Snow White's original VHS release in 1994 was a huge success. It outsold Jurassic Park. It remained one of the best selling VHS tapes ever (Disney or otherwise) by the end of the decade.
Many children of that time were exposed to it that way, or during the prior 1993 theatrical re-release (first ever movie to get a frame-by-frame digital restoration).
You could dismiss that by saying parents would just buy any Disney tape for their kids in those days, but other movies didn't come close to those sales. People wanted this movie more than others.
It's always played well to adults and kids. Times change, the movie ages in more ways than one, but people still like it.
This was written nearly 50 years ago, but Snow White itself was already 40 years old by then:
"In my earlier book, I stated that Pinocchio was probably Disney's greatest film, but I have since revised my opinion and now believe that - while Pinocchio is still a marvelous achievement - Snow White deserves to take top honors. My reason for this change of opinion is quite simple. While researching the first book, I spent many hours in screening rooms viewing all of Disney's animated features and many of the shorts and live-action films. Under those conditions, with no audience to distract me, I was dazzled by the technical brilliance of Pinocchio, which has never been surpassed, and on the strength of that rated it slightly higher than Snow White.
Later, however, I has the opportunity to see both pictures again in a packaged theater surrounded by 1,500 other people. The audience loved Pinocchio and was as impressed by its brilliance as I had been, but there were moments (very few) when everyone's attention seemed to flag, however briefly. Each scene is magnificent, but occasionally the momentum is lost as the story moves from one scene to the next. When Snow White was shown, on the other hand, the audience was enthralled from beginning to end. For the entire running time of eighty-three minutes, everyone was gripped by the story. The audience's concentration was never broken. People shivered as the huntsman stood poised to plunge his knife into Snow White's back; they cheered as the wicked Queen fell to her death. (And this was not an audience of children. It was composed of presumably sophisticated adults at New York's Lincoln Center.)
- Christopher Finch, "Walt Disney's America" (1978)
Evil Queen/Witch has been scaring kids since day 1.
Disney has even leaned into that in the past when advertising the movie saying it was both their "merriest" and "scariest"
