#oz films

[showamagicalgirls]

A few more shots from The Magic Cloak of Oz (1914)

[theartofjessicalivian]

Wicked🧹

5x7 in

Mixed Media (Copics, Colored pencils, Pen, and Black Gouache)

Limited prints are coming soon!

UPDATE (TUES 12/03): My Glinda portrait has been uploaded as well, so go check it out!

[gameraboy2]

The Muppets visiting Dagobah

[lizardsfromspace]

I've looped around from finding the belief that The Wizard of Oz was "the first color film" or "first technicolor film" understandable if wrong to finding it deeply annoying

Like. I get how it feels true - how the transition from sepia to technicolor in the film feels epochal, and how it's a springboard to people imagining how AMAZING and how AWESTRUCK audiences must've been at the time, but it just isn't the case, and no one in 1939 would've thought it was the first color film.

I mean, you've probably seen Snow White (1937) and Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). At the time color features were becoming more common, and they had been common in cartoons and shorts for years.

On a base level, if The Wizard of Oz was such a monumental moment in film history, giving people something they've never seen before, why did it only break even at the box office? By all accounts while not a flop it did decently but not great, and it only became a Cherished Classic thanks to TV airings later on. I mean, 1939 saw what is still, if adjusted for inflation, the highest grossing film ever made, and it wasn't The Wizard of Oz

Here is the actual history of color: most silent films were tinted, most commonly with different scenes being all tinted different colors, but more rarely hand-coloring. But back then people started experimenting with many different "true" color film systems, most of which failed for one reason or another, and there were a couple silent features made in two-strip technicolor, which had a more limited palette. At the start of the sound era, some black & white scenes would have color segments; this stage has been largely forgotten bc in many cases, the color segments don't survive & we only have them in black and white. Then three-strip technicolor began and became the dominant form of color until the late 1950s, with the first full-length three-strip technicolor film being 1935's classic...Becky Sharp. Which did decently, and got one Oscar nom for Best Actress, but didn't really become a classic. And then color films became more common until they became the norm in the 1960s

But it has to be a classic, right? It can't just be some random movie that ushered in technicolor. It has to be a famous movie everyone's heard of. It can't have been a gradual process touched by many individual artists, it has to be something one Great Man ushered in overnight, and the crowds were amazed, bc they had just been waiting for someone to Do Color Film so they could ditch black & white forever. It couldn't have been the case that they rejected many previous attempts at color film bc they sucked. Nothing can ever be the result of many people making many choices in many works of art, it has to be the work of one Great Work of Art that Changed Everything Instantly, and all the little people and failed experiments and less-enduring ones just have to be erased to make way

But it isn't. The transition from sepia to color in The Wizard of Oz did dazzle audiences, and still does, but that's because it's a incredibly well-done visual effect and a creative choice within the story to show the change from Kansas to Oz. We don't have to say it was important bc it was the first to do something technologically; it can be important for just being a really good movie

[alpacinosgf]

[thatsbelievable]

[those-green-eyes]

We are the dark. | LONGLEGS (2024)

[classicfilmblr]

The Wizard of Oz dir. Victor Fleming | 1939

[the-clock-of-the-time-dragon]

It will forever be hilarious to me that Disney wanted so fucking bad to make a Wicked movie — but couldn't get the rights from Universal — that they literally spent billions upon billions of dollars making SEVEN different films (and a whole season of television; not even including their sequels and spinoffs) more than one of which they even got Idina and Kristen to be in based on the stripped-down premise of "what if the Stock Female Antagonist™ was secretly the Misunderstood Angsty Girlboss Heroine™ all along?" (because Disney execs don't actually care about Wicked, they just saw Green, said "hey! if we can't get the real thing, why not use Our Own (and/or Public Domain) characters?" and simply followed the Marketing Department Road all the way to the bank).

Less funny is the fact they were so successful at it — regardless of the merits (or lack thereof) of any of those projects — that it ended up getting the production of the actual Wicked movie delayed by more than a decade (because it would ironically have looked like a copycat and probably faded into the background if it had come out back when Disney was pumping out knockoffs every fucking year).

[zebracakesarecopingmechanisms]

ok so we know about the need to infodump, but what about the opposite? The need to absorb more information about your special interest like a sponge, but you literally can’t find any new material because you’ve already consumed every fact about it

[showamagicalgirls]

I watched a cut of L. Frank Baum's The Magic Cloak of Oz from 1914, which was a lot of fun. It's one of the early silent Oz movies, although of course the version I watch was set to a score.

[callmefirefly]

With Wicked being released in a week, I can practically smell all the Fiyero fan fics that are about to get written because of it. We’re all about to get fed and I am so here for it

[driveintheaterofthemind]

On The Set - Kermit And Miss Piggy Visit Yoda

The Empire Strikes Back (1979)

[weirdlandtv]

Concept art by Harley Jessup for RETURN TO OZ (1985). Dare I use the word—“underrated”?

It wasn’t until today that I realized that two of my all-time favorite movies are Oz adaptations: THE WIZ (1978), and this unusually dark film, a sequel of sorts to THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939).

[dcbicki]

Remember, my sentimental friend, that a heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others.

The Wizard of Oz (1939) dir. Victor Fleming

[sonjackcarl]