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Finally: A Gritty “Wizard of Oz” Reboot
Reboots are all the rage in Hollywood. In the past decade they’ve delivered a Gritty Batman, Gritty Snow White, Gritty Superman, and even a Gritty Hansel and Gretel. Do we really need a Gritty Toto?
What do you think? Is NBC’s “Emerald City” worth watching or should Tinseltown maybe come up with a new idea or two?
Published in Entertainment
Wait. What does need have to do with whether or not this movie gets made?
Dude – it’s got magic in it!
Ugh
I h ate Hollywood. They want everything to be horrid.
Wasn’t Tin Man a gritty Wizard of Oz?
Hollywierd. Definitely.
And when it bombs they will conclude no one is interested in family entertainment.
Seawriter
Where the hell is the Lollipop Guild?
“Oh, reason not the need!”
By the way, this is gritty Toto:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwJWPz1K-UY
I hate Hollywood. They want everything to be the same. The trailer for the remake of the Wizard of Oz looks too much like any number of movies made in the past 10 or 12 years. I’ll guess this movie catches nothing of the mood or message of the book. Stupid.
This could be very meta if the new Dorothy was constantly making references to Judy Garland and remembering watching the movie on TV every year. Otherwise, not so much.
I think the guys in the snowy field ate them.
Toto knew the mean streets of the yellow brick road… He knew a junkie there who slept between the metal trash cans in the alley… they called him “The Tin Man.”
Then there was the coke dealer… the one they called “Straw” and his cowardly little stoolie.
Yeah, he walked these streets, walked among the little perverts and the fairies. He hated every second of every minute of every long hour of the day. And he knew who put him there. She laughed when she kicked him out. Man, Toto’s mother was a real bitch…
Paging David Deeble?
I’m all for a moratorium on remakes and a complete prohibition on any sort of movie or TV show that has to do anything with the legal system. We’ve had enough cop shows to last a lifetime.
So the Munchkins are now GoT extras?
I do hope they at least retain the name Munchkins for their tribe, then this film might have at least one entertaining moment in it.
Up next: Gritty “Wind in the Willows.”
I suppose once they’ve remade everything grittier, the only thing left will be to make wholesome, gentle versions of things that were gritty to start with. The child friendly “Dirty Dozen.” “My Little Pony and the Bridge on the River Kwai.” “The Silence of Lamb Chop.”
Rad.
No.
I thought HBO already did that almost twenty years ago…
(I had no idea Oz was a prison drama, and being a huge L. Frank Baum fan, actually tried watching the first episode when I saw it was going to be on. Lasted about three minutes.)
Back on topic, I guess someone at NBC really, really liked the book of Wicked and didn’t like how Broadway ignored all the grittiness. Maybe?
Another, John Carter of Mars themed ripoff. Proves Hollywood is a drag on the culture
Complete loss of the original idea. It is theft of a piece of the good American culture and puts it into the gutter of depravity and is being used to rub our noses in the depression that is the post modernist nihilist. These people want to use art for a retrograde misanthropy.
I’m still waiting for Gritty Care Bears.
“The Wizard of Oz” is just one of many books in the Oz collection. Instead of endlessly remaking that one story, how about making a movie from one of the other books?
I’m guessing back in Kansas, Dorothy was a hooker who’s done stints in rehab for meth and crack.
That is immediately what I thought.
Talk to @rl. I think you could get a movie deal with that pitch.
There are 8,000,000 stories in the Naked Emerald City …
Network television doesn’t count as gritty. It’s not gritty until the graphic violence and gratuitous nudity begin.
The Nitty Gritty Munchkin Band supplies the soundtrack.
I thought it was The Munchkin Tucker Band playing Can’t You See:
Can’t you see?
Whoa, can’t you see?
What that wicked witch, lord,
she been doin’ to me.
Speaking of “Tinseltown,” that’s the title of the gritty remake of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town.”
I’m not necessarily opposed to a “gritty” or darker reimagining of a classic story like Oz, though, as others have point out, it’s already been done multiple times now- see Wicked or Tin Man.
But did they have to make every single beat and line of this trailer (and possibly the actual show) as eye-rollingly cliche as possible? And when you’re limited by the constraints of a TV effects budget, and your cast has some charisma-deficiencies (the wizard’s line deliveries felt very flat to me), trying to make the tone as persistently somber and epic as possible only makes the whole thing sillier, and not in a good way.
When I saw Dorothy hop into the cop car I thought the same thing- “Really, Dorothy Gale has to be an angsty cop now too!?”