The Wizard of Oz

The classic 1939 movie “The Wizard of Oz” recently returned to movie theaters, for one week, in IMAX 3D.  Although I’m not a big fan of it, I did consider it worth checking out in that format, and the treatment itself was impressive, if not so much the movie itself.  The higher resolution exposed some of the flaws, but overall the film as about as good as it’s going to get.

Book.   The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) was L. Frank Baum’s attempt at a children’s story which was somewhat more lighthearted and grim than the usual fairy tales, e.g. Hansel & Gretel’s parents abandoning them in a forest to a cannibalistic witch. 

            Dorothy & Toto are pulled up into a tornado in Kansas and magically transported to the land of Oz.  They meet the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, and eventually the Wizard himself, in the Emerald City.  They’re helped by Glinda the Good, and opposed by the Wicked Witch of the West.  WWW’s minions are flying monkeys, although in the story the flying monkeys obey whoever commands them with a special magic item (later on Dorothy herself commands them to fly her and her companions over the deadly desert).   She not only defeats the Witch, but also exposes the Wizard as a “humbug” (fake).  However, the Wizard still rewards the Scarecrow with “brains”, the Tin Man with a “heart”, and the Cowardly Lion with “courage”.  After all this, Dorothy finally goes home to Kansas.

            After this, Baum became a victim of his own success.  Children mercilessly begged him to write more stories, and he felt compelled to comply.  So he kept writing more.  They get progressively stranger and more violent.  I don’t know if Baum was running out of good ideas or was “spoiling the milk” to sabotage his success.  I downloaded the complete compendium onto my Android Kindle and am still only 43% through after three complete stories.    

Movie.   The 1939 version with Judy Garland as Dorothy is probably by far the most known, but (see below) not the only one.   For the most part the movie is fairly faithful to the original story, the differences being fairly insignificant.  I don’t like the songs or music, though.  I could never quite enjoy the film, and as an adult I still don’t:  it is, despite 3D, IMAX, and song & dance, essentially a children’s story.

Return to Oz.   This is a 1986 film with Fairuza Balk as Dorothy; it’s strange because although the story is a sequel to the 1939 one (both in terms of being based on a subsequent book AND described in those terms in the movie itself) the actress is younger than Judy Garland was.   Her trip to Oz regressed her!  As I mentioned, it’s actually an adaptation of the next story in the series.  The Wheelers, the evil head-switching queen, Tik Tok, Bilina, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Gump, and the Nome King are all part of that story.  Relative to the first story, this one comes off as more disturbing and less pleasant.  However, I’d say it’s fun to watch simply due to its unintentional trippiness.

Oz the Great and Powerful.   Wizard Oscar “Oz” Diggs (James Franco) is a stage magician, not a real wizard.  He gives out music boxes to his female admirers (including Abigail Spencer, who is very pretty).  Like the original W’o’Oz, the film starts out in B&W and transforms into color.  Heresy, I know, but I much prefer this movie to the 1939 version.

            A tornado hits Kansas (big plot swerve there, huh?) and takes him to Oz.  In the Emerald City he meets a pair of sisters Theodora and Evanora (Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz) who welcome him as the “wizard” who will “save” Oz from the Wicked Witch.   Theodora falls in love with him, but Evanora immediately recognizes that he’s a fraud.  They send him off to kill the “Wicked Witch”, who turns out to be the good witch Glinda (Michelle Williams).   For his part, Oz has not much in the way of scruples about playing the “wizard” for Kansas hicks to earn his living, but is considerably less comfortable when it comes to doing so for real to either kill someone or being depended upon to save innocent lives.  Ultimately, though, Oz “A-Teams” it and comes up with an elaborate plan, using what “wizardry” he does know and understand, i.e. contemporary science tricked up to appear as magic, with an explicit reference to “The Wizard of Menlo Park”, Thomas Edison (no mention of Tesla…huh?) to defeat the two sisters (some vaguely Ewok-type operations in here too, but no Jar-Jar like character, thank God).  This is even more remarkable given that Oz doesn’t seem to have any formal background in science or engineering.  For their part, Evanora tricks Theodora into eating a poison apple which transforms her from “Cute Jackie” into the “ugly green bitch” we recognize from the 1939 original.   

            It looks like someone decided, “let’s ‘remake’ the original 1939 Wizard of Oz using 2013 3D CGI magic,” or as Waters might say, “all these electronic goodies which are available for people like us to use.”  Although it’s a prequel (story of how the Wizard of Oz came to be) it’s very faithful to the original movie in spirit and also much of Baum’s work – including the little living China Girl.  I’ve yet to come across the actual story (if any) from which this movie is derived, aside from the Oz stories in general.  The ending strongly suggests a sequel is being set up, and I’m pleased to see that unlike “John Carter”, this movie seemed to do well at the box office, as it well deserved, making that sequel much more likely to see the light of day.  Amen.

Silent films.   There were several silent films before the 1939 film.  I saw a pair of them, one from 1914, one from 1925.  Neither follows a story I’ve read, but they may be following subsequent books, or very liberally adapting the existing stories. 

      I found the plot the first one to be kind of stretched, and was not overly impressed by the various characters.  Female leads from this era consistently seem to have a boring plainness and ugliness we would never accept in actresses nowadays.  I guess that’s what passed for beautiful back then.  Theda Bara vs. Angelina Jolie?  Please, Bara can’t compete with Jennifer Aniston, or even Jeanine Garafalo.  Oddly, the leading men are still handsome – go figure. 

            I found the second movie to be…how should be put this?  Yet another unintentionally trippy film, especially due to the bewildering array of pantomime animals and very scanty use of the story boards (dialogue boards silent films use in between actual camera shots).  I vaguely gathered the story was about some princess bewitched to have her heart stoned (!) as to be immune to love for anyone, and eventually – very unclear how and a vast amount of time and effort in between – cured and happily reunited with her modest-income loved one.  Again, I don’t know if this was simply lifted verbatim from a story of his with the expectation that audiences at the time would have already been familiar with the story.

            With silent films, you’re working with a medium which is clearly obsolete.  Even D.W. Griffith classics like “Birth of a Nation” and “Intolerance” have that scarcely definable weirdness which provides part of the entertainment value to us jaded twenty first century viewers, who now have not only color and sound, but also THX (if not THC….hmm, I wonder if that is a coincidence) and 3D and IMAX effects; though I’d argue that “Gone With the Wind” or “The Wizard of Oz” (both 1939) have more in common with “Avatar” than with the silent films just 10 years before.