The Wiz
| Although I understand the film “The Wiz” was made to be a modernized adaptation of the 1939 MGM film “The Wizard of Oz” and L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I still fell that certain modifications made in “The Wiz” were distracting to the overall plot. For example, in the original book, the characters are chased by two Kahildas across a canyon, but in “The Wiz,” Dorothy and her companions are attacked in the subway by two paper machete puppets that grow extremely tall. These puppets follow the protagonists until some trashcan with teeth and possessed pillars begin to move and join in the chase. While watching this happen I was dumbfounded as to why the screenwriters would fell it necessary to include this series of events in the story. Instead of focusing on Dorothy escaping, I was thinking about how strange it was to watch such inanimate objects come to life and aggress the four characters. Another example of why I thought “The Wiz” was awkwardly uncharacteristic of the original story of Oz is the fact that in Baum’s books Dorothy is an innocent child. Although she acts with maturity through most of the tale, at times we can still see evidence of her being young, especially through her repetitive statements about wanting to “go home” and see “Aunty Em.” The whole central message of both the 1939 film and the book is the idea that one is always accepted and loved at home, and that you don’t need to search the world to find your place because it is right under your feet with the ones you love. In “The Wiz,” the same message is attempted to be portrayed, but this time with Dorothy as a schoolteacher in her early twenties. When she first arrives in Oz she even cries and says she wants to “go home to Aunty Em” – a sentence that is very awkward to hear coming from an adult, much less a schoolteacher. After seeing this I almost thought the Dorothy in the 1939 movie and the Dorothy in the book were more mature than the older Diana Ross’s Dorothy in “The Wiz.” I felt this was inconsistent to the story and I even lost respect for the character throughout the rest of the movie because she seemed so childish. Therefore, between the bizarre adaptations of the troubles the characters encounter on the journey to Oz and the immaturity of the older Dorothy, I found the movie “The Wiz” to be a more distracting and strange interpretation than to be a successful modernized version of the Oz story. |
posted by Layne @ 2:16 AM
1 Comments:
I understand about the age thing, but I believe that the message they were trying to convey was for Dorothy to go out on her own to find out how much she loves home. In the beginning of The Wiz, her Aunt keeps telling her to go find a place of her own, to go out and see the world, but in the other adaptations of the wizard of Oz, they want Dorothy to stay at home. But i still agree that they should not have made Dorothy 24 years old because that just made the character of Dorothy seem weak.
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