Yellow Brick Off-Roads

Nearly three quarters of a century after Judy Garland and her motley companions danced off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz, there are two new roads back to the Emerald City. "Dorothy of Oz" (below) to be released later this year, is a computer-animated film based on the 1989 book of the same name by Roger S. Baum, great-grandson of Oz creator L. Frank Baum. From the studio responsible for "Hoodwinked!" and directed by Dan St. Pierre ("Everyone’s Hero") and Will Finn ("Home on the Range"), the movie features the voice of Lea Michele, from "Glee," as Dorothy, with Dan Aykroyd as the Scarecrow, Kelsey Grammer as the Tin Man, James Belushi as the Cowardly Lion, and Bernadette Peters as Glinda the Good Witch, as well as Martin Short, Patrick Stewart, and Oliver Platt.

More ambitious in scope is  "Oz the Great and Powerful" (below) set for an early March 2013 release. Directed by Sam Raimi, the frenetic filmmaker famous for the frenzy-fueled "Evil Dead" films, the first-round "Spider-Man" trilogy, and the full-throttle fright fest "Drag Me to Hell," the prequel to L. Frank Baum’s original story depicts the initial arrival in the Emerald City of Midwest carnival magician and future Wizard of Oz, Oscar Diggs, whose full name was recorded by Baum as Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isacc Norman Henkel Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs (abbreviated O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D.), as portrayed by Oscar nominee James Franco. (Robert Downey Jr. was director Raimi’s first choice for the role, while the studio opted for Johnny Depp.) Portraying three formidable witches are Mila Kunis, Michelle Williams, and Rachel Weisz.

There are two important things to remember about the mastermind who discovered and explored Oz in over a dozen novels and several short stories, L. Frank Baum. Firstly, according to Mark Evan Swartz, author of  the 2000 book Oz Before the Rainbow, "What Baum did was to create the first truly American fairyland using language and imagery that would be familiar to the ordinary American child." Swartz noted that "the resulting story is full of action, imagination, humor, and unusual characters."

Secondly, most of all, L. Frank Baum liked writing for children. He believed, "To please a child is a sweet and lovely thing that warms one’s heart and brings its own reward."

Lyman Frank Baum (1856-1919) published childhood journals with an inexpensive printing press from his father. He later sold fireworks, bred and raised Hamburg chickens, and peddled lubricating oils. He was a failed store owner and a failed newspaper editor. Baum had a fervid infatuation with the theater - as a performer, playwright and theater owner - a lifetime devotion that would repeatedly lead him to failure and near-bankruptcy.

In 1900, Baum and illustrator W. W. Denslow (above) published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, based on tales Baum had made up to entertain his sons. Among several other books, Baum wrote thirteen more novels based on the Land of Oz, often inspired by suggestions from his scores of young readers, most of whom were girls, up until his death at the age of 62. Baum styled himself as the "Royal Historian of Oz," as if it were a real place. Two Oz books were published posthumously while 1921’s Royal Book of Oz, though credited to him, was written entirely by Ruth Plumly Thompson, who went on to write 20 additional Oz novels until her death in 1976.

Anna Laughlin in the 1902 stage musical
"The Wizard of Oz"

Two years after the publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Baum and Denslow teamed up with composer Paul Tietjens to produce a musical stage version. "The Wizard of Oz" opened in Chicago in 1902, then ran on Broadway in 1903 and in 1904 and toured the U.S. until 1911. Denslow quarreled with Baum over shared royalties, and the author vowed to never work with the artist again. In truth, the royalties from the print and stage versions of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz allowed Denslow to purchase an island in the Bermudas where he crowned himself King Denslow I. John R. Neill illustrated the remainder of Baum’s Oz books, as well as those authored by Ruth Plumly Thompson. Neill, the self-styled Royal Illustrator of Oz for 40 years, wrote and illustrated three Oz books himself, from 1940 to 1942.

