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"The Making of Walt Disney's 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'"

Our guest on this installment of ST is J.B. Kaufman, an author and film historian on the staff of the Walt Disney Family Foundation. He's just put out an extensively detailed and lavishly illustrated coffee-table book, "The Fairest One of All: The Making of Walt Disney's 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.'" This year marks the 75th anniversary of this classic film's initial release, and Kaufman's hefty volume explores every facet of the making of the film, with pages and pages of never-before-published facts and artwork. This is a truly gorgeous book --- and obviously a "must" for any fan of Walt Disney's work. It's an impressive piece of film scholarship that can be appreciated both as a work of cultural history and as a collectable, large-format art book. As the noted film critic Leonard Maltin has written: "It's fair to call this the definitive study of Walt Disney's landmark animated feature, not only because Kaufman, a meticulous film historian, has dug deeper (and longer) than anyone else into that history, but because he's made connections few others have pursued: the origins of the fairy tale, the impact that the 1916 silent feature had on Walt Disney (even locating a photo of its star, Marguerite Clark, visiting Walt in the 1940s), the genesis of each sequence in the picture, the merchandising it generated, its continuing success in theatrical reissues, and the reuse of the Dwarfs in a handful of wartime short subjects."

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