[00:00:08] Speaker A: On this week's prequel episode, we follow up on our quest for Camelot. Listener polls, learn about L. Frank Baum, and preview return to Oz.
Hello, and welcome back to this film is lit the Pockets, where we talk about movies that are based on books. It's a prequel episode. We have every segment. We're gonna jump right, right in to our patron shoutouts. I put up with you because your father and mother were our finest patrons. That's why not. A new patron this week. But we do have an upgrade. Ben Wilcox joining the $15 Academy Award winners. Ben, make sure you send your request. Has he. Do you have any notes?
[00:00:50] Speaker B: No, I don't think so.
[00:00:51] Speaker A: I don't think so. Yeah, so make sure if you are. When you upgrade, if you. Or if you ever subscribe at the $15 level, send us that request for what you want us to cover. That's the main perk you get at that $15 level, so make sure you throw that out there so we can get it on our list. It'll still be a while, so the sooner you get it to us, the sooner we can figure out where we'll work it into the schedule. So, yeah, make sure you do that. But thank you, Ben. And as always, the rest of our Academy Award winning patrons are.
Ben Wilcox, Nicole Goble, Harpo Rat, Nathan. Vic Blofeld, Mathilde Cottonwood. Steve. Ben Wilcox passed the bar. Oh, I. You did it twice. I didn't realize you were in there. Later. There we go. Congratulations on passing the bar, Ben. Maybe that's why he can afford now to subscribe at the $15 level. He's holding out till when he passed the bar. Congratulations.
Teresa Schwartz. Ian from wine country, Kelly Napier. Gretch. Just scratch. Shelby says, help me raise money for Palestine. With Arctic Fox copywriting on Instagram and that darn skag. Thank you all for your continued support.
Really appreciate it. Make sure you go check out Shelby's fundraising drive over there. We made a little donation, so you should too. Katie, it's time to see what the people had to say about Quest for Camelot.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just like your opinion.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: MAN on Patreon. We had two votes for the book and one for the movie.
Whoever voted for the movie did not come to its defense, though, so I don't. I don't know who that was.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Somebody voted for it, but they didn't want to go to bed.
[00:02:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: No.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: So, Kelly, you are absolutely. We, like. We love that Kelly Napier said, I voted for the book despite it feeling like the Author couldn't quite decide what story she wanted to tell. She started off with an arranged marriage where Lynette's husband just said thanks but no thanks and left her on their wedding night. Then a completely unnecessary flashback to Lynette being sexually assaulted. Seriously, why did we need that? Then finally we get to a plot point the author seems like she actually might stick with.
I feel like Lynette's story as Arthur's messenger and with Lucius and the Holy Grail still could have been told successfully without any of that backstory. The movie was just so, so awful.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: It also suffered from not quite knowing what story it wanted to tell. And as much as it felt like and as such felt like a half told tale the entire way through, I agree with that.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: It felt like a half told tale the entire way through. I don't know if I would go so far as to say it was so, so awful. It was forgettable.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: But I wasn't like mad watching the movie. You know what I mean? Like I was just kind of like a little bored mid as the kids say about as mid as a movie can get. But I was not like oh my God, this is terrible.
So. But that's fair. I get it. And someday we'll have to. I'm just throw this bag of worms. Is that a. What's the saying?
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Can of worms.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: Good Lord. I was thinking a bag of something this can of worms into this and then we're just going to move on. We might have to have a discussion someday about when slash. If it is either necessary or good or useful to include like sexual assault in your storytelling.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: You know, I think that depends on a lot of different.
[00:04:21] Speaker A: Oh I know it depends on a lot.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: So many different factors.
And in. Yeah, I both agree and disagree.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: That's what I was interested to get your input on. How unnecessary felt because I.
And I'm not applying this to Kelly here because obviously I didn't read the book so I don't know how it fits in. And so again I'm not. This is. This is more just sparked a broader discussion of broader Internet discourse or whatever of there seems to be a.
