This week we watched the classical 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs' in our 'History of Animation' class, preceded by a 'Making of...' which featured a number of scenes and songs which never made it into the final cut. It's a must for all animation students, and I'm really happy our school takes time to screen it!
One of the songs which did not survive is 'You're never too old to be young' and it was exactly this song which triggered old memories. It must have been my seventh birthday when I got a single with songs from Snow White, and this week I recognized that 'You're never too old to be young' was one of them. That is, the melody was the same, but the text was 'translated' as "Ik ben maar een dwerg, is dat erg?", which means something like "I'm only a dwarf, ain't that bad?"
Those days my parents had bought themselves a new stereo set, which featured a rather primitive changing mechanism for singles, and I had never seen it working until a friend of the family dropped by, who spent some time to get it working. And right when the first single moved into position, my mother interfered with a hurried "Ah, yes, it's okay now, I see how it works, thank you very much" but it was too late and she turned deep purple when a cheerful "I'm only a dwarf, ain't that bad" filled the room.
This week, 37 years after, I felt some of the embarrassment my mother must have felt. I can only hope our visitor, a little person himself, did not feel too bad about it...