In 1908, Baum presented a multimedia program titled "The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays," a blend of live actors, hand-tinted magic lantern slides and brief motion pictures, which the author would lecture as if hosting a travelogue of Oz. It was one of Baum’s worst financial endeavors.

L. Frank Baum takes center stage with the cast of "The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays"

Frank Joslyn Baum (1883-1958), the eldest son of L. Frank Baum, who worked as a projectionist for "The Fairylogue," penned an Oz book of his own in 1935, The Laughing Dragon of Oz. His biography of his father, To Please a Child, became suspect even before it was published, as most of his family, whom he had estranged in his quest to trademark the Oz name, refused to help his research, so he resorted to making up facts. He became the first president of the International Wizard of Oz Club, which was founded one year before his death by a 13-year-old boy.

When L. Frank Baum died in 1919, 12-year-old Jack Snow offered to be the Royal Historian of Oz but was politely turned down by Baum’s publisher. Snow did become a renowned scholar on the works of Baum, as well as writing a handful of Oz novels himself. The tradition was carried on by Rachel Cosgrove, then Eloise Jarvis McGraw and her daughter, graphic artist Lauren McGraw, whose 1963 book Merry Go Round in Oz was the last of the official "Famous Forty" Oz books issued by Baum’s publisher.

In 1987, the International Wizard of Oz Club approached Roger S. Baum (born 1938), the grandson of Frank Joslyn Baum and great-grandson of L. Frank Baum, to write new Oz stories. A former banker and stockbroker, Baum published Dorothy of Oz in 1989, followed by The Rewolf of Oz in 1990 and Lion  of Oz and the Badge of Courage in 1995, which was made into the animated feature "Lion of Oz" in 2000 (below), featuring the voices of Jason Priestley, Bobcat Goldthwaite, Kathy Griffin, Tim Curry, Lynn Redgrave, and Dom DeLuise. Baum has since written several more books about Oz.

Philip Jose Farmer, an award-winning science-fiction fantasy writer best known for his World of Tiers and Riverworld series of novels, introduced sex and violence to the litany of Oz fiction with his 1982 book A Barnstormer in Oz, which presented the character Hank Stover as a pilot and son of Dorothy Gale who finds himself in Oz after his plane gets lost in a green cloud over Kansas in 1823.

Novelist Gregory Maguire took an adult revisionist look at the world of L. Frank Baum’s Oz in the best seller Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995), which, in 2003, was adapted into the Tony Award-winning musical "Wicked." The author continued his "The Wicked Witch Years" series with the novels Son of a Witch (2005), A Lion Among Men (2008), and Out of Oz (2011).

The earliest surviving movie based on Baum’s book is 1910’s "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," a 15-minute silent film based on the 1902 stage musical, although the author was not involved in the production. "Wizard of Oz" (1925) had little to do with the original story, but it is noteworthy for featuring Oliver Hardy, a couple of years before teaming with Stan Laurel, as the Tin Woodman (above). Baum’s oldest son, Frank Joslyn Baum, had a hand in writing the script for that 1925 silent movie, as well as for the 1933 animated short "The Wizard of Oz," after which he sold the film rights to his father’s book to Samuel Goldwyn, who then sold the rights to MGM for $60,000.

Much, too much has been discussed and written about the much beloved 1939 screen classic "The Wizard of Oz," but it does bear repeating that while it was MGM’s most expensive production at the time, the film failed to recoup the studio’s bankroll. Released in August 1939, the screen fantasy was a box-office disappointment, compared to the same studio’s "Gone With the Wind," released four months later, which initially earned $32 million, nearly eight times its production budget.

No, instead we are going to veer off the Yellow Brick Road to explore three less traveled routes to Oz in the moviehouse.

"Return to Oz"

In the mid-1930s, Walt Disney wanted to make "The Wizard of Oz" as an animated follow-up to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," but, as mentioned, the screen rights had already been bought by Samuel Goldwyn. In 1954, when the movie rights to 11 of Baum’s Oz books became available, Disney quickly snatched them up, hoping to adapt them into episodes of his new TV series, then called "Disneyland."

