Consider the Source: A Life in the Woods

The death of Bambi's mother is considered to be one of the harsher moments in Disney cinema, yet it generally pales in comparison to some of the intense material found in the novel that inspired the Disney animated feature of Bambi.  Make no mistake, Bambi: A Life in the Woods by Felix Salten is not about benign forest creatures and twitterpation; it is a starkly realistic interpretation of the natural world.  Walt Disney chose to soften it into a more palatable and child-friendly walk in the wilderness.

Felix Salten was the pen name of Hungarian born author and journalist Siegmund Salzmann, who spent the vast majority of his life living and working in Vienna, Austria.  Bambi: A Life in the Woods was first published in Austria in 1923.  An English-translation was published in the United States by Simon and Schuster in 1928.  MGM filmmaker Sidney Franklin acquired the movie rights to the novel in 1933.  Ultimately concluding that the material would be too difficult to translate into a live-action film, Franklin sold the rights to Walt Disney in 1938.  Bambi arrived in theaters during the summer of 1942.  Disney would later adapt Salten's squirrel story Perri into a True-Life Fantasy in 1957, and draw inspiration from Salten's The Hound of Florence when creating the 1959 comedy The Shaggy Dog.

Prior to the release of the Disney film, Bambi: A Life in the Woods was always considered an adult novel.  In the decades since, the Disney association has inspired publishers to reclassify the novel as children's  literature, to the point where it is now considered by many to be a classic of the that particular genre.  While the story is not necessarily inappropriate for all but the very youngest of readers, it is indeed a rather direct and at times brutally honest account of forest life.  One such example is a passage where Bambi, while fleeing from hunters, encounters an injured hare:

Someone moved feebly in front of him.  It was Friend Hare's wife who had called.  "Can you help me a little?" she said.  Bambi looked at her and shuddered.  Her hind leg dangled lifelessly in the snow, dyeing it red and melting it with warm oozing blood.  "Can you help me a little? she repeated.  She spoke as if she was well and whole, almost as if she was happy.  "I don't know what can have happened to me," she went on.  "There's really no sense to it, but I just can't seem to walk . . ."  In the middle of her words she rolled over on her side and died.  Bambi was seized with horror again and ran.

Over the years, numerous critics and readers have associated many distinctly non-juvenile themes with the story.  It was banned in Nazi Germany for being "political allegory."  It is seen as an early example of environmental literature, advocating what many have interpreted as an anti-hunting bias.  Undercurrents of religious thought and philosophy can also be found within the book's pages.  Walt Disney effectively removed any kind of social commentary from his finished film, despite being accused of originating the "Bambi effect," that being the eliciting of an undeserved emotional objection to the death of a sympathetically-presented anthropomorphic creature.

Felix Salten

Walt took Salten's story and injected it with humor and levity while still maintaining the overall sense of peril and danger faced by the characters.  He eliminated the explicit violence found in Salten's text, replacing it with more indirect and off-screen references.  Perhaps the most dramatic departure from the novel involves the film's most famous sequence--the death of Bambi's mother.  In the book, Salten devotes an entire chapter to a sequence in which a large hunting party enters the forest and terrorizes the inhabitants, describing in detail the deaths of numerous animals, including the aforementioned wife of Friend Hare.  Amidst the turmoil, Bambi is separated from his mother.  The chapter ends with the somewhat low-key pronouncement that "Bambi never saw his mother again."  Walt jettisoned the large scale invasion and replaced it with the still very intense confrontation with just a single hunter.

Walt removed many of the novel's supporting characters, including Aunt Ena (Faline's mother) and Old Netta, an aging doe who helps Bambi survive after his mother's death.  The most significant omission is that of Gobo, Bambi's cousin and Faline's twin brother.  During the hunt where Bambi's mother is killed, an injured Gobo is taken by a hunter and eventually tamed.  He later returns to the forest, fearless of Man, and is subsequently killed by another hunter.  The character of Friend Hare eventually evolved into the movie's Thumper.   Flower the skunk was created by Walt and his crew and had no literary counterpart.

