- Seven Wise Dwarfs
"Seven Wise Dwarfs" is an educational short
animated film made by the Walt Disney Studios, and commissioned by theNational Film Board of Canada , released theatrically onDecember 12 ,1941 as a short film for educating theCanadian public aboutwar bonds duringWorld War II . The short features the sevendwarf s from Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", four years after the characters made their screen debut. The short was released for the first time on home video in the Disneyboxed set Walt Disney Treasures series : the 2 DVD "On the Front Lines - The War Years". The DVDs were released in the 3rd wave of publishing of the "Disney Treasures" onMay 18 ,2004 .The film shows the dwarfs mining for
gemstone s, and later investing them in Canadian War Savings Certificates, all the while singing a variant of the songHeigh-Ho from the original movie. The movie ends in a pastiche of war scenes, each of which ends with an educational caption appearing on screen, usually coincidentally (like letters appearing from cracks made by bullets). The changed lyrics to the song typically talks of investing in the war effort by purchasing war savings certificates, and uses marketing phrases like "Five for Four" (a phrase coined to reflect a long term return of 5Canadian dollar s on every 4 invested - it is also the name of another short educational film advocating the same cause in Canada during the war).The sequence typically shows "Dopey" the dwarf doing things in a clumsy, belated and different fashion for
slapstick (as in the original movie). Featuring the voice talent ofPinto Colvig as "Doc" (he had been cast as "Sleepy" and "Grumpy" in the original movie), the film is directed byDick Lyford andFord Beebe . Quite a bit of the short consists of reused work from the1937 "Snow White" film."Characters": Grumpy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Doc, Dopey, Happy, and Bashful the dwarfs.
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