Now. I’m not going to sit here and say that The Wizard of Oz isn’t a good film
because it is. It was ahead of it’s time technically and the Technicolor still
looks magnificent after seventy years but The
Wizard of Oz isn’t a great film. The story is so weak it is almost
homeopathic and it also ranks as amongst the most annoying films I’ve ever
seen. I seem to have a habit of slating films which other people love (see The Lion King, North by Northwest, BladeRunner) but I’m not doing it to be contentious. I personally think The Wizard of Oz is overrated and when
you really watch it rather than just look at it, you start to notice all sorts
of problems and plot holes.
Everyone knows the story. It is ingrained in our psyches and
phrases such as “We’re not in Kansas
anymore”, “Ding dong, the witch is dead” and “Fly my pretties” are sentences
which are quoted in every day language. Similarly the characters are so well
known that even if I described them as the green one, the hay bail, the robot or
the furry thirties gangster, you’d know instantly who I was talking about. The Wizard of Oz is just something that
we know inside out whether we’ve never seen it or have seen it a hundred times.
But just because something is well known, it doesn’t mean it is good. After
all, we all know who Hitler was and he wasn’t very nice at all.
