Psycho Panda Psychic Incident

In the earliest version of the fairy tale "Snow White," the evil queen is not a stepmother but the little princess's own mother, which is pretty creepy when you consider that the whole reason Snow White was so very fetching was that she was her mother's daughter. Those Brothers Grimm were not terribly cheerful guys, methinks. Of course, they lived in a different time and perhaps didn't get out much, which may have been depressing for them. And I suppose that their stories do clean up nicely for Disney films.

Above. Evil Queen.

Illustration from Snow White (Mjallhvít) from an 1852 icelandic translation of the Grimm-version fairytale. Landsbókasafn Íslands w:Project Gutenberg eText 16846 Drawing believed to be by Theodor Hosemann. Image is in the public domain because it was published over 100 years ago.

For me, the idea that the evil queen was able to detect her daughter's whereabouts only through the agency of the magic mirror bears some examination. Would a real mother really need a magic mirror to detect her daughter or might they have a psychic link that the Brothers Grimm changed into a magic mirror for purposes of marketing and suchlike? Perhaps a simple 19th century marketing decision led to the development of the evil stepmother.

(Left) This image is a screenshot made from a public domain movie trailer. Trailers for movies released before 1964 are in the Public Domain because they were never separately copyrighted.

Case in point: The Incident of the Psycho Panda.

This Thanksgiving, while my family and I were eating lamb with my sister-in-law's parents (who are really super nice), my mother suddenly related with the story of a crazed panda that grabbed some guy's jacket and ripped it off. Interestingly enough, only days before, I had posted a link to the video of the panda incident in this very blog. Coincidence?

Maybe.

Perhaps, however, it's evidence of psychic connections.

But it's just possible that Snow White's mom was really just a bad cook and a lousy dressmaker. What if Snow White's mother came to her senses and was trying to make amends with some really cool magic combs and a tasty beauty apple and just mixed up the recipe? Sure, it could have still been subliminal murder activity, and it would detract from the Disney movie (although I think the dwarves would carry it without Snow White), but maybe the first queen wasn't quite as bad as she's made out to be.