Count me among the annual watchers when it was on TV. When I bought my 42" HDTV and upconverting DVD player two years ago the first thing I did was buy TWOO on DVD and the whole family watched it. My kids love it as much as I did when I was their age.
Creating a robot in CGI is merely clever and takes full advantage of current technology. Creating a tornado out of muslin fabric was genius.
And my favorite “huh?” line:
“May I have her broom?”
“Yes, and take it with you.”
CookingWithGas, thanks for that. I’ve always been impressed by the tornado - it is stunning even today.
I like the movie. Just watched it earlier this year.
HPL said:
I don’t know, I read Wicked, my opinion is that there is an interesting idea buried in his crappy writing and story. I was interested in how to recast the Wicked Witch of the West as not evil, but rather misunderstood. And I did appreciate the oddness of the Wizard sending a girl to Murder the witch. But the ending characterization of the WW was very befuddled.
Regardless, that book/musical/et al is an alternate view of the events to give an interesting perspective, but like said, it isn’t actually really an Oz story.
Hey, I noticed something in my last viewing. This is a great place to ask about it.
During the scene where the wicked witch is watching Dorothy & Co. dealing with the poppies and snow in her magic HD viewer, there’s a part where the WW is holding something shiny and bronzy and ribbony. She’s waving it around as she delivers the line, “. . . and woe to those who try to stop me!”.
What IS it she’s holding?
Youtube link of that scene. The object teela’s talking about makes an appearance just after 3:25. It looks like the magic cap that (in the book) controlled the flying monkeys. Maybe a bit of a script change that didn’t quite escape the cutting room?
Apparently, I was right.
From here.
Sounds like the scene where the Witch mentions sending on a little bug that will slow them down, referring to the lost Jitterbug scene.
I have a special edition VHS tape with extras that plays the song, but it’s done to studio stills, because the footage of the dance scene no longer exists.
To me the most frightening view of the WWW was the one though Dorothy’s window when the bicycle riding Miss Gulch is transformed to the Witch on her broomstick.
Not a Wizard of Oz question, but…Frank Baum wrote other books about Oz,didn’t he? Have you read any of them? Are they about the same characters, or Oz, or what? “Ozma of Oz” “The Patchwork Gorl”… (I suppose I could check them out myself at the library sometime/) Just curious.
Oz is a little like a snowball, rolling downhill (I was originally going to compare it to Katamari Damacy, the game where your character rolls around, picking up objects that magically GLUE themselves to him). Each one made the cast bigger and bigger. Baum wrote the first 14 Oz books. In each book, a couple of new characters are generally introduced. By about book 10 or so, the closing scene was starting to look a little like a “Smith Family Reunion”…a few dozen of the beloved characters all stuck into one finale scene.
Most of Baum’s Oz books take place either in Oz itself, or in the fairy continent that surrounds it.
It’s interesting that this comes up, actually, since I just finished the book Oz and Beyond by Michael O. Riley. I’d recommend looking for it at the library, along with the Oz books. It’s pretty interesting, though a bit spoilery, if you can call it that.
Yep, that scene scared me peeless when I was a kid.
However, nowadays I can’t see it without grinning because I think of the Futurama parody. The WWW was played by Scruffy the janitor, and his cackle started out wicked but petered out wimpily as he ran out of interest.
In the same parody, I loved Mom as the WWW and the flying monkeys played by her three dumb sons. “But mommy, you said you were going to bake monkey cakes!”
And frankly, the Oz books outside outside Oz are generally better than the ones inside Oz. Excluding The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz, the best Oz books (IMO) are Ozma, Tik-Tok, Road To and Dorothy & The Wizard. Books that tend to take place only in Oz (with a few exceptions: Patchwork Girl, Lost Princess) aren’t as good (IMO). Which is one of the reasons the Ruth Thompson books are so very, very skunky. They all take place in the most twee version of Oz imaginable. (The Jack Snow books are really good though.)
But Baum’s best work (again, IMO) is Queen Zixi of Ix. It’s certainly his most mature work (along with The Master Key))
mrAru and I saw that also …
I adored it when we saw Casablanca at the Garde on a full sized screen …
Has there been a year for Hollywood movies since 1939? I’m trying to think of a time since then when there were so many stellar movies made in the same year, all nominated for Oscars. Hell, it was the same year Gone With the Wind came out.
I remember when it came on TV for the first time, and my dad was fiddling around with the TV set, because he couldn’t figure out why our color TV was suddenly airing in black and white. 
The thing that squicked me out was the witch’s feet drying up and curling up under the house. I don’t know why, but that scared me more than the flying monkeys.
My favorite Oz book by Baum is Rinkitink in Oz. I wonder, if Wizard was so successful, why no one has ever made the rest of the series into a movie? Are there rights issues? I could see how Shaggy Man could be arrested as a child kidnapper, but certainly the Nome King was one of the most dastardly villians in literature. (He shares my loathing of eggs, so I can’t be too hard on him.) There’s a whole little world there, and Wizard is just the first part.
There’s Return to OZ, which has the Nome King as villain. Quite good, imho.
Actually, the Nome King shows up as the villain of about four of the Baum Oz books, even after his amnesiafication, abdication and reform at the end of Emerald City of Oz.
The people on the Ringworld think of the ring as an arch over their world - like a rainbow. The main characters go both over and under it before crashing on it. And you can also think of Speaker as a cowardly lion, because he’s feline, and by his races standards he is very cautious. The Tin Woodsman could be Louis because hes very old and bored with life until circumstances give him a reason to care, and Dorothy could be Teela because she’s young and innocent, and what seems like bad luck for everybody ends up being good for her in the long run.
I liked Return to Oz – it contained elements of The Marvelous Land of Oz, which is my favourite Oz book, and [shameless name-dropping] stars Fairuza Balk, who came to a party at my house near the end of the eighties, and is a great person to meet for the first time when you have a headful of acid.[/shameless name-dropping.]
The freakiest bit of TWOO for me was always the apple trees throwing apples at Dorothy. I guess I’m alone in that.
[Log Lady]The owls are not what they seem…[/log lady]