by Wade Manns
Back in 1900, L. Frank Baum released his timeless children’s masterpiece, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Over 100 years, many sequels, and many adaptations later, the 1939 movie version, simply called The Wizard of Oz, is still the most popular rendition of Baum’s classic.
In September, that venerable movie celebrated its 70th anniversary with a re-release, including an all-new digital transfer which involved long hours of painstaking frame-by-frame restoration as well as a remastering of its sound mix. The result is a movie that holds up even among the big-name movies today.
I assume most people know the story of The Wizard of Oz: a little girl named Dorothy and her dog Toto are swept up together with their house into a cyclone and dropped right into the middle of the land of Oz, on top of the Wicked Witch of the East.
This naturally angers the witch’s sister, the Witch of the West, and she spends pretty much the rest of the movie trying to get back her ruby slippers (originally silver in the book, changed to take advantage of the then-novelty Technicolor method) which mysteriously transferred onto Dorothy’s feet.
Though the book features a good deal more content after the witch is killed and the Wizard leaves, the movie concentrates on Dorothy’s story near the end and doesn’t include any of the extra lands which are discussed in the book. Overall, though, the movie presents the core story in a good way, in a way which has endeared a half-dozen generations to its charm and timeless message.
Though the restoration of the film involves high-tech terms and concepts, the result on both the audio and video fronts are breathtaking. There is a super-high resolution format available, in the Blu-Ray disc version, but the DVD version holds up just fine, and is much better than the 1999 release of the movie.
Color correction seems to be in effect and works very well, and overall resolution seems to be higher (though again, it is a little hard to tell with the DVD version). Many scratches and irregularities which were present in the old release have been removed for this new version, as well as several instances of wire work being touched up (the song from the Emerald City “If I Were King of the Forest” being a prime example of when one could see a wire held from above holding up the lion’s tail, in the original version). According to the extras on the DVD, all this took nearly 250 hours of work to accomplish.
Though some parts of the story may not hold up under repeated viewing, such as the whole overarching “never wanting to leave your home because that should be where your heart is” concept, and some parts have been changed from the book, such as the aforementioned omissions of the rest of the lands in Oz as well as the fact that Oz turned out not to be real (in the book series, it is a real place), the movie really is a great one, and again, holds up even after 70 years as one of the best children’s, and general-audience movies of all time. How can I give this any less than five stars?