Snow White Ripoff!!!

[herman_the_german]

I've already mentioned these folks before, the Cascadia Lab's Magical Memories Collection.
These DVDs are very low quality in image and sound, and with indifferent dubbing, therefore I cannot recommend them (unless it is not available anywhere else, and you are some kind of a nut). I actually bought two of them since the price was so good, but I've since gotten rid of them.
The titles in the series include:

- A Bag Of Apples
- The Tale Of Cubby (English version of 3 Cheburashka stories)
- Aladdin
- A Kitten Named Bow
- Little Mermaid
- Hansel & Gretel
- Pinocchio
- etc.

Some of these listed are already in the Mikhail Barishnikov's Tales From My Childhood Collection.

Well, over the weekend I found some more titles at a cheap clothing outlet store. I saw a few titles of this series which looked interesting, and since the store was available for returns in case of defects i took a chance on them (at $3.99 a disc). The dubbing ended up not being as bad as the first batch I got.

Heidi ended up being a, low quality image and sound, "movie" version of the japanese Alps No Shojo Heidi series by Isao Takahata (1974). The movie and series are otherwise unavailable in the US. The version I previously owned is the Spanish Planeta Junior set in 3 discs (3 separate "movies"), which is infinitely superior in sound and image to this travesty, and keeps the German titles of the original "movies". Otherwise this might be a good option for anybody else that wants the series really bad, but not bad enough to order from Spain or on a region other than R-1. But, does anybody know if this version is legal? Who own the rights to the "movie" version?

Pinocchio is also a Japanese series, dating, maybe, from the 90's. It is edited down to 93 minutes, and remains faithful for the first half, then it goes in to fanciful additions by the writers in which Pinocchio encounters mermaids, a lonely rich girl and a troupe of orphans (after the local Burgomeister bans Christmas, shades of Rankin & Bass' Santa Claus). Eventually, he becomes a real boy.

Snow White ended up being the real find. It is live action, not animated, and I was hoping for a German version that was imported to the USA & dubbed by K. Gordon Murray (obviously, no credits are included in the box or anywhere in the disc).
Well, I got something totally different. It is apparently a "straight" version of the story, of an unknown country of origin (the names on the Dwarves' beds are in no language I know, though they remain Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, etc. in the audio track.), but possibly European and maybe in collaboration with Spain (since the lip movement seemed to match the Spanish track at certain points.) It doesn't have the Mexican flavor of other similar productions, such as the Puss in Boots, Pulgarcito or Little Red Riding Hood films, or I would have also guessed Mexican.
It is interesting because it steals all it can from the animated Disney version: costumes, dialogue, set design (check out the stairs in the Dwarves home!), scene construction, and maybe even music. This last one hard to corroborate since it seems to have been dubbed over several times, the songs, for example are a different dubbing session than the dialogue.
It is also interesting because in addition to "borrowing" from the Disney version, it also adds to it. The story begins before the birth of Snow White, it shows why she was so named, it shows the death of both her father and mother (Mom dies after birthing, Dad is poisoned by the Evil Queen!), and most interestingly, it shows the scene in which the dwarves build Snow White a bed, a scene which was storyboarded by Disney, but which was not a part of the finished film!
Did a Disney artist have a hand in this? It seems highly likely!
At the very least the people who made this version had a print of the Disney film, in addition to storyboards and God knows what else.

You guys cannot believe how much was stolen from the Disney version! It's all there, the wishing well, the animals meeting her in the forest, the sock in the pot, the Dwarves sneaking into the house, the bathing of Grumpy, etc.
Does anybody have any inkling on what the origins of this might be? This has got to be at least as good a find as the Hindu version of Superman!

[Squid]

Reading the title of the thread I thought you were going to talk about Sleeping Beauty