The Premiere of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [NBC Radio Broadcast] (1937)

85 years ago, Walt Disney's first ever animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, premiered on December 21st, 1937. This film cost around a million and a half dollars. After that, Disney's folly has become his greatest triumph of all time. It is the first ever Disney film to have musical numbers and Snow White is the first ever Disney Princess ever made.

At one point, Louella Parsons says that this film is "the best Christmas present that children of Hollywood could possibly have."

Six days later, Walt Disney and the seven dwarfs appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Three weeks later, it opened at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City and a theater in Miami in January 1938, in which the strong box office sales encouraged RKO Radio Pictures to place the film into general release on February 4. It became a major box-office success, earning rentals of $4.2 million in the United States and Canada during its initial release, becoming the most successful sound film of all time, in which it displaced Al Jolson's The Singing Fool (1928). Snow White would soon be displaced from this position by Gone with the Wind in 1939.