also never established other than vaguely teenagery, and with her white hair and facial design I kept being reminded of Carol Channing, which was very distracting.
After a confusing couple of minutes, it’s established that this is set many years after the Wicked Queen was defeated. Snow White married Prince Charming and had the titular daughter, but they never told her about all the adventures she had back in 1937 or anything about the evil Queen. This backfires pretty quickly when said queen is freed from some kind of vague imprisonment due to an unfortunate stained-glass-umbrella-sunlight related incident. The special just brushes past this because it really doesn’t matter.
The Queen reclaims her castle, is informed by the Magic Mirror that there are now two Snow Whites fairer than she, and thus loses her shit and freezes the entire kingdom. Her power set here is greatly expanded from the original, she can basically do whatever the plot needs her to do at any given time. Snow White the Younger and Grunyon manage to flee the devastation and find themselves in the territory of the Seven Friendly Giants, who are just the Seven Dwarfs with different one-note personalities and, y’know, giant.
It reportedly took Disney months to whittle down the list of dwarfs from over fifty to the eventual seven. I doubt it took that long here. The full list is: Corny, Finicky, Tiny, Hicker, Weeper, Brawny, and Thinker, only the last two of which are of any importance. Brawny is the Grumpy of the group, outwardly hostile but secretly a softy and the one who keeps rescuing Snow White from the evil Queen. Thinker is the smart one, although it’s more accurate to say that he’s the calm, reasonable one who is smart by cartoon standards because he acts like a normal person and notices the blatantly obvious. He allows the special to get done in an hour (minus commercials) by already being aware of who the Evil Queen is at the start of the special, being familiar with the original story about Snow White, and when the Queen starts her murderous attempts to become the fairest of them all he’s able to recognize what she’s doing and act accordingly. It’s hard to overstate how refreshing it is to simply have characters see a giant rat attempting to kill someone being hunted by a magic evil Queen and recognize that yep, that was the evil Queen all right, better take some precautions.
It’s also nice to have said Queen attempt to get rid of Snow White by just trying to directly murder her. She’s not overly clever, doesn’t try to be tricky, she just shapeshifts into a giant rat, gets in the giants’ house, and goes for her throat. When the giants take Snow White to work with them (instead of mining these giants are in charge of carving rivers and mountains, which is a nice throwaway detail that implies a lot, they didn’t have to do that) she causes an instant snow melt that almost drowns them all. Finally, she’s forced to recreate her ‘shapeshift into an old woman’ routine and has Snow White sniff some poison flowers, which does the trick and sends her right to sleep.
The giants instantly retaliate by charging the Queen’s castle and tearing the motherfucker down. I genuinely laughed when I saw that. I can see the chain of logic the staff went through leading this to very cathartic moment: we want seven companions like the dwarfs but can’t do that, let’s go the other way and change them to giants, that means we have to up the witch’s powers so she can be a threat to all of them, okay that causes her to be sneaky again, so what’s stopping the giants from just stomping her into the ground in retaliation, oh literally nothing? Fine, let’s do that then.
This leads to a fascinating little forty-second scene that made me go back and take a harder look at writer Marc Richards’ work (there’s nothing there more interesting than episodes of ‘Gilligan’s Planet’). The Queen has been having her established frosty relationship with the magic mirror the entire special (also portrayed as a drama mask floating in a void, really tugging the lion’s tail, there, Filmation) and with the giants literally tearing down her castle she finally turns to the mirror and has the following exchange:
Queen: Mirror, help me! I must have more power!
Mirror: Too late you acknowledge that I am the source of your powers, my Queen! The evil for which you use those powers shall consume me even as it shall consume you!
Queen: You, perhaps, but never me!
Mirror: I am you, my Queen!
The mirror then shatters and falls to the ground, the queen recoils, turns into smoke, and vanishes. End of evil Queen.
That’s, ah, a lot of backstory crammed into just a few moments.
The rest of the special deals with the aftermath. The kingdom unfreezes and everyone returns to normal except Snow White, who’s still asleep. It’s Christmas morning and the twenty people that apparently live in the kingdom are gathered with the giants, king, and queen around the quasi-coffin holding our main character. They’re all appropriately sad and I started to really worry if some random prince was about to sweep in at the last second to give her a smooch but the kiss that wakes her up and gives us a happy ending is from her parents. That’s nice. The cartoon ends as Snow White the Younger laments that she can’t turn the Queen’s evil castle into a Christmas funtime castle like she was hoping to, it being reduced to rubble and all, when Brawny bashfully reveals he built her a new castle that’s right there in plain view that nobody could see until they needed to justify an everyone-laughing-into-the-credits ending.
I don’t mean to oversell this special, this is not all that great, but it is genuinely not terrible in ways that I found occasionally pleasantly surprising. The songs aren’t very good but they’re short and infrequent, it is an hour long but enough actually happens to justify the run time, none of the characters are aggressively annoying or stupid and we get to see a bunch of giants kick the shit out of an evil witch Queen’s castle. The animation is consistently average and remained watchable, which I have learned is not always a given with these things. It's been issued on VHS and doesn’t seem to be available for streaming, although Amazon does have a jumbled listing combining this special with the sub-Hallmark 2018 movie of the same name, and that’s fun. If you’re really into He-Man it’s amusing to notice all of the little production tics and quirks that you grew up accepting and while the Christmas part of the special is an afterthought at best it does contain a bunch of wintery atmosphere. Definitely putting this on the ‘don’t regret that I watched it’ pile.
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