Best Live-action classic Disney movie

[Ante Bellum]

*raises hand*
I've seen it a few times. I just decided to lurk in the thread a while but once this was brought up I figured I'd say something.

[ShiroiHikari]

Oh hey yeah, that's actually a pretty good movie. I just tend to forget that it was made by Disney.

[Ante Bellum]

It's supposed to be a lot closer to the original books, right?

[Nate]

"Closer" may be a stretch. Not that the original Wizard of Oz was a stellar example of fidelity to the book, but Return to Oz wasn't either as it really combined two separate books into one movie (which obviously means they skipped a lot). The first movie just stuck to one book but shortened it.

[Ante Bellum]

Ah...
I think what I heard is that the books were originally a lot darker than the first movie was.

[ShiroiHikari]

I've read the first book and I'd consider that to be mostly true. Also the first book is a lot more...incoherent than the movie as far as narrative is concerned.

[rocklobster]

Actually, it's the reverse. L. Frank Baum tried to do light-hearted stories, but it didn't always work.

[Etoh*the*Greato]

I've read the first book and I'd consider that to be mostly true. Also the first book is a lot more...incoherent than the movie as far as narrative is concerned.

Considering it's a fairy tale that is supposed to be a tale adovcating the gold standard in currency, it'll probably be that way.

[Nate]

Considering it's a fairy tale that is supposed to be a tale adovcating the gold standard in currency, it'll probably be that way.

Bzzzt, the book was written in 1900. The "gold standard" interpretation wasn't suggested until 1964. If people want to use it as such that's fine, since literary interpretation is subjective, but that likely wasn't the reason Baum wrote the book. In fact, the guy who came up with the theory said that it had no basis in fact, so...yeah.

While Frank Baum probably was doing a bit of political satire, that was hardly the purpose or goal of his novel.

[TWWK]

While Frank Baum probably was doing a bit of political satire, that was hardly the purpose or goal of his novel.

I don't know a whole lot about the background, so I'm not quite sure why the book was written, but the political allusions are very rich. They can't be avoided, right down to Dorothy's (i silver) slippers (free silver was a major platform William Jennings Bryan ran on during his presidential campaigns at the turn of the century).

I'm not sure when these later interpretations occured, but you couldn't help but notice them if you were living in 1900 America - the silver/gold question was one of the hot issues of the time.

[Nate]

"Baum acknowledged the influence of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, which he was deliberately revising in his 'American fairy tales' to include the wonder without the horrors."

That's from one of the annotated editions of the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz book. Again, while Baum definitely put in some political satire and allusions, his goal was just to make a fairy tale.

Also again, the "gold standard" interpretation was not invented until 64 years after the book was made. If such an interpretation was intended by Baum, surely the people alive during the 1900s would have recognized it? Unless you're saying the people alive when Baum was were just idiots, it was clearly not one of Baum's reasons for writing the book.

Again, that doesn't make it an invalid interpretation, because as I said before literary interpretation is subjective, but it does mean that Baum wasn't purposely trying to push that notion forward.

[ShiroiHikari]

I like how this thread started out about Disney and then became a Wizard of Oz thread. XD