I grew up thinking of "The Wizard of Oz" as an old movie for kids that was periodically shown chopped up by commercials on small television screens. It was only after I reached adulthood that I came to recognize this film as one of the all-time best.
I found watching "The Wizard of Oz" on DVD to be a much richer experience than I had seeing it on network TV on those old television sets. Both sepia-toned Kansas and the vibrant Technicolor Oz looked so much better! And by watching the movie without interruptions, I could fully appreciate the brilliance of the screenplay.
As a child, I thought it was cute when Scarecrow (Ray Bolger), Tin Man (Jack Haley) and Lion (Bert Lahr) sang "If I Only Had a Brain / a Heart / the Nerve." As an adult, I realize they want intelligence, compassion and humanity, and fortitude and courage. They hope to obtain these from the Wizard (Frank Morgan), but he can only give them symbols: a diploma, a heart-shaped watch and a medal of valor. They must find the qualities they seek within themselves.
When I was a kid, I hated Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton), the unpleasant neighbor who tries to get Dorothy's dog Toto (played by a female terrier named Terry) destroyed. My sympathy for Dorothy (Judy Garland) would deepen when she gets hit in the head and knocked unconscious during a tornado. However, since I've grown up, I've come to take the movie less literally and view it more in terms of metaphor.
It seems to me the conflict that arises over Toto puts Dorothy in emotional turmoil, symbolized by the twister. The tornado transports her to a new state of mind, represented as a Technicolor realm called Oz. It's an exciting place for Dorothy to be, but she is in grave danger there. When she says she wants to get home, it's not that she particularly wants to return to the Kansas farmhouse: what she wants is to get back to a safer place in her life.
Dorothy hopes the Wizard can help her get home, but he is a charlatan who doesn't help her at all. At last the good witch Glinda (Billie Burke) tells Dorothy she doesn't need to be helped: she has within herself the power to get home. Glinda says Dorothy wasn't told about this sooner because "she had to learn it for herself." I interpret the film's story to mean that ultimately we need to look inside ourselves to fix whatever we think is wrong with our lives.
In addition to containing "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) with terrific picture and sound quality, the Three-Disc Collector's Edition comes with an impressive collection of bonus materials. I especially enjoyed the featurette where Angela Lansbury reads in voice-over a condensed version of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," the 1900 book written by L. Frank Baum upon which the movie is based. What fascinated me was not so much the words as that the screen was filled with a series of the illustrations created for the book by W. W. Denslow.
I knew almost nothing about Baum, so I was delighted that the DVD set includes a half-hour documentary on his life and work. He wrote a large number of children's books and at one point founded a film company to make movies based on his stories. The DVD set supplies two of his company's films: "The Magic Cloak of Oz" (1914, 38 min.) and "His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz" (1914, 59 min.)
The DVD set contains three additional screen adaptations of Baum's work. Two of these are short: the silent "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (1910, 13 min.) and the Technicolor cartoon "The Wizard of Oz" (1933, 8 min.). There's also a feature-length silent, "The Wizard of Oz" (1925, 1 hr. 12 min.), which showcases the talents of now-almost-forgotten slapstick comic Larry Semon as Scarecrow. History has been kinder to the actor playing Tin Woodsman: Oliver Hardy (of Laurel and Hardy fame).
While I thoroughly enjoyed the Technicolor cartoon, I didn't watch any of the four silent films all the way through. None of them seemed particularly compelling to me, but they were mildly interesting as history.
The DVD provides a 51-minute making-of documentary from 1990 that I found very corporate, but quite entertaining and informative. There's also an audio commentary track by historian John Fricke in which he plays interview segments from a dozen people who had something to do with the movie. The commentary is basically a compendium of minutiae and trivia, but it has its moments, and hard-core fans will love it.
On the next page, I've listed all the details for the "Wizard of Oz" Three-Disc Collector's Edition DVD. There's also some additional information about the DVD set elsewhere on this site.
Continued on the Next Page: DVD Details