Television writer Dorothy Cooper ("Father Knows Best," "My Three Sons") wrote a two-part teleplay titled "The Rainbow Road to Oz" (based largely on The Patchwork Girl of Oz), which Disney liked so much he decided to turn it into a feature film, with most of the major characters played by Mousketeers from TV’s "The Mickey Mouse Club," featuring Annette Funicello as Ozma, the rightful ruler of Oz (above). Two musical numbers from the upcoming production were inexpensively staged and previewed in September 1957 on the TV program’s "Fourth Anniversary Show," with Walt himself appearing on-camera to personally approve the project.

By early 1958, Disney had already abandoned plans for the film, perhaps because he became convinced that the Mousketeers couldn’t carry a motion picture. Also, annual telecasts of the 1939 "The Wizard of Oz," which began in 1956, caused concern over unfavorable comparisons. (The Library of Congress named "The Wizard of Oz" the most-watched movie in history.) When Disney finally decided on what his next feature film would be, he chose "Babes in Toyland," starring Annette Funicello and Tommy Sands.

Afterward, the Disney studio occasionally toyed with the idea for an Oz film, but it wasn’t until 1985, nearly twenty years after Walt’s death, that the studio got serious and, in a risky endeavor to recruit new talent as directors, gave the assignment to Walter Murch, a respected film editor and sound designer who, early in his career, worked with George Lucas on "THX 1138" and "American Graffiti." He also worked with Francis Ford Coppola on "The Rain People," "The Godfather," "The Godfather Part II," "The Conversation," and "Apocalypse Now," for which he shared an Academy Award for Best Sound. He also garnered Oscars for Best Film Editing and Best Sound for "The English Patient."

First-time director Murch, who also co-wrote the screenplay for "Return to Oz," with Gill Dennis (co-scenarist for "Walk the Line"), made two major decisions in his vision for the film (based in part on L. Frank Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz). He did not want to create a direct sequel to the 1939 classic, and he had no desire to do a musical. On the one hand, he sought what he called "a different stylistic voice," but on the other, he acknowledged the deep regard for the Judy Garland version. "You can’t deny it," he said. "It’s part and parcel of people’s mental baggage, it’s part of the imaginative furniture of the twentieth century. So what I had to do was to harmonize with things that were part of the first film. I didn’t want to play the same notes as the other film played."

"We knew going in that it was going to be risky," Murch told an interviewer, "but it had been 45 years since the original film came out, and I thought enough time had passed for a different sensibility to have a chance, to present a somewhat more realistic view about Dorothy…"

Although the new script picked up where the 1939 movie left off, the filmmakers adopted the notion of Oz as a real place, just as L. Frank Baum had depicted it in his books. (The Judy Garland version stole the it-was-only-a-dream coda from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.) As "Return to Oz" opens, Dorothy’s Uncle Henry (veteran character actor and moviehouse favorite Matt Clark) and Aunt Em (Piper Laurie, memorable as Sissy Spacek’s zealously religious mother in "Carrie") are rebuilding the house lost in the twister, while Dorothy’s nights are sleepless with anxious memories of her Oz friends. As if the flat, lifeless landscape of a drought-stricken Kansas farm wasn’t bleak enough, Dorothy finds herself transported to a sterile, ominously threatening clinic where the unctuous doctor and sinister nurse promise to purge the girl’s troubled nights with the marvel of electroshock treatments.

An opportune thunderstorm literally washes Dorothy away back to Oz, where she sadly discovers the Yellow Brick Road in disrepair, the Emerald City abandoned and in ruins and her erstwhile companions turned to stone. Oz has been taken over by Mombi, an evil witch who keeps interchangeable heads in a chamber within the royal palace, and the Nome King, a subterranean rock creature who hoards all the jewels from the Emerald City. It’s up to Dorothy - aided by new allies Billina, a talking hen, a clockwork mechanical man called Tik-Tok, Jack Pumpkinhead (who touchingly calls Dorothy "Mom"), and the Gump (the mounted head of a moose-like animal with a body made from a sofa and wings fashioned from palm fronds) - to restore peace and order in Oz.

