PEL Presents PMP#186: From Oz Books to Wicked Film

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

Mark Linsenmayer

Casey, Paskin, Philosophy, Linsenmayer, Society & Culture, Alwan

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2024

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We're coming up on the 125th anniversary of L. Frank Baum's children's book, The Wizard of Oz, and the film version of (the first half of) the musical Wicked has been released. Mark, Lawrence, Sarahlyn and Al talk about the landmark 1939 film musical, the 1978 film The Wiz, Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel Wicked, the stage musical, the other Oz books by Baum, Maguire, et al, and other films like 1985's Return to Oz and 2013's Oz the Great and Powerful.

How does this film stack up to other recent Broadway-to-film adaptations? Will there ever be a faithful film or TV adaptation of the books?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Pretty Much Pop, a culture podcast.
0:11.1	Cast not for our fame, but for the quality of our voices.
0:13.8	Today we're discussing the 124-year-old phenomena that is The Wizard of Oz in light of the recent release of the film version of the first half of the stage musical Wicked.
0:24.5	I'm Mark Linson-Meyer, and thanks to the Oz books, I thought that East was on the left side of maps for too many years.
0:30.5	I'm Al Baker, and I'm just here to festivate my manifestory as gratitutions.
0:35.7	I'm Sarah Lynn Bruck, and with the title like Wicked, I was disappointed the movie wasn't about
0:40.1	Boston.
0:41.7	My name is Lawrence Ware, and I am easing on down the road.
0:46.2	Did you guys get that reference?
0:47.4	Of course.
0:48.3	Not even a little bit.
0:50.3	I'll say that WIS is one of the things that I did not revisit.
0:53.2	I don't remember having a super positive
0:55.2	experience about it. You don't need to. But I see that it was back on Broadway or is coming back on Broadway. Anyway, it's still alive. It is definitely a lot. The movie itself is not very good. The musical numbers are delightful. The musical numbers are great. I watched some clips of The Wiz, and it was kind of painful.
1:13.5	One thing you do have to hand The Wiz do is I was casting about for things that I could praise Wicked for as a show and as a concept.
1:21.9	And almost anything that I thought, oh, maybe we can say that Wicked was the first to do this or that.
1:26.8	The WIS, almost by definition, got there first.
1:28.9	So maybe it was a little bit undercooked, but you've got to hand it to it.
1:33.2	People's histories with this franchise.
1:35.2	I'll start because this was the first thing in terms of longer books, you know, that were still children's books, that my parents would read to me.
1:43.4	We owned the whole set of Frank Oz, Frank Oz, L Frank Bums, Oz books, the 14 or whatever,
1:51.5	I should have that number at the top of my head.
	...

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