THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) - 11/19/2024
Sometimes it’s good that we don’t remake things
This morning, I just saw the trailer for the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon, a film, mind you, that is only 15 years old. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked at this point since Disney has taken the lead and set the standard for many other studios to remake their beloved classics and capitalize (shareholder value!). When the Lion King remake becomes the highest grossing-film of that year while offering nothing new, just a chance to repurpose the original and get an older generation back in seats - I guess this is the world we live in.
The nostalgia play is a weird one because there are times where it absolutely hits financially, and then there are times where it fails majestically. When you go to reboot or remake something, just doing a shot-for-shot remake because you want to make the same movie is inherently dumb. It’s even dumber when it’s for animated, fantasy films that benefit from being animated. Don’t put CGI dragons next to humans and then tell me this is better when we had an entirely imagined and fleshed out world with its own artistic choices that worked because everything looked the same. Especially when all we do now is put actors against green/LED screens and don’t even shoot outside in the real world.
With Wicked’s release around the corner, I figured it would be nice to go back and watch the captivating and magical The Wizard of Oz, the film that spurned so many failed sequels and prequels. It’s wild to look at the trailer and while there was an incredible amount of practically built sets, there is so much CGI present that it automatically feels fake. In 1939, they absolutely did not have any type of technology that could match that - nor could they possibly fathom it at all - but there is something absolutely charming about all the fantastical scenic paintings in the background that make everything feel, well, somehow more real than these CGI counterparts.
What’s more is that successful films like this do get remade to fit growing technology and, yes, mainly to grift money off of nostalgia play as well as morbid curiosity from movie goers. As I ranted about earlier, sometimes absolute classics are redone for all of the wrong reasons: Van Sant’s Psycho or The Cohens The Ladykillers. Films like these remind us why some things need to be left untouched, so it’s shocking when there are absolutely treasured classics that are. The fact that we have all agreed to not redo The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca or Vertigo or The Red Shoes is beyond belief, but is for good reason. Sometimes there is some hope in humanity over greed when we have small cultural wins like this, where everyone just decides that something is too perfect (even if it has its flaws) to redo.