Walt at times did consider some of the book's more philosophical underpinnings.  One particular chapter from the book focused on two autumn leaves having a rather existential discussion about their own mortality before falling to the ground.  Disney artists in fact storyboarded the sequence, but it was ultimately rejected as being too disparate from the primary storyline.  The film also gives less focus to how humans are perceived by the forest creatures.  Salten explores that dynamic more deeply, as witnessed by this passage that appears near the end of the story when Bambi and the old stag confront the dead body of a human:

"Do you see, Bambi?" the old stag went on, "do you see how he's lying there dead, like one of us?  Listen, Bambi.  He isn't all-powerful as they say.  Everything that lives and grows doesn't come from Him.  He isn't above us.  He's just the same as we are.  He has the same fears, the same needs, and suffers in the same way.  He can be killed like us, and then he lies helpless on the ground like all the rest of us, as you see Him now."

Disney did provide a more cohesive narrative to the story, something that was lacking in the novel.  The climactic forest fire sequence was wholly created for the movie and helped reinforce the film's more defined themes of life, death and rebirth.  On a more minor and almost unnoticeable point, Walt relocated the story to North America from the European setting of the novel.  Bambi was in turn transformed into a white tail deer from his book-based roe deer incarnation.

Bambi: A Life in the Woods was indeed a challenge to bring to the screen.  In their book on the making of the film, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston noted that, "Walt was always ready to try something completely new if the idea intrigued him enough.  Although he claimed that his main interest was in the animals' personalities, he found himself moved by many of the themes in the book, several of which would keep haunting him over the next few years.  But at the time, while he thought he knew the special feeling he wanted in Bambi, he did not know how to achieve it, or even if it could be done."

Thankfully, Walt and his studio rose to that challenge.  But in many ways the final product is an entirely different animal from the material upon which it was based.

Consider the Source: Pulp Fiction, Rocketmen and Betty Paige

In 1991, the Walt Disney Company had very high hopes for The Rocketeer.  It was envisioned as a potential movie trilogy that could in turn spawn a synergistic franchise encompassing merchandising, television and theme park tie-ins.  Sadly, it was not to be.  The movie-going public failed to embrace the concept and thus, the Disney interpretation of the Rocketeer remains limited to the live action feature film that celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.

Similarly, the Dave Stevens comic book stories that inspired the film are rather slight in actual content.  The entire Rocketeer saga is comprised of just eight chapters totaling 112 pages.  But over the years it has in some ways grown greater than the sum of its parts; it is considered by many to be among the greatest of comic book publications, and Stevens, one of the true masters of the illustrated page.

The Rocketeer stories were born from the then emerging independent comics publishers of the 1980s.  Stevens' very first two Rocketeer chapters debuted in 1982 as backup features in Mike Grell's Starslayer series, published by Pacific Comics.  Chapters three and four migrated to a new anthology title called Pacific Presents which was published in late 1982 and 1983.  Chapter five went to press in 1984 with a wholly different publisher, Eclipse Comics.  Eclipse would later collect all five installments into one over-sized graphic novel collection.  Comico launched a new Rocketeer storyline, Cliff's New York Adventure, in 1988 with the publication of the Rocketeer Adventure Magazine.  Cliff's New York Adventure was continued in a second issue released in 1989, but then the series stalled.  Dark Horse Comics finally published the third issue and concluding chapter of the comic in 1995, some four years after the release of The Rocketeer movie.

Stevens drew inspiration for the Rocketeer primarily from movie serials and pulp magazine characters.  Visually, the Rocketeer outfit and helmet is wholly derivative of designs created for a series of Republic Pictures "Rocket Men" serials released throughout the 1940s and early 1950s.  The two Rocketeer storylines, (The Rocketeer and Cliff's New York Adventure), are very direct homages to 1930s pulp.  The Rocketeer indirectly featured characters from the popular Doc Savage stories, while Cliff's New York Adventure guest starred a thinly disguised version of the Shadow.  Due to potential copyright issues, those elements could not be carried over into Disney's feature film.

Stevens' Rocketeer stories are visually striking, fun and frequently very clever, but the storytelling is at times rushed and occasionally disjointed.  Likely this was due to Stevens falling victim to a run of bad luck in regard to publishers.  In an interview conducted a year prior to his untimely death in 2008, Stevens noted, "The whole experience of jumping from one, two, three, four publishers in a span of a handful of years, it just drummed all the enthusiasm out of me.  I loved the character and I loved creating scenarios in which the cast could play and grow, but it just wasn't meant to be.  If not for the disastrous financial end of it, it might have been a good gig to have for ten years or whatever."

