3 1/2 DWARFS

For a few moments imagine that the curator of the Louvre decided that all paintings exhibited would henceforth be placed in uniform “square” frames only. Thus, the “Mona Lisa” would be masked so that the top and bottom of the image were obscured by a matte. Impossible? . . . ridiculous . . . of course!

Now, for another few moments, imagine that the Walt Disney Company decided to re-release “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” on the occasion of its 50th anniversary and that the studio moguls decided that the original image would be cropped at the top and bottom to present a more contemporary “horizontal” ratio. Impossible? . . . ridiculous . . . of course not!

The movie should really be called “Snow White and the 3 1/2 Dwarfs.” There may have originally been seven midgets up on the screen, but one could come to the conclusion that there are at least that many mental-midgets at Disney for destroying this all-time classic.

PETE KLINE

Hollywood

A spokesman at Disney explained that 90% of theaters in the country don’t have the lenses or special aperture plate needed to project a 1.33:1 image. Disney technicians painstakingly analyzed every frame of the film and 501 scenes (61.5% of the film) were reformatted or repositioned to fit the modern, less square frame size. The process took more than five months, during which time an entirely new printing negative was manufactured from the 50-year-old original. Meticulous care was taken to preserve important picture information in all the reformatted scenes, the spokesman said.