I’ve just been re-watching Ralph Bakshi’s wonderful movie, “Wizards.” I had forgotten a lot of things about the plot – that people in an idyllic post-apocalyptic future had forgotten all about evil, until the bad wizard finds some old Nazi newsreels. At first, the people are complacent, thinking, it can’t happen again.
Spookily timely.
I think a remake, with a depiction of the Sidhe more in keeping with their traditional description, plus maybe a little more punk, would be awesome. (they were fairies in the original, because it was the 1970s.)
To tell the truth, much as I wanted to like Wizards, it just never worked for me. There was much to admire in Bakshi’s loose, off-the-wall style (and Mike Ploog’s still drawings), but there was a helluva lot tat seemed completely irrelevant and unfocused. A lot of the flick leaves you scratching your head and wondering “Why is THAT in here?” An inordinate amount of time is spent on trivialities, followed up by hurried exposition on weightier matters. The film’s pacing is abysmal.
Plus, as Chronos rightly says, it was a product of its time. It’s not just the “psychadelicness” of the imagery, it’s the whole still-resonant hippie Tolkien vibe of the 1970s that the film tapped into. Bakshi’s next film, tried to do the same more explicitly with Lord of the Rings, and, in that case, his pacing and murky storytelling finally caught up with him, and the film flopped. But the demographic moved on. Tolkien has more of a Peter Jackson imagery to it, and the hippie days are gone. The original poster for Wizards featured Necron 99 atop his two-legged mount with a skull and crossbones on the back of the saddle and the legens “A Fantasy Vision of the Future”:
They quickly realized that this wasn’t playing to their core audience, so they revamped it, showing Necron 99 As “Peace” with the wordv “Peace” on the saddle in place of that skull and crossbones, and the legend"An Epic Fantasy of Peace and Magic":
THAT had the right vibes, and it’s practically the only image you se any more. Even though both “Peace” and his mount are pretty clearly scowling at the audience in a non-peaceful way.
Finally, I can’t see them redoing it in traditional hand-painted cel animation, and any other way – modern 2D or the now-standard 3D, would just look completely wrong.
Notice, by the way, that the skull the two-legged steed is standing on in the original poster is magically gone in the “Epic Fantasy of Peace and Magic” poster.
My biggest problem with Wizards was the Wizard. In another thread someone pointed out that the movie was heavily influenced by the work of Vaughn Bode who I never liked. The movie was very much a product of its time. I don’t see it ever being remade.
Reportedly very deliberate (and hard not to believe).
One thing that really annoyed me about the film is that, after setting up this big conflict between Good and Evil, and telling us how Avatar was so much more moral than his evil brother Blackwolf, and it looks as if we’re about to have a Wizard’s Duel or an Intellectual Confrontation or something, instead…
Avatar simply pulls a gun out of his sleeve and offs his brother with a couple of shots
Well, there you go for a moral to the story that came outta left field and is perfectly consistent with nothing.
To each his own. To me the punchline was the best part of the movie.
I loved the movie when I was a teenager. I guess that was the target audience. Now Bakshi seems childish and immature. I don’t know if I could sit through an entire Bakshi movie again.