The gifted and sometimes eccentric actor Nicol Williamson (a favorite of ours as Merlin in director John Boorman’s "Excalibur" and Little John to Sean Connery’s Robin Hood in "Robin and Marian") portrays the Nome King (as well as the doctor), while Mombi (and the nurse) is chillingly portrayed by Jean Marsh (best known as the star, and co-creator, of the 1970s BBC TV series "Upstairs, Downstairs").

Jean Marsh as Mombi

The filmmakers considered hundreds of young applicants in a search for a girl close to the age of Dorothy in Baum’s books. Executive producer Gary Kurtz (who also produced "American Graffiti," "Star Wars: A New Hope," "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back") said, "In the MGM film, (the age) didn’t much matter because it was a theatrical vehicle. The vaudevillian approach to that was fine. To make her character work here, you really need the vulnerability of a child and her fears and anxieties." (During the production of "The Wizard of Oz," Judy Garland was forced to wear an uncomfortable corset under her gingham dress to flatten her 16-year-old curves and make her look more childlike.)

The role of Dorothy Gale went to Fairuza Balk, a relatively inexperienced nine-year-old actress from Vancouver. Balk’s career since has included several dark roles in such films as "The Craft," "American History X," and "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans," but she did play Adam Sandler’s girl friend in "The Waterboy" (although her character is an ex-convict).

Fairuza Balk in
"The Craft"...

...and in "The Waterboy"

Incidentally, Disney paid a large fee to reproduce Dorothy’s famous ruby slippers, which were still the intellectual property of MGM at the time. (Coincidentally, almost 30 years later, Warner Bros., the current owners of "The Wizard of Oz," would not allow Disney to use the iconic slippers in "Oz the Great and Powerful.")

Director Murch insisted that the characters closely resemble the original illustrations by John R. Neill, which placed considerable demands on the special effects teams. New systems of remote-controlled animatronics and puppetry (also utilized around the same time by The Jim Henson Company in "The Dark Crystal" and "Labyrinth"), stop-motion photography, as well as amazing claymation by Will Vinton Studios, all created a marvelously surreal reality. (The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, losing to "Cocoon.")

Unfortunately, the Disney studio was unhappy with the somber tone of the early footage they were seeing, and when Murch fell behind schedule, he was fired. Fortunately, his friends, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, stepped in on his behalf, and he was reinstated.

The movie’s dark content disappointed a number of critics. Janet Maslin of The New York Times noted, "Children are sure to be startled by the film’s bleakness," and David Kehr of the Chicago Reader wrote, "It’s bleak, creepy and occasionally terrifying."

"Return to Oz" was the one and only film Walter Murch directed. Asked why he never directed again, he said, "It was a combination of things. The film was ambitious, and then turned out to be neither a critical nor a commercial success, which is a heavy hit for someone’s first directing job. There were a few reviewers who liked it…but most compared it unfavorably to ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ The climate of the times just wasn’t receptive to anything other than the MGM Land of Oz. Or at least not this other view, which was closer to the original books…I went back to editing and sound mixing, which I love…and directing just didn’t seem to be a way I could make a living…"

The movie has since garnered a cult following of fans. Years later, Fairuza Balk said, "It’s very difficult to make anything that could be perceived as a sequel to a classic film because people are so married to it,  they’re in love with it and they want you to be able  to reproduce more of what that same thing is, and it’s impossible…I think  that ‘Return to Oz’ is an incredibly unique, surreal, amazing film, and it has a lot of really serious fans."

