Okay, his readers wondered, if that’s the case, then why wasn’t Toto a little chatterbox during the events of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its immediate sequels? Baum explained in a later novel that Toto could have talked during earlier books he just chose not to. One of my favorite stories about the Oz books is that in one book, Baum declared that all animals - even animals born in non-magical lands - can talk when they get to Oz. Frank Baum was just making this shit up as he went along Somehow, he didn’t think of including a Hot Scarecrow, though. Here are five reasons Baum’s work is so hard to update. As such, it’s instructive about why Oz is so resistant to being modernized. And director Tarsem Singh - excuse me, NBC’s promotional materials would like me to refer to him as Visionary Director Tarsem Singh - gives the series several moments of jaw-dropping beauty.īut as a story, Emerald City is a snooze, just another attempt to make Oz dark and edgy - a bit like Once Upon a Time, if Once Upon a Time did all its shopping at Hot Topic. Showrunner Shaun Cassidy has made more bad TV shows than good ones, but when he strikes gold (as he did with 1995’s American Gothic and 2005’s Invasion), he’s very good indeed. But that’s it.Įmerald City, which will run for 10 episodes through early March, is bad but watchable, perhaps because the people behind it are so talented. Also, there was that one Scrubs episode that essentially reproduced the MGM film within the halls of the series’ hospital. I’d peg that number at three: the 1985 film Return to Oz, the 1992 Geoff Ryman novel Was, and the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel Wicked (along with the musical adapted from its pages the novel’s sequels are less impressive).

Yet the number of genuinely good Oz reworkings is shockingly small.

Oz of ozma