Bumped.
I showed it to my teenage sons for the first time last night - don’t know I hadn’t when they were younger. Still a great film. I have to admit I had never realized before that the same actor, Frank Morgan, plays the traveling magician in Kansas, the Emerald City doorkeeper, the carriage driver and the Wizard behind the curtain. Was that also him in the big bald head and fangs as the illusion of the Wizard, or was it another actor? Haven’t been able to confirm that.
Probably my favorite movie. Watched it every time it was on TV when I was a kid. It was the 80s before I ever knew that Oz was in color. My dad would not get a color TV.
But it is funny how much of the film I forget. Every time I watch it now, there are sequences when I go “is this new? I’ve never seen this!” I don’t know why WoO is the only film that does that in my head. It refuses to “file” properly,
I’ve seen it probably 50 times, and some parts of it for the first time each time!
Some of that could be due to the fact that you watched it on TV. A 2 hr movie in a 2 hr time slot is gonna lose some stuff to get 16 mins (and sometimes more!) of commercials into it!
It was many TV viewings before I saw the group actually climbing the mountain to get to the Witch’s castle. You know, where the tin man is holding onto the lion’s tail as a guide rope. And you can clearly see the square piece of wood used to reinforce the tail. They’d always just appeared at the top to spy on the winkies (Witch’s guard) entering the castle…
It’s one of my all-time faves. I’ve watched it every year since I was probably 5 yo. Then my kids watched it every year, then when it came out on VHS my son watched it every day for about a year. Then I introduced it to my grandkids who watched it every time they were over (once a week) for a couple of years. Now they don’t request it as often but I’d guess we still see it at least once a year. There are always new and different things I pick up on when I watch it.
It holds up amazing well for such an old movie
I think it’s more accurate to say that Dorothy rescues and aids the Scarecrow (she takes him off the pole) the Tin Man (she oils him) and even the lion. And she’s the one who pushes them to embark on their own quests.
I recently watched a really excellent version of “The Wiz” on “The Show Must Go On”, when it was free. It was good enough to pay for, especially if you are a Wizard of Oz fan.
As others have said, the books are even more explicitly feminist. They also present a socialist paradise, where good Queen Ozma makes sure that everyone has what they need, and that no one has to work too hard.
I always assumed the implication was that it was the Wizard himself playing the roles of his “underlings” (so as to better protect his secret).
Yes, but is it also Morgan, under all that makeup, as the scary Wizard behind all the bursts of fire?
Taking the movie as a stand alone, ignoring the books…
Why does anyone think Oz really existed? It was just a dream. There’s no evidence that it really happened, and plenty of evidence that she imagined the whole thing.
Yes, in the movie, it’s all a dream. There is no evidence at all that Oz really existed. The studio insisted it be written and shot that way, given its perception of audience tastes in the late Thirties.
Frank Morgan played 5 roles: the Wizard, Prof Marvel, the Gatekeeper, the Carriage Driver, and the Guard.
Yes, but was that the Wizard just as the humbug and “man behind the curtain,” or was it also as the scary bald green fanged guy in the projection?
Idk, but thought you’d like to know the 5th character he played.
I think that’s “proof” that Oz doesn’t exist, that the same person is five roles (including the one in the real world.)
Oddly, though, I like to think Oz is real in the movie. I just can’t support it with any text in the movie.
Yeah, this is what I was going to post. The “wicked” witch just wanted to collect her dead sister’s belongings. Then Glinda has Dorothy steal the dead witch’s shoes and points her on a dangerous journey to see a charlaton who sends her and her friends on a virtual suicide mission to steal the wicked witch’s broom, yet another thing that rightfully belongs to the witch, when all Dorothy had to do was click her heels together to go home THE WHOLE TIME.
There’s a longstanding theory that Glinda is the criminal mastermind behind everything. She used her magic to drop Dorothy’s house on the Wicked Witch of the East, gave her the ruby slippers and then sent her out to find three other people to help her kill the Wicked Witch of the West, and then induce the Wizard of Oz to fly away in his balloon, leaving Glinda as the only remaining magic user in Oz, in control of the Emerald City’s poppy fields (i.e. opium trade).
That’s pretty much the only way it all adds up!
My son saw it in the early 2000’s, and he liked it a lot. “The girl sings really nice!” he said, or words to that effect.
Diabolical! And yes, it all makes perfect sense.
I always thought they got Worf for that role.
Well, she also wanted revenge on Dorothy for killing her sister. “I can cause accidents too!”
I was going to post that. I read all the books as a child, and actually, the first one is, IMHO, the weakest of the original 14 written by Baum himself (a granddaughter, or niece, or something, wrote a bunch more, but I never liked them). Not that it was bad-- just that, if I had to rank them, it would be last.
Dorothy never wanted to get back to Kansas, she wanted to get back to Aunt Em and Uncle Henry, because they needed her, and that is made quite clear in the beginning of the book, before the cyclone. She is their reason for plugging on, and the only brightness in their lives. This is not the case in the movie, where she seems to be in the way, and inadvertently cause them a lot of trouble, which I think is a mistake.
But actually, the whole “There’s no place like home” moral is a mistake. Baum says in the preface to the first book that he wanted to write a book for children that was not didactic, not an Aesop fable, but just plain fun. The movie ruined that, IMHO.
After her second trip to Oz, when Princess Ozma is in charge, Dorothy and Ozma figure out a way for Dorothy to signal when she’d like to visit Oz again, and she returns home, but future trips are in the offing. Then she convinces Aunt Em and Uncle Henry to move there, and they all take up permanent residency.
Oh, and my 13-year-old has always loved it-- well, the first time he saw it, the witch scared him, but he got over that, and now he loves the whole thing.