Department of English, University of Louisville Phone: (502)852-6770 or (502)852-6801. Fax: (502)852-4182. Of course it is entirely appropriate to judge a movie by today's standards when you're talking about introducing it to today's audience--especially of children. And of course the fact that three-year-olds do spend a lot of time analyzing gender roles is precisely why their parents might want to be somewhat sensitive to what images they're consuming. I say this not as one who has kept a daughter--mine is now 5--from the incredibly sexist Disney films. But I do say it as one who has grave concerns about how to counteract the stereotyping that little girls get all the time, from the time--there are significant studies on this--when they're pre-verbal infants. But the major point that I want to make here is that when texts from the past are consumed in the present, there's every reason to "judg[e] . . . them by today's standards." Indeed, there's a very real sense in which that's all we CAN judge by--even our attempts to understand texts with historical sympathy are productsof one of today's standards. I wouldn't keep my little girl from SNOW WHITE--and I prefer the old Disney stuff, even w/ its sexism and racism, to Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers. But the issues posed by the original poster on this stuff are serious. I would like to recommend two films for when the 3-year-old girl is may be 2 years older: PIPPI LONGSTOCKING and THE JOURNEY OF NATTY GANN. Finally, a significant difference between SNOW WHITE and its ilk on the one hand, and other movies in which the good are powerless on the other. In the former, the girls inevitably have to be saved by someone else, and inevitably in the context of heterosexual romance whose happy outcome is assured on the wedding day. In the latter, the powerless assume control over their own lives through their strength of character and action--as in the two films I've suggested. bitnet tbbyer01@ulkyvm; internet [log in to unmask] Thomas B. Byers Department of English/University of Louisville Louisville KY 40292