There will be no Munchkins skipping among the daisies, and the Yellow Brick Road will be updated with the latest computer technology in the Warner Brothers remake of one of the most popular films of all time.
The film studio has joined forces with a comic-book artist and a writer better known for his work in the thriller genre to produce a revisionist version of The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 classic that turned Judy Garland into a teenage superstar.
To the inevitable horror of the movie’s thousands of ardent fans, the producers have vowed to take the story and inject it with a ”2007 wow factor”.
The new version was the brainchild of Todd McFarlane, a media entrepreneur who cut his teeth on the Spider-Man comics and rose to fame with his own anti-hero creation, Spawn.
He told Variety magazine that he wants to give the film a dark edginess, with Dorothy ”much closer to the Ripley from Alien than a helpless singing girl”. He has already produced a line of toys featuring a sexed-up Dorothy, and her dog Toto morphed into a vicious warthog.
The writer assigned to the project, Josh Olson, was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay of A History of Violence. He takes a notably different approach to McFarlane and is calling the project a sequel not a remake.
”Dorothy as some bondage queen isn’t something I want to do,” he demurred.
The producers face some more daunting hurdles, not least the question of whom to cast as Dorothy. ”That’s a very risky business, which is why so few people have ever sung Over the Rainbow for fear of comparison with Garland,” said Stephen Prince, professor of film studies at Virginia Tech university.
This is not the first attempt to recapture some of the glory of the original. In 1978, Sidney Lumet directed Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as Scarecrow (”horrifying, nightmare-inducing” wrote one film critic) in The Wiz. There was the forgettable 1985 Return to Oz. Even the Muppets had a go two years ago with Kermit as the scarecrow.
Other attempts have fallen by the wayside, which is probably just as well. Fox TV tried and failed for several years to produce a hip-hop remake with the scarecrow played by Justin Timberlake.
But the reaction of many die-hard Oz fans over the years has been: Why do they bother?
”With the state of the industry at present, one wonders if the studios are doing anything but remaking old classic movies,” Prince said. ”It is a little astounding that they are thinking of redoing a movie that endures because it brought together people absolutely right for the role.”
On the other hand, there are those who take the view that the L Frank Baum Oz series of novels are in themselves classics of American literature that are simply too important to be left to just one film that is almost 70 years old. There are 15 of the books, most of them free of copyright restrictions — an attraction in itself to profit-hungry studios.
Second best
Jungle Book II (2003): Remake of Disney’s 1968 masterpiece
The Italian Job (2003): Mark Wahlberg did well in Michael Caine’s role in the circumstances
A Perfect Murder (1998): Remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder
The Thomas Crown Affair (1998): A rare example: the Guardian said it was ”better than the original”
— Guardian Unlimited Â