"The Wiz"

The story goes that it was Ken Harper, a young African-American disc jockey at a New York City radio station, who came up with the idea to produce an all-black stage musical based on "The Wizard of Oz." "The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical" opened in Baltimore in October 1974. The 1975 Broadway production, directed by the versatile Geoffrey Holder (the Trinidad-born actor-choreographer-dancer-costume designer whom 007 fans will recall as voodoo henchman Baron Samedi in "Live and Let Die"), won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

Motown Productions latched onto the film rights to "The Wiz" in 1977 and signed 18-year-old Stephanie Mills in anticipation of having her repeat her Broadway role as Dorothy (above). However, Diana Ross asked Motown CEO Berry Gordy to cast her in the part. He felt the 33-year-old was far too old to play Dorothy, but Ross went over his head and contacted Universal Pictures, who committed to financing the film if she got the role. (Undaunted, Mills embarked on a successful career singing disco, R&B, soul, and gospel hits.) When original director John Badham ("Saturday Night Fever") learned that Diana Ross had been signed, he quit the film. "She’s not this character," Badham insisted. "She’s not the little six-year-old girl Dorothy." Badham was replaced by Sidney Lumet.

Lumet, whose 50-year career of making movies was, more or less, a love affair with New York City ("Serpico" and "Dog Day Afternoon" were among his recent films), might seem an unlikely choice to direct a "super soul" musical. However, when screenwriter Joel Schumacher (future director of "St. Elmo’s Fire," "The Lost Boys," and the Val Kilmer/George Clooney "Batman" films) threw out the play’s script by William F. Brown, Oz was transplanted from Kansas to the Big Apple. When asked why he preferred New York, Lumet said, "I don’t like company towns, and Hollywood is a company town." He maintained that Hollywood wears people down, while the diversity of New York City fed into what inspired him. New York, he insisted, "is a thrilling city."

Schumacher’s screenplay was heavily influenced by Werner Erhard’s teachings and his cultish Erhard Seminars Training (est) movement. Erhard, real name John Rosenberg, was a former encyclopedia and used car salesman who became a quack motivational speaker, preaching narcissism and existentialism to gullible followers who endured verbal abuse, sleep deprivation, and the denial of daily necessities. Both Schumacher and Diana Ross were fans of Erhard. Producer Rob Cohen recalled, "Before I knew it, the movie was becoming an est-fable full of est buzzwords about knowing who you are and sharing…I hated the script a lot. But it was hard to argue with (Ross) because she was recognizing all of this stuff that she had worked out in est seminars." Glinda the Good Witch (Lena Horne) delivers a speech at the end which one writer called a "litany of est-like platitudes," while the climactic song "Believe in Yourself" is virtually an est anthem.

At the time, "The Wiz" was the most expensive musical ever made. The production took 62 days to film, during which Lumet did 868 set-ups, making it, he said, his most difficult shoot. To depict the Yellow Brick Road, the film crew put down a total of 25 miles of linoleum down streets, bridges and subways. The plaza of the then World Trade Center was transformed into the Emerald City. "We treated it as a giant jewel case," Lumet said. "We lit the place with 36,000 lamps." (The World Trade Center was also memorably utilized onscreen in "Godspell," the Jeff Bridges-Jessica Lange version of "King Kong," and "Escape from New York.")

In his 1978 review, Roger Ebert asked, "Is the movie a match for the 1939 Judy Garland version? Well, no, it’s not (what movie could be?) but as a new approach to the same material, it’s slick and energetic and fun." Unfortunately, apart from Ebert’s praise, "The Wiz" was a critical and commercial failure, resulting in a net loss of almost ten and a half million dollars for Motown and Universal.

More importantly, the film’s dismal reception sealed the fate of any studio’s interest in African-American-slanted pictures that had begun with blaxploitation movies in the early 1970s. In the 1998 book Blacks in American Films and Television, author Donald Bogle noted, "What killed the movie was simply the fact that no longer were black hands in control. Instead the movie’s most important creators -  the director Sidney Lumet and the writer Joel Schumacher - were white artists, totally out of tune with the material (its built-in folkloric quality) and the style of the performers." (It seemed to have eluded the author that the script for the original stage musical was written by a white artist, William F. Brown.)

