My Dad used to complain every year when this movie came on TV and we insisted on watching it, he used to tell us how we had seen it a dozen times already! I loved the fact that it became my son's favorite movie and one of his first words was "Green Witch!", as he called her. Time to get out those Ruby slippers for our stroll, just follow the yellow brick road!
Since it was first released in 1939, through subsequent re-releases and annual television showings, THE WIZARD OF OZ has become an American classic. It was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture in 1939, possibly the most amazingly productive year in Hollywood history.
THE WIZARD OF OZ has not been colorized. The film was originally shot in both sepia-toned (which means brownish-tinted) black-and-white and Technicolor. The sequences in Kansas were in black-and-white and the Oz sequences were in Technicolor. Most of the people who remember THE WIZARD OF OZ being a black-and-white movie grew up watching it on black-and-white TVs, which of course, didn't differentiate between the Kansas and Oz sequences.
Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale with the ever-present Toto. Garland was awarded a special Oscar in 1940 for her outstanding performance as a screen juvenile in this film. Though she would go on to make more than thirty more films in her career including many lavish MGM musicals, it is for this role that she is best remembered. Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg's Oscar-winning song from the film, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", became her personal theme song.
A little girl is whirled from her home in Kansas by a cyclone which deposits her in the magical land of Oz. There she meets a number of strange companions who accompany her to the city of the Wizard who rules the land, and with his help she returns to Kansas." - 1938 MGM synopsis of L. Frank Baum's book "The Wizard of Oz."
It is the movie that launched a thousand cliches into our popular culture, and I would bet that most of us grew up seeing it once a year on television. The principal actors agree (in the book called "The Making of The Wizard of Oz" by Aljean Harmetz) that the film was not a smashing success at the time of its original release. But almost 60 years after it was made, having been placed constantly before our eyes, it is almost unanimously labeled one of the greatest movie classics of all time.
The plot is well known, so I won't belabor it. L. Frank Baum himself wrote of his story, "[It] aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out." The sad parts aren't too sad, and the scary parts aren't too scary. Although the flying monkeys did scare me when I was very young. No matter what your age, if you are one of the Young in Heart to whom the picture is dedicated, you cannot help but enjoy it every time you see it.
The dialogue is witty and flowery, a joy to listen to as there is not a crude word in the script. Let Hollywood know how much we miss the clean quality family films like MGM Production #1060, The Wizard of Oz.
See you next time, unless you're too busy then...