Among some people and I don't know how prominent this opinion is that at all Depicting or using sexual assault as like a character moment or a character development at all is like inherently bad and should never be done.
And I'd be interested to see. I don't know. Again, I don't know how many people truly think that I've seen that sentiment spoken online. But I don't again, I don't know how much of a minority. How much of a loud minority that is or whatever, versus because one thing that is absolutely true is that very often sexual assault is used as a convenient way to.
And an uncreative way to give usually women characters, quote, unquote, character development in a way that is problematic. So that's absolutely. It's absolutely a problem that is worth discussing. I'm just. I think it's an interesting conversation.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: So I don't know. In. In the specific case of the King's Damascel. Yeah, I. I both agree and disagree with Kelly here because I so.
So kind of the. The arc of the story is that.
So Lynette is sexually assaulted and then she thinks this means that she's, like, ruined. Right.
Which is very indicative of the time period, both that the book is set in and that it was written in.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: It's also just a common experience for victims of sexual assault to feel, regardless of it being obviously incorrect, it's just something that people feel. And again, largely because of society.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: But, yeah.
So kind of the point as the story evolves is that this is not something that makes her unworthy.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: Right.
[00:06:43] Speaker B: And kind of the journey that the text attempts to take us on is that what makes her then worthy of pursuing the Holy Grail at the end is that she learns to be charitable and forgiving.
[00:07:00] Speaker A: Oh.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: Which I, again disagree with.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: I thought was fairly problematic, you know. Yeah. Direction to take.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: So I agree and disagree with Kelly in the sense that for the specific story that Vera Chapman seems to want to tell, it kind of is necessary.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: Yes, it's necessary, but that she did a bad job in execution of telling that story is like, kind of where you come down on it. Yeah.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: But I also think there very easily could have been a version of this story that did not include that. That would have been just as good or maybe better.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, it is. Yeah. Okay. I just wanted to get your kind of feelings on that because I was curious. All right, next person.
[00:07:48] Speaker B: Next comment was from Nathan, who said, my library only had an, I assume, much spicier book called the King's Damsel. I also saw that one when I searched for a bodice ripper. It did look a little bit like a bodice ripper.
So I have not been able to read, but that was not a good movie.
One random thought was the main villain's song about going back to the bad old times because he liked it more than Is the Republican platform true. You're not wrong about that.
[00:08:21] Speaker A: I would have to remember the song. I don't remember. I've already forgotten. Like, I don't remember the lyrics or I couldn't understand them at the time is also possible.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I like, vaguely remember him having a song about, like, the dark times or whatever. But, yeah, I don't really remember anything about that.
All right. Our last comment on Patreon was from Ben, who said, hi. Great episode. Didn't watch slash read, but I am a fan of Arthurian mythology.
So Ben came in to rescue us with some information here.
[00:09:00] Speaker A: I saw that he had some info for us, which is nice.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: And Ben went on to say, maybe you should do an episode like the Robin Hood one, but with Excalibur. The best Arthurian movie, in my opinion.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: I've heard that it's fun, at least. The movie Excalibur, that's the one from the 80s, the live action one, I assume, is what he's talking about. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, yeah.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: Since you had some questions about Arthurian mythology, I thought I'd clarify the. Though Arthurian mythology is constantly evolving and being added onto each other that there is no original version, really, which kind of makes every interpretation valid in a way so similar to fairy tales.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: It's how you talk about fairy tales all the time that they're saying, like, the original version isn't really like.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: Yeah, there's not really an original on Excalibur. King Arthur's sword being called Excalibur seems to be first derived from the old Welsh myths, which. Where it's called Cal. Yeah, I don't even know if I want to.
[00:10:01] Speaker A: Khaled, switch.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: C, A, L, E, D, F, W, L, C, H, Caled.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I have no idea. Obviously, the old Welsh.
