THOUGHTS ON THE WIZARD OF OZ AT 70

By Mick LaSalle.
It's impossible to watch "The Wizard of Oz" today without feeling, within minutes, some kind of mystical connection to people you will never know. When Judy Garland sings "Over the Rainbow," there's the sense of participating, just by watching, in some beautiful shared human experience. Yet, when it was released in 1939, the film's ultimate status as a timeless piece of Americana was hardly assured. The reviews were mixed-to-friendly, but not rapturous, and the box office was disappointing.

Television is what turned "The Wizard of Oz" from an interesting old movie into something like a secular sacrament. Fifty-three years ago next week, on Nov. 3, 1956, it debuted on national television, and starting in 1959, the movie was shown annually, in prime time, mostly the Sunday before Thanksgiving. If you were a child in the 1960s - and there are a whole bunch of us - you saw "The Wizard of Oz" on a black and white TV every year. You were scared of the Wicked Witch of the West and the Flying Monkeys, and you were astonished when adults told you that, in fact, the Oz portions were shot in color.

Today, in the days of home video, a child can watch "The Wizard of Oz" around the clock on a five-foot plasma screen. Yet it was scarcity that gave that earlier experience its value: You knew this was your only chance to see the movie for an entire year (and when you're 5 years old, a year is an eternity). And you knew - and this was a big part of the excitement - that other people were watching it, too. You could feel it.

These days we only have that sense of communal viewing with national tragedies, elections and the Super Bowl. We don't have it for movies, anymore, and it's the one aspect of the pre-home-video era (the only one) that I miss.

Communal viewing is what made "The Wizard of Oz" mean what it means today, and it's why Baby Boomers react to it the way we do. It's why, when we watch it, we feel that other people are watching it and feel a bond with everyone who has ever watched it. It's not the same for today's kids.

Indeed, I doubt there will be too many 5-year-olds clamoring for their parents to buy the newly released, four DVD deluxe "Wizard of Oz" set - certainly not nearly as many as there would have been in 1965.

But I expect that there will be a lot of parents and grandparents buying this set for children - and perhaps wondering why the kids aren't having the same religious experience. For this reason, I wonder if "The Wizard of Oz" hasn't hit its critical and popular peak. In 50 years, will people feel the same?

In any case, I watched the new "The Wizard of Oz" DVD, and it looks crisper than the previous "Wizard" DVD and lusher than the "Wizard" DVD before that.

It also looks better coming out of my video projector than it did in theaters when it was re-released in 1998. So the movie is definitely looking good, better than ever. What follows are seven random impressions of "The Wizard of Oz," at 70:

1. Dose accents: Just for the record, if you're a kid living in Brooklyn in 1965, that the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man talked like old-time New York vaudevillians did not strike the ear as odd. Nor did it sound strange that the Tin Man wants a heart but can't pronounce the word ("If I only had a hot"). Today, "Wizard of Oz" is a visit to a whole other linguistic era.

2. The witch is still scary: When I was 5, she scared me because she was a witch. Today, she's scary as a vision of implacable evil that can't be reasoned with or reached. In the film, the Wizard tells four peace-loving individuals (Dorothy and the trio) that they have to bring back the witch's broom - in other words, kill the witch - and their only reservation is the danger involved. Killing the witch is recognized as an unalloyed good. This strikes me as a healthy attitude for a country two years away from fighting Hitler.

This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/29/MORR1ABE1D.DTL&type=entertainment