2) Oz is a surprisingly political work, but mostly for the early 1900s when it was published The Wizard represents the patriarchy or something. It’s fitfully interesting, but I don’t know that we really need to dig into why the Wizard hates the Wicked Witch of the West beyond “she’s wicked” - especially when Wicked has already skillfully flipped the script on that particular question.
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Oz has to make sense, or why would we set a story there? Emerald City, in particular, huffs and puffs to set up an ultra-complicated political conflict between the Wizard, the various Witches, the nearby kingdom of Ev, and a whole host of free agents. This approach is anathema to our modern world-building properties. He was making everything up as he went along, and he simply didn’t care if you noticed.
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The two didn’t really mesh, so Baum’s Oz is full of cheerful inconsistencies. Baum tried to give Oz a political reality and a vague sense of economics and all sorts of things. He clearly used Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland as a guideline, but Wonderland was meant to be utter nonsense.
This is Baum’s Oz in a nutshell: wildly inventive and incredibly inconsistent. Okay, his readers wondered, if that’s the case, then why wasn’t Toto a little chatterbox during the events of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its immediate sequels? Baum explained in a later novel that Toto could have talked during earlier books he just chose not to. One of my favorite stories about the Oz books is that in one book, Baum declared that all animals - even animals born in non-magical lands - can talk when they get to Oz. Frank Baum was just making this shit up as he went along Somehow, he didn’t think of including a Hot Scarecrow, though. Here are five reasons Baum’s work is so hard to update. As such, it’s instructive about why Oz is so resistant to being modernized.
And director Tarsem Singh - excuse me, NBC’s promotional materials would like me to refer to him as Visionary Director Tarsem Singh - gives the series several moments of jaw-dropping beauty.īut as a story, Emerald City is a snooze, just another attempt to make Oz dark and edgy - a bit like Once Upon a Time, if Once Upon a Time did all its shopping at Hot Topic.
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Showrunner Shaun Cassidy has made more bad TV shows than good ones, but when he strikes gold (as he did with 1995’s American Gothic and 2005’s Invasion), he’s very good indeed. But that’s it.Įmerald City, which will run for 10 episodes through early March, is bad but watchable, perhaps because the people behind it are so talented.
Also, there was that one Scrubs episode that essentially reproduced the MGM film within the halls of the series’ hospital. I’d peg that number at three: the 1985 film Return to Oz, the 1992 Geoff Ryman novel Was, and the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel Wicked (along with the musical adapted from its pages the novel’s sequels are less impressive). Yet the number of genuinely good Oz reworkings is shockingly small.