The Wizard of Oz is now showing at Las Vegas’ Sphere. Or a version of it is, at any rate, and not one that meets with the approval of all the picture’s countless fans. “The beloved 1939 film starring Judy Garland, widely considered one of the greatest Hollywood classics, has been stretched and morphed and adapted to fit the enormous dome-shaped venue,” writes the New York Times’ Alissa Wilkinson. This entailed an extension “upward and outward with the help of A.I. as well as visual effects artists. The cool tornado created by Arnold Gillespie for the original has been traded for something digital, and eventually you can’t see it at all, because you’re inside the funnel. New performances and vistas have also been generated,” which is “at best questionable” ethically, to say nothing of the aesthetics.
Yet even given the considerable modifications to — and excisions from — the original film, “most audiences will gladly overlook all of this, wowed by the sheer scale of the spectacle.” The Wizard of Oz has, as has often been said, the kind of “magic” that endures through even great deficiencies in presentation.
That quality first became apparent in 1956, seventeen years after the movie’s release in cinemas, when it first aired on television. Though the dramatic transition from black-and-white to color would have been lost on most home viewers at the time, “45 million people tuned in, far more than those who had seen it in theaters,” says the narrator of the It Was A Sh*t Show video above. Another broadcast, in 1959, did even better, and thereafter The Wizard of Oz became an “annual must-see event” on TV, which eventually made it “the most-watched film in history.”
That status justifies the movie’s infamously troubled production, which is the video’s central subject. From its numerous rewrites all the way through to its feeble box office performance, The Wizard of Oz encountered severe difficulties every step of the way, which gave rise to rumors that continue to haunt it: that an actor died from poison makeup, for example, or that one of the munchkins committed suicide in view of the camera. While the production caused no fatalities — at least not directly — it did come close more than once, to say nothing of the psychological toll the combination of high ambition and persistent dysfunction must have taken on many, if not most, of its participants. Even hearing enumerated only its clearly documented problems is enough to make one wonder how the picture was ever completed in the first place. Yet now, 86 years later, its Sphere reinterpretation is raking in $2 million in ticket sales per day: an act of wizardry if ever there was one.
Related content:
Watch the Earliest Surviving Filmed Version of The Wizard of Oz (1910)
The Wizard of Oz Broken Apart and Put Back Together in Alphabetical Order
The Complete Wizard of Oz Series, Available as Free eBooks and Free Audio Books
Hear Waiting for Godot, the Acclaimed 1956 Production Starring The Wizard of Oz’s Bert Lahr
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
