Once the dwarfs started to see a little cash from the 1937 movie they made, and after it became clear that none of them would score Snow White, the first thing they wanted to do was find wives. After all, even though the movie makeup gave them a youthful, some say adolescent appearance, these short miners were getting old. Even Dopey was in his thirties. They knew the deck was stacked against them. The typical, reasonably-sustainable job for a dwarf in those days in the faraway hill country where they lived was mining, and as such, there were thousands of the little dudes in the vicinity. Conversely, only a handful of small chicks wanted to be around the dirty human moles. Now that they had some extra dough in their tiny pockets they all figured they’d be players – figuratively speaking, big fish in a dwarfed-sized pond.

The curveball in all of this was the one dwarf who followed his stomach. Long before the whole Snow White thing, Grumpy attached himself to a short little gal named Crabby. She wasn’t much to look at and she could be as mean as an old witch, but she was a pretty good cook and food being an important thing to a dwarf, they married. It’s worth noting that before getting married Grumpy was known by the name Ambivalent. Yep, it was marriage that turned him grumpy and transformed a run-of-the-mill hungry dwarf into an international symbol of grumpiness. Alas, this is a fairly common occurrence at any height.

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So by 1938 all the dwarfs sans Grumpy were cruising dwarf chicks. Sleepy had a difficult go of it because when he would meet a girl and she asked what his ideal date was he always said sleeping with her. Of course, none of these girls would agree to that until he met one named Drowsy. She wasn’t easy or anything, she just thought getting a little shuteye was a fine idea and on their first date Sleepy, well, he nodded off in the first thirty seconds. But word quickly got out that Sleepy and Drowsy were sleeping together and they woke-up to the fact that they better get married. They somehow managed to stay conscious long enough to have three children, Nap, Tired and Lullabye.

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If you think it’s hard to find a mate when all you want to do is sleep, you should try to get a girl’s phone number when you’re bashful. It’s hard to project a manly image when your cheeks are always rosy and a simple greeting like “hello” makes you turn your back in shyness. But they say that there’s someone for everyone and there was a dwarf girl who lived near the mines named Timid. Bashful and Timid always walked around with their heads down, not wanting to encourage any human interaction and one day they literally ran into each other. When they both reluctantly looked up it was like looking in a mirror. Timid took Bashful’s sweaty little hand in hers and they were hooked. They married quietly (shocking) at a secret altar deep in the woods. They seem happy but no one really knows since they lack the confidence to respond to basic questions.

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Everyone thinks Doc was a kindly, fatherly dude, but he was really a know-it-all, bossy, and most of the dwarfs hoped he’d go away in a mining accident. He was the mining union representative and they called him “Doc” not because he was wise and doctorly but on account of the fact he wanted the Snow White movie to be a documentary, focusing more on the dwarfs. He was old and scruffy by the time the film hit theaters. He convinced a haggard short one who went by the name Constance that there was going to be a sequel to Snow White and that he was going to have a starring role. He gave the title of the film as Doc and the Dark Mining Adventure and Constance married him to get her share of the windfall. It was all a lie of course and she finally divorced old Doc in 1956 after he told her that the Snow White ride at Disneyland was going to be called Doc & Snowy. Even little people can be big fat liars.

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It goes without saying that all seven of the dwarfs thought they would ultimately marry Snow White. She came to the mining town about a year before filming started trying to line-up a cast of dwarfs who would work cheap. As the movie shows, Snow was constantly flirting with the dwarfs, rubbing their heads and kissing their cheeks. Being strangers to love, the gullible little guys took this affection as a sign of true romance. I mean shit, she was even snuggling up to Dopey and they all knew his elevator only went up a floor or two. Obviously, it turned out it was all for show, a ploy to cement her top-billing status. Needless to say, the dramatic Prince Charming kiss hit like a mule kick to their little torsos and took most of the spunk out of their hi-hoing.

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Though no one would say so outloud, all the dwarfs were miffed about Dopey getting so much screen time and for getting what turned out to be the best part. Dopey was born bald and stayed that way, not an unheard of reality in the early 20th-century dwarf community. He was taller than the other dwarfs and could sometimes pass for a normal-sized miner. Name aside, he wasn’t a dope it’s just that he communicated like a teenager, mostly grunts and head nods, and as the film shows, he had certain endearing qualities. Turns out that after the last day of filming one of the full-sized extras took Dopey back with him to Hollywood. It was intended as a novelty, you know, check it out a real live dwarf. Rumor had it that the dopey struggling actor stuffed Dopey into his overnight bag and transported him as a piece of luggage. That seems unlikely, but regardless, now there were two more struggling actors in Hollywood. Dopey the dwarf somehow adapted and he started hanging out with a bunch of like-situated actors from the Wizard of Oz where he met a short gal named Dazey. She was dazed and he was dopey and they lived happily ever after, if you believe in that kind of thing.

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For sure it was rough, even with a little more cash than the average miner, for the Seven Dwarfs to find companionship. For most of his life Sneezy that his name was Gesundheit … whoever he was around that’s all they said. He blew through handkerchiefs like a stoner goes through rolling papers and Kleenex hadn’t made it’s way to the hill country yet. Still, for a semi-famous albeit nasally-challenged dwarf there remained dating prospects. He went with a nice dwarf named Coughing for a while, but between the sneezing and the coughing the mucus quotient was simply too high. Then Sneezy had the good fortune to meet Hiccup. They were always together and you could hear them coming a mile away between the sneezes and the hiccups and the God bless yous and the pardon mes. They named their son Burp and you can imagine what his deal was and then they decided to end the procreation … like, how much involuntary bodily noise-making can one family take?

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Everyone knows it’s equally maddening to be around someone that’s always happy as it is to hang with a person who is perpetually grumpy. According to the dwarfs, dealing with Grumpy wasn’t that bad because at least you could make fun of him and laugh at the tiny little things that set him off. With Happy though, it was different. He was incessantly whistling and hi-hoing, he was by far the most hi-hoingest of the Seven, and to a man, it was hard to take. On top of that, the dwarfs felt guilty for disliking him just because he was always in a good mood. Happy didn’t care because he was, well, happy to the core. When he was sad he laughed, when he was tired he guffawed, he chuckled in the mine, hummed while doing chores and smiled when he was scared. You would think that such an upbeat dude would be a big hit with the ladies, yet the truth was that even dwarf females tend to be turned-off by dudes that walk a round giggling like a schoolgirl. He just needed to find someone who shared his happy outlook on life and, dadgummit, that’s what happened. Doc told Happy he’d introduce him to a girl he knew if only Happy would wipe that smile off of his face and stop snickering for just five minutes. And so Happy met Jovial and their house was forever filled with laughter and nobody wanted to live near them and they never had a serious conversation and they couldn’t go to scary movies and they were the best people to know if you had a really good joke.

Now you know, true love is more than a fairy tale.

Photo credit: Express Monorail on Best Running / CC BY-NC-ND