[00:10:10] Speaker B: The Welsh, Yeah. I have no idea how to speak Welsh.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: I couldn't even.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: Couldn't even begin to guess how that was pronounced but later Latinized to Caliburn, with Excalibur ultimately being one of its deviations.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Interesting. So because you mentioned Caliburn being the sword in the. That was.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: That was the one that I saw. Had seen. Like somebody said, like, the sword in the stone was sometimes called Caliburn and.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: That it sounds like it may be messier in the sense that maybe Caliburn is also kind of Excalibur.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Like different names for the same thing. And like in some stories it's referred to as Caliburn. In some stories it's Excalibur. In some stories, maybe it's just the sword. Yeah.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: So the Sword and the Stone myth Seems to originate from the French 12th, 13th century poem Merlin The. Though it being the same as Excalibur, first comes from the 13th century Lancelot Grail cycle.
[00:11:02] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: Interestingly, it is in the later 13th century post Vulgate cycle where they make the two swords separate and Arthur instead gets Excalibur from the lady of the Lake.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: Do you know off the top of your head why we refer to some.
What cycle means in this instance and where that comes from and why it's called cycle? Because I've heard of that in the modern context. A modern book series.
I can't remember what it's called. A pretty popular book series, like a Brandon Sanderson or something that's called, like the something cycle.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:36] Speaker A: And I have always. I've never been sure why, where that came from, what the cycle means, because clearly it goes back to the 13th century.
[00:11:45] Speaker B: Well, and I think probably even further back than that because the other place that I know that specific term from is Norse mythology.
A lot of the stories in that I believe are also referred to as like the fill in the blank cycle.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: Generally, like 8th to 10th, 12th century is like the.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: I don't know what it means precisely.
[00:12:12] Speaker A: Okay. I was just. I would be interested and we could look it up. I'm not gonna. We're not gonna stop right here, but. Because I can just Google it after this. But I was curious because I've seen that used before and I never really knew, like, what that even specifically means. Obviously, you know, you have things like trilogies like, well, three books, three stories, whatever, and cycle. Usually what I've seen it has referred to, I thought, like a series of stories.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: In context, that would be what I would presume it meant. Yeah, yeah. On the Knights of the Round Table.
The Round Table itself seems to first feature in the Roman Debre. Poem of 1155, where Arthur having a band of warriors. Those sources predating the time of knights is older. The Knights of the Round Table being the paragons of chivalry, obviously coincide with the time of medieval romances. Though the Round Table was often comprised of other kings and lords as well as Arthur's companion. So to describe it as the Senate or King's council could both be accurate.
And Mordred is often presented as a knight of the Round Table before he betrays Arthur. So there is a precedent for it also consisting of evil knights.
[00:13:26] Speaker A: Okay, so I was kind of right speculating that it could kind of be like a House of Lords or. Yeah, like a Senate or whatever. So I just looked it up. Literary cycle on Wikipedia is a group of stories focused on common figures, often though not necessarily based on mythical figures or loosely on historical ones.
So things like Arthur in legend and the Norse sagas and all that would be.
[00:13:48] Speaker B: You probably even put Robin Hood under that.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: I'm sure this is. I had never heard this term before, or I guess I had, but I'd never thought about it in this context or that it had, like, a specific definition. Cycles which deal with an entire country are sometimes referred to as matters.
And then it has some examples here.
The matter of Britain, or the Arthurian cycle, which centers on King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table.
The matter of France, which centers on Charlemagne and the 12th Piers. The matter of Rome, which centers on Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great.
And apparently the epic cycle is the stuff that is the stuff on the Iliad and whatnot. The stuff about the Trojan War.
Huh? Yeah. I had no idea that that was how that worked. Oh. Technically, the Canterbury Tales kind of counts as a cycle. It looks like it's referencing here anyways. It does. What's funny is it doesn't reference. At least in this, it does not reference the sagas or.
Which I guess maybe the sagas are their own thing.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: I don't know.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: Anyways, I feel pretty confident that I've heard that term in connection with that.
[00:15:03] Speaker A: I mean, it seems to make sense. It would seem to make sense based on that descript description. It is, you know, stories based on the same characters that are vaguely historical, kind of mythical. Yeah, that's what the sagas are. So.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: All right, and Ben's last note here is about the Fisher King and the Holy Grail.
