Leave the sewin’ to the women, you go get the trimmin’

Or, Score: 1 Target, 0 Environment

I don’t have a best buy reward zone card, and I’m not paying for one. So I popped into Target to get Cinderella (and some much needed nail clippers, I seem to have lost mine). This is the first time I’ve ever told the cashier “I don’t need a bag,” and she made me take on anyway.

We just had an Oktoberfest party at work (sausages and beer, yum!) to celebrate our sales figures for September, and I was just about stuffed to the brim. So I didn’t need to worry about dinner interrupting my Disney bliss, and settled in for over 4 hrs of Cinderella goodness. I have to say, I’m in a very good mood today, and I’m sure it’s because of her.

The Target package of Cinderella comes with a shoe necklace. It’s blue and sparkly. It doesn’t look much like a glass slipper, and it’s not really something I’d wear. But it is less crappy than I imagined it would be. And when faced with buying something with a prize or without, I’m sure you know what the decision is.

Getting this DVD into the player was an exercise itself. There is the cardboard sleeve with the Velcro flap over the plastic DVD box (like the rest of the movies). There is shrink wrap adhering the shoe necklace to the plastic DVD box. There is shrink wrap around the plastic DVD box itself. Then there’s that retarded sticker on the top that says the name of the movie. And finally, they won’t just settle for a regular DVD box. There are two clasps on the dumb thing (like a briefcase?) that have to be undone before you can snap the thing open. I don’t remember that from any other packaging.

I watched the extras disc first. And oh my goodness, were they extras! Not to say that they were perfect, I could have done with less repetition of/about the songs. It turns out that Cinderella was crucial for Disney, if it wasn’t a huge success he might have had to stop making movies all together, and he thought that marketing the music as stand alone music was going to help tons. There’ s fantastic footage (think Beatles) of young women rushing into the music store with an ecstatic look when they get their hands on a copy of the sheet music for “the work song.” What a different time it was back then. There’s also some footage of the Perry Como show, in which some back up singers dress in absolutely indescribably horrid mouse suits.

There’s a short section where we meet the artist responsible for each character. Old people are pretty cute.

As it turns out, to save money (not quite sure how that works) the whole movie was shot in live action with the voice actors acting and dancing, and the artists traced over copies of that to make the final product. This necessitated all of Cinderella’s costumes to actually be made in real life. CINDERELLA’S OUTFITS ACTUALLY EXISTED!! And there are s few clips of Ilene Woods on different shows, wearing these outfits. In a clip from the Mickey Mouse Club she wears the dress, and then changes into the remains of the dress the mice made after the stepsisters tear it apart. THE TORN APART PINK DRESS ACTUALLY EXISTED!! It doesn’t get much better than that. I’m thinking about making myself the pink mouse dress for next Halloween. I guess it wouldn’t be very recognizable, but if mice can make it, I certainly can.

But that’s not the best part. There’s a small “Art of Mary Blair” documentary. And, as it turns out, I love Mary Blair. Most notably she worked on Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Cinderella, and later in her career the Small World ride. Her art is fantastic as stills, but they have to soften it a lot for the cartoons. I’m going to buy her book. What I’d really like are some prints of her art-- not just disney stills, but my preliminary research doesn’t show much available. I’m ready to get a job in the Disney archives and just start stealing.

There’s new footage too. A music video with today’s Disney Channel stars covering “A Dream is a Wish your Hear Makes.” There’s a segment where we learn how to pick a Tiara with Isaac Mizrahi, How to give you room a princess makeover by the extreme makeover: home edition team (Ty suspiciously absent), and how to act like a princess and curtsey with some real princess who sounded an awful lot like Olivia Newton John (I have my doubts about her pedigree, because a real princess would NEVER wear Ugg boots on tv).

I haven’t played the DVD-ROM yet, but it involves room design, dress-up and uploading your photo.

At this point I was debating if I should watch the actual movie or do my homework. I was in much too good of a mood, so I figured I’d go for it. Cinderella is the first Disney platinum release that I actually watched as a child. It turns out there were bits I forgot about, but other parts I remembered perfectly. Unlike all this new stuff where, I don’t know, the girl has a mind of her own. Cinderella is just perfectly obedient. It’s not through struggle and fighting for equality that she becomes princess, it’s because she’s beautiful both inside and out.

The next Disney Platinum release will be Lady and the Tramp at the end of Feb. It seems to me they could have stepped it up a bit to be released before Valentines Day, but that’s just me. I can’t wait for some old Peggy Lee footage.

And, just when you thought they’d done all they could with Cinderella, they’re releasing Cinderella III in 2007. (Because II was such a hit???) And, like the early trailer for II, they don’t actually have any new footage, just old footage with a new voiceover. It seems that III will not be retarded vignettes about mice and pudding and cats in love. It will be something about life if Cinderella doesn’t go to the ball and meet the prince, or something. Lady Tremaine, (the stepmom) seems to have evil magical powers, (and sounds A LOT like Maleficent) and sees to be able to counter the good fairy godmother magic. Or something. I was led astray by II, but I’ll stay cautiously optimistic about III. I’d love to see a legitimate treatment of a great Villainess, but since the stepdaughters are comic figures, I doubt it’ll happen.