The painful truth is that Ms. Ross was laughably too old for the role, even though the screenplay transformed Dorothy into a 24-year-old schoolteacher (still nearly a decade younger than her actual age). No wonder director Lumet insisted on long-distance photography throughout the film. Ted Ross reprised his stage role as the Cowardly Lion, while comedian Nipsey Russell was brought on board as the Tin Man.

Michael Jackson, who had just left Motown Records before signing with Epic for his breakthrough album "Off the Wall," was cast as the Scarecrow (with a large, bulbous rubber nose), in what would amount to his sole feature film role, not counting a cameo in 2002’s "Men in Black II." ("Off the Wall" was produced by the renowned Quincy Jones, who subsequently produced Jackson’s chart-topping albums "Thriller" and "Bad." Coincidentally, Sidney Lumet corralled the talents of Jones as a music supervisor on "The Wiz." At first, Jones was reluctant to work on the film but did it as a favor to Lumet. Jones had previously scored a number of movies directed by Lumet, including "The Pawnbroker" and "The Anderson Tapes.") The Wizard of Oz was portrayed by Richard Pryor.

"Under the Rainbow"

In the book The Making of The Wizard of Oz by Aljean Harmetz, producer Mervyn LeRoy recalled working with the Munchkin performers: "We had a hell of a time with those little guys. They got into sex orgies at the hotel. We had to have police on every floor." According to co-screenwriter Noel Langley, "They raided the lot. The showgirls had to be escorted in bunches by armed guards." Years later, when her memory may have been clouded by her own addiction to pills and booze, Judy Garland said, "They were little drunks. They got smashed every night, and the police had to pick them up in butterfly nets." Supposedly, dwarf actor Billy Curtis (later known for his memorable role as Mordecai in Clint Eastwood’s "High Plains Drifter") made a number of passes at Garland, prompting her to respond, "Mother wouldn’t approve."

Several Munchkin performers, no doubt, did get drunk during their nine-week stay in the Culver City Hotel. Author Harmetz noted, "Culver City was full of bars, and the bars were full of big people who bought the little people drinks." The facts are that the rumors over the years about the little people indulging in drunken orgies have been completely disproved. At worst, they threatened to go on strike after hearing stories that they would not be paid.

In Time magazine’s review of the comedy "Under the Rainbow," the critic wrote, "In 1939 MGM spent $1.2 million to make ‘The Wizard of Oz’; in 1981 Orion Pictures has devoted $17 million to a modern farce about the hundreds of (little people) who went to Hollywood to play the Oz Munchkins, and by their lewd shenanigans cut the town down to size. ‘Rainbow’s’ plot is serviceably convoluted, involving a secret service agent (Chevy Chase), a paranoid…duke and his Sicilian assassin-in-waiting, a pair of Axis spies, 25 Japanese camera buffs, four dead dogs and 150 little people. Make that 151: Carrie Fisher plays their den mother."

Carrie Fisher, Billy Barty, Eve Arden, Chevy Chase

The cost of the movie actually neared $20 million (the producers utilized the real, disused Culver City Hotel), and despite the return of a disappointing $3 million in the domestic box office, it has recently achieved something of a cult status among several adoring fans. One reviewer, who was not amused, noted that "the film ends up pandering to a caricature that is insulting - all of the little people in the film seem to have no more of a mental age of children that have been left to run riot in a playground without adult supervision." There are insulting jokes towards women, Italians, Japanese, Germans, blacks "and sheep molesters," but oddly, no jokes about homosexuals.

Carrie Fisher (above) once admitted that this was one of the worst movies she ever starred in. Chevy Chase hated it. The cast of little people included Jerry Maren, one of the original Lollipop Guild in "The Wizard of Oz," who later regretted appearing in this film because it was in such poor taste, stating that nothing remotely like this happened during the original production.