In most versions, the Fisher King, called that because he is first seen fishing, is the king of the Perilous Lands, where, because of a wound he has sustained, it has also caused his lands to decay.
The king is the land, and the land is the king, and it is only through the Holy Grail that he can be healed. Huh. Interestingly, the Grail quest probably originates from earlier stories where King Arthur is searching for a magic cauldron.
[00:15:49] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Well, that's fascinating. Thank you, Ben, for all of that information. We really appreciate it. Didn't know we had an Arthurian scholar in our midst in our listener base.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: All right, over on Instagram, we didn't have any comments, but we did have two votes for the book, zero for the movie, and one listener who couldn't decide.
And on Goodreads, we had one vote for the book, zero for the movie, and Mikko said, the movie feels so uneven and makes you appreciate how good even the mediocre Disney animations actually are.
I don't think the song Prayer would have worked even with otherwise silent footage. And the escape happens almost in blind panic. And the song does not fit at all.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: I agree with that. That was what was really juxtap. Yeah, was just really not juxtaposition, but was really dissonant about it.
[00:16:43] Speaker B: There are some things I like in the movie, and they seem to coincide with your thoughts. I like letting Garrett just be blind without the need to cure him. And I think getting Excalibur reinserted to the stone is a clever way to defeat the villain. I have no idea why that gets rid of all the magic stuff, but the basic idea works.
My biggest question after reading the book and watching the movie is why did they decide to adapt this story?
While the book is interesting, it has so little going on that would work in an animated movie. For example, I doubt they ever considered depicting Lynette's assault. And the Grail is such a tiny part of the story. You cannot get an adventure out of it. In a book with 21 chapters, we go from chapter 18 of the setting out of the Grail Company straight to chapter 19 of the finding of the Grail.
[00:17:31] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:17:31] Speaker B: I mean, we know this movie went through development hell, so I have to assume that earlier scripts looked really different from what we got. But I have the same questions. Like, it seems like an interesting choice to adapt as a kid's animated film.
[00:17:46] Speaker A: The only thing I can think is that. And the reason it's. And because it's so different, it's one of those things where.
My guess would be they knew they wanted to do Arthur, King Arthur, some sort of King Arthur thing, and they probably wanted a female protagonist, right? So they found a story that was similar enough and just paid for the rights. So that. Because it's one of those things where it's like, they could have written their own story that was vaguely similar, you know, that had a female protagonist that was there, that was this movie, but, like, completely changed or whatever.
But at that point, it's like, why not just pay this author, right?
[00:18:24] Speaker B: Well, and I do things or whatever. And I do have to deal with the legal issues being, like, sometimes, especially for a studio that doesn't have the same kind of clout that Disney has, I think it, being an adaptation of any sort can lend a little bit of, like, legitimacy because they have the.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: Numbers of how many people read those, but they know how Many copies of those books were sold. So they have at least some thing they can point to and go, this number of people liked this story.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Right.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: There's at least some desire. You know what I mean?
[00:18:59] Speaker B: So, like, yeah, but it is interesting because the movie is really nothing like the book at all.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: And Miko's final comment here was, I didn't really like the book. For example, I too disliked Garrett's choice of his boon. But the movie is so much worse at telling a story that giving my vote to the book is a no brainer.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: Fair enough.
[00:19:22] Speaker B: So our winner this week was the book with five votes to the movies, one plus our one listener who couldn't decide.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: There you go.
Thank you all for your feedback. Katie, it's time now to learn a little bit about L. Frank Baum.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.
So we've already covered the wizard of Oz.
That was our fourth episode.
[00:19:49] Speaker A: Good Lord.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: I know.
We recorded that sitting at a kitchen table in our first apartment we lived in.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Yeah. It may not even. May as well not even exist.
[00:19:58] Speaker B: I know.
I honestly don't go listen to it. No, it's probably not good.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: Probably not good.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: But that was. So that was our fourth episode. And even though I know we talked about L. Frank Bomb during it, that episode actually predates our prequel main episode structure because we were not doing prequels.
