Wizards of oz red shoes2/26/2024 The journey from Kansas to Oz is a rite of passage from a world in which Dorothy’s parent substitutes, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, are powerless to help her save her dog, Toto, from the marauding Miss Gulch into a world where the people are her own size and she is never, ever treated as a child but as a heroine. I have begun with these personal reminiscences because “The Wizard of Oz” is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults a film that shows us how the weakness of grownups forces children to take control of their own destinies, and so, ironically, grow up themselves. It took me half a lifetime to work out that the Great Oz’s apologia pro vita sua fitted my father equally well-that he, too, was a good man but a very bad Wizard. And when the curtain fell away and his growing offspring discovered, like Dorothy, the truth about adult humbug, it was easy for me to think, as she did, that my Wizard must be a very bad man indeed. My father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, was a magical parent of young children, but he was prone to explosions, thunderous rages, bolts of emotional lightning, puffs of dragon smoke, and other menaces of the type also practiced by Oz, the Great and Powerful, the first Wizard De-luxe. The Wizard, however, was right there in Bombay. It may be hard to believe, but England seemed as wonderful a prospect as Oz. More than that: I remember that when the possibility of my going to school in England was mentioned it felt as exciting as any voyage beyond the rainbow. I remember that “The Wizard of Oz”-the film, not the book, which I didn’t read as a child-was my very first literary influence. My bad memory-what my mother would call a “forgettery”-is probably just as well. I have forgotten almost everything about his adventures, except for an encounter with a talking pianola, whose personality is an improbable hybrid of Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, and the “playback singers” of Hindi movies, many of which made “The Wizard of Oz” look like kitchen-sink realism. The rainbow is broad, as wide as the sidewalk, and is constructed like a grand staircase. It was about a ten-year-old Bombay boy who one day happens upon a rainbow’s beginning, a place as elusive as any pot-of-gold end zone, and as rich in promises. Maybe he didn’t really find the story, in which case he had succumbed to the lure of fantasy, and this was the last of the many fairy tales he told me or else he did find it, and hugged it to himself as a talisman and a reminder of simpler times, thinking of it as his treasure, not mine-his pot of nostalgic parental gold. Shortly before my father’s death, in 1987, he claimed to have found a copy moldering in an old file, but, despite my pleadings, he never produced it, and nobody else ever laid eyes on the thing. See how well you know what went on behind the curtain.I wrote my first story in Bombay at the age of ten its title was “Over the Rainbow.” It amounted to a dozen or so pages, dutifully typed up by my father’s secretary on flimsy paper, and eventually it was lost somewhere on my family’s mazy journeyings between India, England, and Pakistan. Plus, without The Wizard of Oz, we wouldn't have the fantastic soundtrack from Wicked! In honor of the film's 80th anniversary this year, we've found some of the most magical (and weird!) details about The Wizard of Oz. With its lovable characters, memorable songs, and sweet message, Frank L. Despite its slow start, the movie gained a second life after being shown on television, and has since continued to delight audiences for generations. You may or may not know this, but The Wizard of Oz actually wasn't the smash hit that you might think it was when it debuted (more on that later). MGM's studio film about a young farm girl from Kansas who gets swept up in a tornado and taken to a magical land has become a timeless classic since it first wowed audiences with its wholesome story (and innovative color film technology) in 1939. Dorothy ( Judy Garland) was right about one thing: there really is no place like home.
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