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In a gloriously gonzo final flourish, he floats off into the sky with a cheerful cry of: “I can’t come back. He admits that he ended up in the land of Oz when his hot air balloon was blown there – and even that balloon is beyond his control. Another film might have contrasted this earthbound huckster with the genuine marvels performed by the wonderful Wizard of Oz, but in this one the wizard is played by the same actor as Professor Marvel, and he turns out to be much the same character: a fast-talking fairground showman who hides behind a curtain, waggling levers, and using mechanical trickery to keep his subjects loyal and afraid. As kindly as he is, the professor is a con artist who pretends to be psychic by peeking at a photo Dorothy is carrying. Having run away from her home in Kansas to stop her pet dog Toto being put down, Dorothy meets a travelling clairvoyant named Professor Marvel (Frank Morgan) – a character who isn’t in L Frank Baum’s source novel, but was created by screenwriters Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf.

In the sepia opening scenes, we are warned that the magic we’re about to see might not be wholly magical. But it upends the conventions of good-v-evil storytelling in ways that would have had Walt Disney fuming. The pig-tailed Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) is so wholesome, the Harburg and Arlen songs are so delightful, and the Technicolor adventures are so exciting that it’s still easy to mistake The Wizard of Oz for traditional family entertainment, 80 years on from its release in August 1939. In the trio’s moaning and blubbing as they prepare to sneak into the witch’s castle, you can see a foreshadowing of Westley, Inigo and Fezzik invading Humperdinck’s castle in The Princess Bride. In the clanking of the Tin Man’s rusty limbs, you can hear echoes of Don Quixote’s home-made armour. None of them is what you’d call a handsome prince. Just look at the trio of frightened and feeble misfits that accompanies its heroine along the yellow brick road. Is When Harry met Sally the greatest romcom ever?īut for all of its similarities to the Disney film, MGM’s version was more of an anti-fairy tale than a fairy tale. It went on to be cinema’s biggest hit of 1938, a success that not only encouraged Disney to make other fairy-tale cartoons for decades to come, but also encouraged another studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to try its own fantasy musical about an orphaned girl and a wicked witch: The Wizard of Oz. In December 1937, Walt Disney Productions released its first feature-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

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