The Rocketeer movie originated when screenwriters Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo contacted Stevens in 1985.  DeMeo remembers. "Dave met with us and saw we were 'kindred souls.'  [He] knew that we understood and respected the pulp genre.  So we really met at the beginning of the road that led to the film--years before pre-production would begin."  Bilson recalls, "We had a story pitch we had developed with Dave that we presented to a number of studios before Disney bought it.  Dave would bring copies of the comic and some of his original art, which was always impressive.  But we didn't write a script until we had a deal.  Then there were several years of revisions and new drafts before the film was finally green-lighted."

Working closely with Stevens, Bilson and DeMeo created a more cohesive storyline from Stevens' first five Rocketeer chapters.  They focused on the central premise of the stolen rocket pack falling into the hands of pilot Cliff Secord and his mechanic friend Peevy, who are then hounded and pursued by a combination of gangsters, Nazis and federal agents.  Forced to jettison the Doc Savage references, they incorporated billionaire and aviation pioneer Howard Hughes into the plot and created a new central antagonist in the form of flamboyant movie star Neville Sinclair.  The Sinclair character, a secret Nazi agent, was inspired by a largely fabricated version of actor Errol Flynn attributed to biographer Charles Higham.  According to Stevens, " . . . from the get-go there was never any great villain.  All there was was the rivalry between Cliff and this--and what do you call it?--a Svengali photographer, and that doesn't make for a big adventure.  So we had to come up with a really suitable villain, and that was where Neville Sinclair came from."

The filmmakers transformed Cliff Secord's Bettie Paige-inspired nude model girlfriend into the more sexually-benign Jenny, in keeping with Disney's more family-friendly sensibilities.  The trio also added the climactic final showdown at the Griffith Observatory, culminating with an intense battle between Cliff and the Nazi agents on board a German zeppelin high in the skies over Hollywood.

Despite objections by some Disney executives, Rockeeter director Joe Johnston insisted on remaining faithful to Stevens' designs, especially in the case of the iconic helmet of the title character.  The Bulldog Cafe, based on an actual 1930s southern California eatery, was also deftly translated from comic to screen.  In an interesting collaborative twist, Stevens, Bilson and De Meo created the film's Lothar character, Sinclair's giant-sized henchman, and then later featured him in the final two chapters of Cliff's New York Adventure.  Bilson and De Meo co-wrote those last two comic installments with Stevens.  Lothar was directly inspired by vintage B-movie actor Rondo Hatton, whose brutish facial features were the result of acromegaly, a pituitary gland disorder.  The persona was recreated for The Rocketeer film by actor Tiny Ron Taylor working with veteran makeup artist Rick Baker.

Stevens was active in the making of the film.  He carried a co-producer credit and worked extensively on production design.  Bilson recalls, "Dave spent a lot of time on the set.  I think most of his energy was in the art of the film."  DeMeo adds, "What I remember was Dave's enthusiasm.  He was really into it, really enjoyed seeing his creation come to life as a film."

While The Rocketeer movie did not live up to Disney's exceptionally high expectations, it was distinctly not the box-office bomb many pundits claim.  And it is fondly remembered by fans and filmmakers alike.  Danny Bilson notes, "The Rocketeer may be the highlight of my long career.  I only wish it had more initial success for all the creative people involved--in particular, Dave Stevens."


Special acknowledgment to interviews with Dave Stevens and Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, published in Back Issue magazine, issue #47. 

Consider the Source: The Hollow Heart of Sleive-na-mon

"Suggested by the Darby O'Gill Stories by H.T. Kavanagh"

That particular credit from Darby O'Gill and the Little People is indeed an accurate assessment.  The screenplay, written by Lawrence Edward Watkin, is not a direct adaptation of any of Kavanagh's original Darby O'Gill material.  Watkin instead combined elements from a number of the tales and used those elements and other themes to craft a wholly original story.  As we celebrate Saint Patrick's Day, let's take a moment to consider the source of one of Walt Disney's most endearing and especially underrated live action productions.

