“The Nelson,” the Ethics Alarms designation for very special episodes of swell-earned schadenfreude, was introduced in 2023 in a post about…Disney’s live-action reboot of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the 1937 animated film that began building the Disney entertainment empire. Thus it is nicely symmetrical for Nelson to give his trademark “Ha ha!” to the trailer of this slow-motion disaster, which has set what is believed to be a YouTube record with, as of yesterday, 40,383 “likes” and 1,012,299 “dislikes.” The film is hitting theaters in March. Ethics Alarms warned Disney about what was bound to happen if and when this botched project ever got out of the cutting room. I wrote in part,

The ethics value defied here is competence, and what we are seeing is the classic sunk costs fallacy in its classic form. The Vietnam War was the most painful example of this breach of life competence and common sense, which holds that devoting a lot of time and/or resources to a failed project argues for devoting more of the same, lest those “sunk costs” go to waste. In reality however, what is being missed is that fact that whether or not one has invested a great deal in a lost cause, its status as a project that has proven itself unworthy of investment is unaltered. Doing what Disney is doing with the “Snow White” project is called “throwing good money after bad.” It is bad business—incompetent, wasteful, and irresponsible.

First, Disney woke fanatics thought it made sense to cast a Snow White-of-Color, which makes no sense since the story makes such a big deal about how “fair” the heroine is. Then, because a single au courant little person actor complained about the dwarfs in the classic fairy tail, Disney eliminated them in favor of these dorks…

…who look like the guest list at a Yale administration DEI party, or maybe the next terrible remake of “The Magnificent Seven.”After the release of that photo resulted in universal mockery, Disney pulled the film and announced that the new seven dwarfs would be some kind of CGI thingies. Meanwhile Snow Not-Exactly-White kept shooting off her mouth and insulting the original film and, by extension, Disney’s founder and everyone who loved the original. Then, last year, with her movie’s premier nearing, Rachel Zegler decided that it was a good time into enter the partisan political divide, going full Trump Deranged on Instagram after the election and condemning what might have been at least half of her troubled film’s potential audience. “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace,” she wrote. “Another four years of hatred, leaning us towards a world I do not want to live in. Leaning us towards a world that will be hard to raise my daughter in.” That was just one of her rants; another one ended with a princess-like “Fuck this.” Juuust a bit late, Disney told its star to apologize, which she did badly and insincerely.

Rachel, I must add, is not very bright, and neither are her agent, publicist, and close friends. It is astounding that an actress whose career is hanging by a thread would be this arrogant and obnoxious as if the Star Syndrome, the performing arts version of The King’s Pass, applies to her. Zegler’s previous big-budget movie, the high-powered, prestige staging of “West Side Story” by Steven Spielberg (also a Disney production) with her as Maria, was a mega-bomb. Established super-stars often don’t survive two huge box-office failures in a row: another debacle costing the studio millions with Zegler at the center will have her doing road companies of “Wicked” if she’s lucky. Maybe she can play Snow White at Disneyland.

And now comes the trailer…

It’s not that bad, but I assume that the overwhelmingly negative reaction has been magnified by the fact that the star is, you know, an asshole. The movie looks dark and humorless in stark contrast with Walt’s masterpiece. The dwarfs are reminiscent of Jim Henson’s characters in “Labyrinth,” but creepier, not quite human, not quite puppets…and that film also bombed. The evil queen is more attractive than Rachel, which is a plot problem: maybe the movie is about dysmorphia. The CGI woodland creatures also are weird; they are even more annoying that those CGI baboons in “Gladiator 2.”

Of course the Prince is barely seen in the trailer since we have already been warned that he represents toxic masculinity and is a minor feature of this girl-power Snow White. Presumably the remake is also a musical, but we only hear Zigler singing snippets from what sounds like a generic “Frozen”-style score that is unlikely to make anyone forget the many hits from the 1939 movie, “Whistle While You Work,” “Heigh-Ho!”, “I’m Wishing” and “Some Day My Prince Will Come.”

The movie is fated to be another example of “The March of Folly” phenomenon, from Barbara Tuchman’s famous book about how throughout history mankind has persisted in going forward with doomed projects, plans and quixotic quests even when virtually everyone involved knew that a disaster was inevitable. There have been occasions when a major Hollywood production was so troubled that the studio pulled the plug even after substantial expenditures: Terry Gilliam’s “Don Quixote” and the big budget film version of “I Claudius” are famous examples, but also rarities. Walt Disney killed some projects, but never after letting them get as far as “Snow White.”

But then Uncle Walt was a genius, and knew what he was doing.