Bonus! The weird Wizard of Oz adaptations

I was promised Zardoz. I did not see Zardoz

I saw a student staged performance of The Wizard Of AIDS at my college in Portland, probably in 1992, and assumed they had written it themselves. Good to know quite a lot more people got to see it for quite a lot longer. The script and songs were entertaining in their own right, something activist performers don't always figure out. It was the Queer Nation era when it was important, literally life or death, just to get the words out in public.

Hey, I think you might not have heard of Strictly Come Dancing (or, as it's almost always called, Strictly), but it's a pretty big deal around here, and in recent years it's become increasingly more okay with queer stuff. Here are some clips to show you the kind of thing I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmFnmNacI5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgRQJxiA2L8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymRrtTlHjzI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qrat9qskTYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDF-D_7hXLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDK4pjXXKDk And some more for a little bit of context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq5sfQSF3zA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaPqIMRNvjU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQt6ieNPAgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PG6Nd17WjWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV2h45lGib4&t=112s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBiJMXuolyE

You talked about the wizard of Oz and the never ending story, and the funny thing is both movies only tell about half of both novels. There's like half of the wizard of Oz that's left out of the movie and the never ending story ends about half way through the novel , so if you read either one of these books you will be getting a totally different versions of the story than you get from the movie.

I wish you had included the silent pre-1939 Oz adaptions. They were inserting.

I adore Return to Oz. I know it has a reputation as nightmare fuel, but I found the 1939 film much more upsetting when I was a child—and I think that’s because Judy Garland’s Dorothy gets upset frequently. Whereas Fairuza Balk’s Dorothy doesn’t. Truly—she’s calm almost the entire film, including at the asylum. When they are falling out of the air, she tells Jack, well, it can’t be helped! I took my cue from the main character, and in Return to Oz, she was calm and empathetic no matter what happened! Also, what a phenomenal score by David Shire. Intrada did a rerelease a few years ago and it is well worth a listen if you get a chance.

It has indeed been a wonderfully weird world of Oz since the original. One adaptation that you didn't mention Matt, was the Muppet's Wizard of Oz released in 2005. I loved the Muppets as a kid, and I remember watching this one with my younger brother and sister when it first came out. At that time, a lot of Muppet movies were basically just a collection of glorified celebrity cameos, - which notably set them apart from my beloved 1992's Muppet's Christmas Carol, which has Michael Caine apparently forgetting that he's acting against felt and deciding to give a Scrooge performance that rivals Alistair Sim's. It the reason why that movies has been part of my yearly Christmas tradition since I was 7, and should absolutely be part of everyone else's as well (in my humble opinion). Anyways, in the Muppet's Oz, we have Kermit as the Scarecrow, Miss Piggy as the Wicked Witch, Gonzo as the Tin Man, Fozzie Bear as the Cowardly Lion, Queen Latifah as Auntie Em, Ashanti as Dorothy, and we're all heading to Muppet Oz singing a few decent, but nowhere near memorable songs along the way... and it's all inoffensive fluff that you would expect from made-for-TV Disney in the early-to-mid aughts. ... Then, near the end of the film, and I promise you, out of absolutely goddamn nowhere, we get one of the most entirely jarring 2 minutes of film ever slipped into any movie (let alone a made for T.V Disney movie) by a producer who I can only imagine was far too deep into his upteenth rail of cocaine to know what the hell he was doing. What we had - for these glorious 2 minutes - was Quentin Fucking Tarantino, high off of Kill Bill fame at the time, riffing increasingly violent scenerios to an increasingly terrified Kermit the Frog about how they can straight up massacre the Wicked Witch. When that scene hit, I spent the rest of the movie (and much of the rest of the week) in an absolute daze, wondering just what crazy shit the pot that I had smoked with my friends earlier in the day had been laced with. It was in fact the last time that I ever smoked pot, ... so thank you Muppet Wizard of Oz for scaring me straight (well... at least straight in that respect...) Lest of all you think that I'm making this up (and trust me... I wish by all that is holy that I was....), this truly epic scene can be enjoyed in all it's splendor on Youtube. I think you will all agree, that based entirely on these 120 seconds alone, that Muppet Wizard of Oz movie is the most fucked-up version of the Wizard of Oz ever put to screen. Here's the scene. Watch if you dare, but I promise, you will never be the same after you've seen it..... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez4HFqAPcq4

Are you familiar with the social media campaign Coke did in Brazil to fight homophobia and gay slurs? It's called 'This Coke is Fanta" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIQEdkJpI2A

One scene in "Return to OZ" that never fails to make me unreasonably cackle is where TikTok's thought runs down while directing Jack and Billina on building the Gump monstrosity: "Next we must Gump the head in the front and tie Jack's feet together!... ... That's right, Jack! Left, right, wrong!... ...Little girls, pumpkin heads, make chickens by the coop!" I'm stifling a cackle now just writing this, which is rough on me because I'm at SPL in Northgate at the moment and I don't want to upset anyone! Haha.

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I have not watched the video yet and I am about to and very excited, but it always makes me a little sad that Return to Oz's reputation now is simply the creepy weird Oz film. I think it is so beautiful and certainly means more to me that the Judy Garland movie. I am happy at least that it still gets talked about though.