Wizard of Oz & Over The Garden Wall

[neotoma]

greenygal and I went to see The Wizard of Oz on Saturday, as it was playing at the local arthouse cinema. It was a lot of fun to see it on the big screen -- there's a lot of detail that only shows up well that way. I did come up with the alternate characterization that Glinda is manipulating Dorothy into knocking out rival witches -- it's the only explanation that makes sense to me for why she didn't tell Dorothy how to get home at the beginning, and why she magicked the ruby slippers onto Dorothy's feet too. I was also struck by just how many geeky references come from Oz directly.

After the movie and lunch out, we went back to my place and watched Over the Garden Wall. If you haven't seen it, it was a miniseries that the Cartoon Network ran the first week of November, and it's gorgeous. Also, cute, surreal, and deeply eerie.

It starts off with two brothers, one a teenager, one a younger boy, lost in the woods and trying to get home, and unfolds from there. It takes about 40 minutes for the plot to get rolling beyond 'surreal and cute', but then it's amazing!greenygal as a little upset that I'd only told her it was cute, but I didn't want to spoil the story. Among other things, the original music is fantastic, and they got opera singer Samuel Ramey do to the voice of the villain. Elijah Wood plays the older brother, with Christopher Lloyd, John Cleese, Tim Curry, Shirley Jones, Chris Isaak, among other voices you might recognize. It's available on Amazon and iTunes for about $10, at least in the USA.

I did have one theory about the show which I haven't seen anyone else come up with I think that the Beast was the Woodsman's daughter, transformed. It explains why she was back at the Woodsman's house after the lantern was blown out -- the Beast didn't lie that it was her soul in the lantern, the Beast just didn't explain that she had been transformed into a monster. And possibly the Beast didn't know that blowing out the lantern would free her from the curse that trapped her in that monstrous form. Of course, that's just speculation.

Comments

[alchemine]

Glinda is manipulating Dorothy into knocking out rival witches

I believe it. In the actual Oz books, Glinda is powerful but not omnipotent - she can look in her big book of records to see what's going on around Oz, but she mostly deals with it by arming a small party of people/animals with some magic and sending them off to do the work. (After the Wizard comes back to Oz in the third or fourth book, he becomes her apprentice and is always whipping out some spell or powder or other that Glinda gave him to use in emergencies.) So it's very much like her to use Dorothy to take out other witches.

[greenygal]

Yeah, folks, she lures you in saying "Oh, it's this cute little cartoon" and next thing you know there's soul-eating monsters and drowning children. Eep.

(I did quite like it, especially once the plot kicked in.)

It's amazing what some sensible choices about character conservation do to Glinda; in the book, the unnamed Witch of the North gives Dorothy the slippers because she knows they're magic and special, but explicitly doesn't know what they do. (And she doesn't do it in such a way as to set Dorothy up against the Witch of the West, who doesn't show up until later.) Glinda knows immediately, but they don't consult her until the end of the book, and it's not implied that she knew what they were up to before that. (Of course, in later books Baum gives Glinda a book wherein she reads everything that's happening in Oz every day, and she could hardly have missed Dorothy's arrival, but maybe she was busy with something else.) You can see why the movie made the changes it did, but the immediate result is Glinda using Dorothy as a pawn.