Herminie Templeton Kavanagh passed away nearly a decade before Walt Disney began to actively consider a feature film based on her Darby O'Gill tales.  She is a bit of an enigma.  Information about her is quite hard to find, and places and dates regarding her life, and most especially her two marriages, are difficult to confirm and are often contradictory. The Darby O'Gill short stories were written by Kavanagh and featured as a serial in McClure Magazine near the dawn of the 20th century.  They were later collected and published as a book in 1903 under the title Darby O'Gill and the Good People.  Two decades later, Kavanagh published a second collection that was called Ashes of Old Wishes and Other Darby O'Gill Tales.  She died in 1933 at the age of 72.

As noted, the Walt Disney-produced film was "suggested by" Kavanagh's works.  The most striking difference is in the character of Darby himself.  The literary Darby is distinctly younger than his movie counterpart.  The author portrayed him as a thirty-something Irishman with a headstrong wife named Bridget and a brood of children.  As interpreted by actor Albert Sharpe, the Disney Darby was an older widower in his sixties, his only offspring being a grown daughter named Katie.

Various plot points from the film can be traced back to the early Darby stories.  Darby's imprisonment by King Brian early in the film relates to Kavanagh's first story, Darby O'Gill and the Good People.  In that tale, Darby is confined for six months in "the hollow heart of Sleive-na-mon," the subterranean mountain home of King Brian and his subjects.  Similar to events in the film, he manages to escape by wits and trickery.  The overriding storyline of King Brian granting Darby wishes takes its inspiration from Kavanagh's second story, Darby O'Gill and the Leprechaun.  The movie's climactic moments involving the Banshee and the Death Coach were derived from the story The Banshee's Comb.

It is interesting to note that a sequence in the Disneyland television episode I Captured the King of the Leprechauns was adapted from the Kavanagh story How the Fairies Came to Ireland.  The episode depicts Walt Disney traveling to Ireland at the suggestion of actor Pat O'Brien in an attempt to recruit a real live leprechaun to star in his upcoming motion picture.  In his search, Walt visits a library where ancient texts reveal how the leprechauns had fallen from heaven at the same time Satan was exiled.  The narrative is taken almost directly from Kavanagh's story.

But, as we consider the source of these Disney endeavors, it is also important to consider the source of the Kavanagh stories as well.  According to the author:

This history sets forth the only true account of the adventures of a daring tipperary man named Darby O'Gill among the fairies of Sleive-na-mon. These adventures were first related to me by Mr. Jerry Murtaugh, a reliable car-driver, who goes between Kilcuny and Ballinderg. He is a first cousin of Darby O'Gill's own mother.

By all accounts, it was a tongue-in-cheek statement on Kavanagh's part.  And Walt Disney employed a similar "true story" strategy when he "visited" Ireland in I Captured the King of the Leprechauns and then went so far as to acknowledge King Brian and his Leprechauns " . . . whose gracious co-operation made this picture possible."

Consider the Source: Folly, Buzz and Fifteen Puppies

The novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith was first published in 1956.  Walt Disney secured the film rights to the book in June, 1957.  The completed film was released on January 25, 1961.  It was an exceptionally fast journey from author creation to screen realization, and hence, despite the original novel emerging over time as an unsung classic of children's literature, the film 101 Dalmatians has always dramatically overshadowed its own source material.

When Dodie Smith first set to write The Hundred and One Dalmatians in the mid-1950s, she was already recognized as an accomplished playwright, screenwriter and novelist.  The inspiration for the story came from her own love of dalmatians.  With her husband Alec Beesley, she had owned a dalmatian named Pongo, who passed away in 1940.  Shortly after Pongo's death, the couple acquired two new dalmatians, Folly and Buzz.  In 1943, Folly gave birth to fifteen puppies, one of which appeared to be stillborn.  Alec revived the pup, and those events, combined with a somewhat insensitive comment from a friend ( . . . their skins would make a nice coat) became the basis of the book she would write a decade later.

Upon acquiring the rights to Smith's book, Walt immediately handed the project to studio veteran Bill Peet.  In his autobiography, Peet related:

"Walt wanted me to plan the whole thing: write a detailed screenplay, do all the storyboards,and record voices for all the characters . . . I scrawled my manuscript for Dalmatians on large yellow tablets and worked at it with a frenzy every day and on through the weekends.  I left out some parts of Dodie Smith's book and enlarged on others without losing the strange twists and turns in the wildly suspenseful story."