Mako, Billy Barty

Undoubtedly one of the most recognizable little people in film and television, Billy Barty, camping it up here with an outrageous accent as a German spy, becomes fodder for the very sort of stereotypical humor he was striving to make unacceptable as an outspoken activist for the rights of those with dwarfism. The same could be said of the actor portraying a Japanese agent, Mako (an Oscar nominee for his breakthrough role as an engine room "coolie" in "The Sand Pebbles," starring Steve McQueen), who tirelessly crusaded against such stereotypical casting as a "laundry man, gardener, martial artist, villain." But to be fair, the jokes spare no one, and they are fired off in such a deliriously scattershot fashion that no one really has time to be offended.

Perhaps it was an effort to recreate the bombastic frenzy of Steven Spielberg’s noisy 1979 period comedy "1941." Director Steve Rash, who made the acclaimed, albeit fictionalized, 1978 biographical film "The Buddy Holly Story," seemed to be rewiring 1940s screwball comedy, featuring a fast-paced series of mistaken identities, confusing encounters and other mix-ups.

If there is a heart to be found in "Under the Rainbow," it is the earnest performance by diminutive Cork Hubbert as Rollo Sweet, a wide-eyed Hollywood hopeful from Depression-stricken Kansas. When he proclaims his personal motto, "No dream too big, no dreamer too small!" you have no choice but to believe him.

Postscript:

Even before "Oz the Great and Powerful," Disney’s latest attempt to turn a warmly cherished childhood favorite into a coldly distancing special effects-bloated popcorn-seller, filmmakers attempted to reinvent Oz with adult sensibilities that would have seemed alien to L. Frank Baum.

"Tin Man" (2007), a four-and-a-half hour miniseries on the SyFy Channel, was a $20 million "re-imagining" of Oz, heavy on steam-punk science fiction with nary a child in sight. Zooey Deschanel (star of the Fox TV series "New Girl") starred as a grown-up "DG" (as in Dorothy Gale) in a cast that featured Alan Cummin (Nightcrawler in "X2: X-Men United") as an ersatz Scarecrow and Richard Dreyfuss as "The Mystic Man" (aka Wizard of Oz). (Moviehouse note: "Tin Man" is not to be confused with "Tin Men," a far better movie starring Richard Dreyfuss, directed by Barry Levinson.)

("Tin Man" director Nick Willing went on to muck up two more children’s classics for the SyFy Channel, turning Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into a silly fantasy thriller involving espionage and assassins in the miniseries "Alice" and making a turgid soap opera out of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in the miniseries "Neverland.")

"Dorothy and the Witches of Oz" (2012) was yet another contemporary retooling of Baum’s Oz tales, originally broadcast in an extended version on the SyFy Channel as a miniseries titled "The Witches of Oz." Director and co-writer Leigh Scott’s résumé includes a number of mockbusters for the straight-to-video production company The Asylum, including "Transmorphers" and "Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s Curse."

For "Dorothy and the Witches of Oz," Scott was somehow able to wrangle the talents of Christopher Lloyd ("Back to the Future") as the Wizard of Oz, Mia Sara ("Legend," "Ferris Bueller’s Day Off") as Princess Langwidere, Lance Henriksen ("Aliens," "Pumpkinhead") as Uncle Henry, and Jeffrey Combs ("Re-Animator," "Bride of Re-Animator") as L. Frank Baum, along with "The Lord of the Rings" cast members Sean Astin and Billy Boyd.

Afterword:

Long unavailable for home viewing, the charming 1990 made-for-television movie "The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story," featuring a praiseworthy performance by John Ritter, with Annette O’Toole and Rue McClanahan, was included in the 2009 70th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition of "The Wizard of Oz" on DVD and Blu-Ray. The supporting cast included original "The Wizard of Oz" Lollipop Guild spokes-Munchkin Jerry Maren.