I tried to tell Young Kid the story of Snow White. But I was missing some key plot points:

1.Why does Snow White fall asleep instead of dying?

2. How long does she stay asleep?

3. Doesn’t a prince kiss her awake? But then where do the dwarves come in?

4. How does it end?

This is the story that I came up with:

Once upon a time, there was a princess named Snow White. Her mother, the Queen, died and her father remarried. His new wife was vain and cruel. She was obsessed with being more beautiful than Snow White. She had a magic mirror and would ask it, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” The mirror kept answering that Snow White was the fairest, driving her into a rage. Finally she decided to murder Snow White by feeding her a poisoned apple. The magic mirror felt sorry for Snow White. It wanted her to get away from her evil stepmother, but it didn’t want her to die. The magic mirror put a spell on the poisoned apple so that instead of killing Snow White, she would fall into a deep sleep but stay perfectly healthy and alive. The magic mirror thought that Snow White needed a little romance in her life, so it decided that only a prince’s kiss would wake her up.

Snow White brought the poisoned apple on a walk into the woods. When she took a bite, she fell asleep right there on the ground. Back at home, her evil stepmother asked the mirror once again, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” Again, the mirror answered that Snow White was the fairest. After weeks of this, the evil stepmother smashed the mirror into tiny pieces. Its enchantment was broken and Snow White woke up.

She woke to find herself in a beautiful garden. She sat for a while, looking around and wondering how she got there. Soon, seven dwarfs appeared. They invited her into their home. Snow White soon became a member of the family and spent her days singing, sweeping, farming, and hunting with the dwarfs. A prince once came by and offered to take her away, but she said no thank you. She was happy to live in the woods with her dwarf family.

The End.

Now I’m going to Google the actual story.

Disney version: Snow White sings song with prince at castle. Jealous Queen orders Huntsman to kill Snow White. He tells her to run away instead. She does a Goldilocks thing, finding the dwarfs’ cottage and taking a nap in their beds. They decide to keep her. The Queen finds out Snow White is still alive. She disguises herself as an old peddler woman and gives Snow White the poisoned apple, which makes her fall into a deep sleep. The dwarfs kill the Queen. (Technically they chase her to the top of a cliff, and she falls off, but basically they kill her.) The prince shows up and kisses Snow White to wake her and they live happily ever after.

Grimm’s version: It’s almost the same, surprisingly. Prince doesn’t show up until the end. The dwarfs think Snow White is dead, but she still looks so lifelike that they put her in a glass coffin instead of burying her. Prince comes along, she’s so beautiful that he asks the dwarfs if he can have the coffin and they agree. As his men hoist up the coffin, the piece of apple is dislodged from her throat and she comes back to life. She marries him and becomes Queen of his land. The stepmother is banished.