There are quite a few name changes from book to film.  The Dearlys in the book (no first names are ever provided) become Roger and Anita in the movie.  The couple's servants, Nanny Cook and Nanny Butler, are combined into one character for the film.  In the book, the name of Pongo's wife is Missis; Perdita is in fact a wholly different character.  She is a stray who is found by Mrs. Dearly and brought home to act as a wet nurse for some of the puppies.  The elimination of the book's Perdita character was perhaps the only major disappoint Smith expressed with Peet's adaptation.  Perdita and her backstory were the basis of a clever plot twist that Smith revealed in the final chapter of the book.

Peet stayed generally true to Smith's story but did eliminate a number of book's sequences and created an entirely different final confrontation between the dogs and the villainous Cruella de Vil. The journey of Pongo and Missis across country to Hell Hall is significantly shortened, and a dramatic scene in which Cruella stands atop her car and applauds a burning building is eliminated completely.  There is no climactic car chase in the book.  Instead, Pongo and the entire brood are provided entry into the de Vil home by Cruella's white Persian cat, at which point they set about destroying Cruella's quite large and extensive collection of furs:

There was not enough space in one room to finish the whole job, so the pups spread themselves throughout the house.  After that, the fur flew like a vengeance--in every direction.  Chinchilla, Sable, Mink and Beaver, Nutria, Fox, Kolinsky and many humbler skins--from kitchen to attic the house was filled with a fog of fur.  And the white cat did not forget the ermine sheets.  She did good work on those herself, moving so fast that it was hard to see which was clawed white ermine and which was clawing white cat.

Cruella arrives home shortly thereafter with Mr. de Vil (also eliminated from the film; "he was a small, worried-looking man who didn't seem to be anything besides a furrier"), at which point Pongo and Missis steal her elaborate mink cape. After entering the house, " . . . Cruella could be heard shrieking with rage."  It is subsequently learned that the destruction of the furs impacted the de Vils financially and they were forced to flee England to escape their debts.

Other interesting variations from the book:

• Mr. Dearly is not a songwriter, but an accountant.  "He had done the government a great service (something to do with getting rid of the national debt) and, as a reward, had been let off his income tax for life."
• The Dearlys purchase Hell Hall and turn it into their "dalmatian plantation," although Smith never used that particular play on words.
• Smith created the television show What's My Crime, but the program Thunderbolt was exclusive to the film.
• The puppy that is resuscitated by Mr. Dearly, called Cadpig, is never identified by name in the film.

Smith enthusiastically endorsed the film, although she in good nature chided Walt about how small her name appeared in the opening credits.  She wrote a sequel to the book that was published in 1967.  The Starlight Barking was distinctly different from its predecessor with a storyline that involved an extraterrestrial character, Sirius, Lord of the Dog Star, attempting to evacuate all dogs from the planet in order to save them from the threat of nuclear war.

Walt Disney had also secured the rights to Smith's earlier adult novel, I Capture the Castle.  He had hoped to cast Haley Mills in the starring role, but the proposed film was ultimately never made.

Illustrations from The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone.

Consider the Source: Radish Obsessions and a Blind Prince

It's a rather bizarre tale of radish obsessions, a physically abusive witch and a wandering blind prince.  Sure, there's a young girl with long hair held captive in a tower, but the original Brothers Grimm story of Rapunzel is not quite the same as the Tangled affair that currently graces theater screens around the world.  It's time again to consider the source.

As with much of their works, the Brothers Grimm version of Rapunzel is rooted in older folk tales and mythologies, most significantly the story of Rudaba by 11th century Persian poet Ferdowsi, and the Italian story of Petrosinella, penned in the late 17th century by Giovambattista Basile.  Jacob and Wilhelm distilled these earlier tales into a rather cold, harsh and often disturbing account.  It is indeed a far cry from the upbeat musical interpretation that the Walt Disney Studios has presented in the form of Tangled, its latest animated feature.

Unlike her movie counterpart, the Grimm Rapunzel is not a princess by birth.  Her parents are commoners and quite a nutty pair.  Childless and unhappy, the mother dearly covets her neighbor's beautiful radishes.  Convinced his wife will die without the desired vegetables, he raids the nearby garden so to satisfy his spouse's obsession.  Upon returning to the garden a second time, the man is caught by the old Witch whose radishes he as stolen.  The Witch demands the couple's unborn child as payment for the radishes.  The man complies.  Not exactly the best of parents and wholly different from the noble and loving royal couple in Tangled.

