This week's review is the family-friendly (though rather long-winded) TV movie, The Witches of Oz, originally reviewed for DVDsnapshot.
My Take:
I was never that comforted by Oz. It
didn't seem so much a land of whimsy and magic as a place of
capricious death and a “kill-or-be-killed” ethos, where you could
be trapped forever if you didn't please the right people. In one
book, “The Marvelous Land of Oz,” after using “The Power of
Life” to animate imaginary friends, a boy learns he isn't real.
Rather, he's simply the shell carrier for the more important Ozma,
and must be erased because his usefulness is over. Needless to say, I
never again picked up on Oz book after reading this at age seven.
Perhaps it appeals to the childhood fantasy that we're secretly
royalty or aliens, somehow greater and more special than our humdrum
lives suggest, but that book would take weeks of Freudian analysis to
unpack.
While the MGM Wizard of Oz has
charmed for generations, no other crack at the books has been that
successful. The Witches of Oz, like
some adaptations, turns on the tempting idea of revisiting OZ
with a grown-up Dorothy. Usually, she's offered as a sexed up
version, a concept skewered here to nice effect. This SyFy miniseries
prefers to ask “what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like
this?”