[00:20:17] Speaker A: We only started doing that. We started doing that later than I thought.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: Yeah.
So I thought, well, let's go over this again. Why not?
So L. Frank Baum was an American author best known for his children's fantasy books, in particular the Wonderful wizard of Oz and its many sequels.
He was a pretty prolific author.
In addition to the 14.
Yes, 14 Oz books, he also penned 41 other novels, not including four lost unpublished novels, 83 short stories, over 200 poems, and at least 42 scripts.
The L and L. Frank stands for Lyman.
[00:21:03] Speaker A: But sorry, real quick, I'm just glancing here. Are you going to talk about, like, when he lived?
Oh, I'm just curious, like, when he was born and like, like, what his lifespan was. I just, like, legitimately had no idea. I know that's like super basic, but I was like, I honestly have no idea when his.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: Frank Bo is a. This is a turn of the century.
He was born in 1856 and died in. And died in 1919.
[00:21:29] Speaker A: Okay. I just give you some.
[00:21:31] Speaker B: He was writing all of the Oz books, like, at. Solidly. At the turn of the century.
[00:21:38] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's fine. Like I said, I just wanted some context of like when he lived.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: That's fair. Yeah.
So the L in L, Frank stands for Lyman, but he disliked his first name and went by his middle name instead, hence the pen name L. Frank Baum.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: I get it. Lyman's not.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: Yeah, Lyman's. Lyman's not great. Frank is better.
Apologies to any Lyman's who may or may not be listening.
So after failing at acting, running a store, editing a local newspaper, and being a traveling salesman, Baum published the Wonderful wizard of Oz in 1900 to almost immediate critical acclaim and financial success. I know.
And the success of the Oz books allowed him to return to. To both return to his first love, theater, through various adaptations of his works, and to continue writing, which, as I said, he did prolifically.
Now the unfun part.
And this is where, as I was reading his Wikipedia page, I remembered that we definitely did talk about Baum back in the day, because I remember talking about this.
He may or may not have been super racist towards Indigenous Americans.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: So in two different editorials that he wrote when he was being the editor of a local newspaper in South Dakota, which. And the paper did fail. I said he failed at that.
In this is 1890, and then again in 1891, Baum called for the, quote, total extermination of the Indians.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: So, yep, now I say may or may not have been.
[00:23:16] Speaker A: Let's say, where's the may not have been in there?
[00:23:18] Speaker B: Because some historians argue that he intended those pieces to be satirical.
And as evidence of that, they often point to his mother in law, Matilda Jocelyn Gage, who received an honorary adoption into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation and was a fierce defender of Indigenous American rights and with whom Baum had, as far as we know, a very good relationship.
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Okay, interesting. I mean, I could imagine. I mean, it reads that without having read it. That line reads like the, you know, an indecent proposal or whatever. Whatever The. No, that's. That's a movie. What's the.
What's the one about eating children?
The famous satirical polemic about eating children.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: I don't know.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Jonathan Swift.
It's not an Indecent Proposal. It's something like that. I think Indecent Proposal is a movie about having an affair.
[00:24:13] Speaker B: Yes, I think you're right.
[00:24:15] Speaker A: Anyways.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: And it can also be argued that not only did they have a good relationship, but that Gage was influential on Baum in regards to her other activist pursuits.
She was a famous women's suffrage advocate, something that did rub off on her son in law when Baum and his wife Maude lived in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He was the secretary of its Equal Suffrage Club.
[00:24:38] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: And did a lot of work towards, like, convincing people to vote for votes for women.
[00:24:45] Speaker A: Yeah. A Modest Proposal. A Modest name of the Jonathan Swift essay about. The satirical essay about how we should eat babies or children in order to. Yeah.
[00:24:54] Speaker B: And I will say, like, I have not read the. Either of those editorials in their, like, full.
[00:25:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: Scope.
I.