Equally at odds with the Disney version is the Grimms' male protagonist.  He is but a handsome and charming prince who is drawn to the captive Rapunzel by the young girl's beautiful singing.  He climbs her tresses, seduces her, proposes marriage, concocts a long-term escape plan and at some point also manages to impregnate her.  Disney's Flynn Rider instead gets walloped multiple times with a frying pan and then blackmailed by a much more chaste heroine.

Upon learning of Rapunzel's affair the old Witch cuts off all the girl's hair.  The brothers then relate that the Witch was " . . . so hard-hearted that she took the poor maiden into a great desert, and left her to live in great misery and grief."  The Witch then surprises the prince upon his next visit and he accidentally tumbles from the tower.  He survives the fall, " . . . but the thorns into which he fell put out his eyes."  In comparison, Flynn Rider just gets stabbed to death.

The Grimms' prince then wanders in a blind state, " . . . eating nothing but roots and berries, and doing nothing but weeping and lamenting for the loss of his dear wife."  After a few years, he manages to find his way to the great desert where he discovers Rapunzel living with their twin children.  She weeps in great joy and her tears fall upon the prince's eyes and cure his blindness.  In Tangled, Rapunzel's single tear brings about Flynn's resurrection.

In the film, Mother Gothel meets her end due to rapid aging and ultimately turns to dust.  In the Grimm story, "What became of the old Witch, no one ever knew."

Noticeably missing from the original Grimm tale:  an island kingdom, a mysterious healing flower, Pascal the chameleon, floating lanterns, the Stabbington brothers, the Snuggly Duckling Tavern, Maximus the horse, hair with healing powers, and a whole lot of singing and dancing.

Consider the Source: She Had Eaten the Heart and Tongue

Editor Note:  In all the films Walt Disney produced during his lifetime, it was generally rare for one to be based on an original story.  Walt drew extensively from outside sources, primarily existing fiction and traditional tales and stories.  In many cases, the resulting "Disney version" has become the popular culture definitive, for better or for worse.  We are launching a new series here at 2719 Hyperion entitled Consider the Source, where we explore these original stories, novels and traditional tales that ultimately evolved into tangible representations of Disney entertainment.  First up, we deal with the Grimm realities of a certain classic fairy tale . . .

There exist numerous variations of the story that forms the basis of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  Bella Venezia is an Italian version; Myrsina has roots in Greek folklore, while Nourie Hadig is Armenian in origin and Gold Tree and Silver Tree is a part of Celtic tradition.  Walt Disney drew his inspiration from the most well known version of the tale, Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs, as famously chronicled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 19th century.

Walt remained quite faithful to much of the Grimm rendition. The fundamentals such as the Wicked Queen, the Magic Mirror and the poisoned apple remained in place while he expanded on other elements.  He was much lauded for creating distinct names and personalities for each of the dwarfs, who were generic and unnamed in the original Grimm text.   In their account, the Brothers Grimm chronicled two other failed attempts by the Queen to kill Snow White, first with a tightened corset and then subsequently with a poisoned hair comb.  Walt had considered the comb sequence for the film but ultimately decided that the pace of the story was better served by just the single encounter involving the poisoned apple.

The Disney version also proved much more romantic.  Added was the early scene where Snow White and the Prince first meet, a sequence entirely without basis in the Grimm story.  Walt also added the penultimate awakening kiss which had actually originated in a 1914 silent film version of the story; the Grimms had revived her by simply having the piece of poisoned apple accidentally dislodged from her mouth.

The Grimm brothers being grim indeed, Walt excised two of their harsher and distinctly more graphic story elements.  Wisely removed was the evil queen's intended act of cannibalism.  Upon the huntsman's return from the forest, the Queen consumes what she thinks is the heart and tongue of her step-daughter.  Due to the machinations of the huntsman, she had actually eaten the parts of a wild boar.  Also, the ultimate fate of the Queen varied greatly from page to screen.  In the film, she dramatically falls to her death after a lightning strike.  In the Grimm version, upon attending the wedding of Snow White and her Prince at the very end of the story, she was fitted with a pair of red-hot iron shoes and forced to, ". . . dance in them till she fell down dead."