The excerpts that are on Wikipedia do seem a little bit like they could be satirical, but people do be contained in multitudes.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: I mean, it's true. It's absolutely true. You have no idea.
[00:25:15] Speaker B: Yeah. And since we don't really have any solid evidence that Baum wrote those, like, intended to be satire, I'm a little more inclined to take the racist man at his word.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: Yeah. But I mean, I would be more inclined to take whatever, like, the historic historians who have really studied him a lot, like.
[00:25:35] Speaker B: Well, that's the thing, though, is that not everybody thinks that.
[00:25:38] Speaker A: Okay, interesting.
[00:25:39] Speaker B: Like, some people are like, no, we think he meant this to be satire. And other people are like, I don't know, man.
It feels like maybe he didn't.
[00:25:48] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:25:49] Speaker B: So, I mean, if we have any bomb scholars listening to us, you could weigh in, because I really only know, like, the surface level stuff.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: But, you know, it's there for your consideration. Yeah.
Something to think about.
At any rate. Baum kept writing Oz books up until his death from a stroke in 1919, and the final Oz book, Glinda of Oz, was published posthumously in 1920.
And then some other person picked up the. Where he left off and wrote, like, 40 more Oz books.
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: Or something like that. Yeah. There is, like, a crazy number of Oz books, apparently.
[00:26:34] Speaker A: Fair enough. All right, well, we're going to learn a little bit about two of those Oz books, the Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz.
[00:26:42] Speaker C: In our preview this summer, Walt Disney Pictures presents a motion picture fantasy adventure beyond your fondest imagination.
You'll be transforming miraculously back to the enchanted land of Oz, that magical kingdom beloved by young and old for generations.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: It's just a yellow brick.
No, Bellina, you don't understand.
This was the Yellow Brick Road. The Marvelous Land of Oz, being an account of the further adventures of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, is a 1904 children's novel by aforementioned American author L. Frank Baum.
It is the second book in the Oz series and the sequel to the wizard of the Wonderful wizard of Oz.
The Marvelous Land of Oz was heavily influenced by the 1902 stage version of the wizard of Oz. The stage adaptation had been a huge hit, and there were actually still two companies touring the country as the second book was published. So this was a big influence on Bomb as he was writing it. And like I said, his first love was the theater.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: Right.
[00:28:03] Speaker B: So the Scarecrow and the Tin man, who were played by a popular comedic duo of the era, Montgomery and Stone.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Sound like a law firm.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: I know, right?
Also, if you go to look those two up, content warning, they did a bunch of minstrel shows.
[00:28:20] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[00:28:21] Speaker B: So there are lots of pictures of them in, like, very offensive blackface. Yeah.
So they played the Scarecrow and the Tin man, and then those two characters were given larger roles in the marvelous Land of Oz than they had in the first book. Additionally, the titular wizard of Oz, who in the first book was a good man, but then a villain in the stage version, was given an evil role in the backstory of the marvelous Land of Oz.
So L. Frank Baum kind of retconned him to go with the stage version.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: Which is like, kind of the more modern.
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: The typical modern interpretation of the wizard.
[00:29:01] Speaker B: Is that he is.
[00:29:02] Speaker A: He's like a huckster. Evil. Or if not evil, at the very least, is like, not a kind of shady. Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:10] Speaker B: One early reviewer of the book even noted that some details clearly appeared to be designed for stage production, stating, quote, general Ginger and her soldiers are only shapely chorus girls.
There's an army of women in this book, apparently.
[00:29:29] Speaker A: I don't even understand what that means.
[00:29:30] Speaker B: So what they were pointing out was that it seemed to them like this army of women may have been written into the book with the thought that, like, we can use a bunch of chorus girls.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: In the stage version. And it'll look really cool.
[00:29:43] Speaker A: Gotcha.
[00:29:46] Speaker B: But women's rights is a primary theme of the book. The kingdom that Princess Osma and Glinda establish is a fictional manifestation of the matriarchate that I hope I'm pronouncing right, that is described in the written works of the aforementioned Matilda Jocelyn Gage Baum's mother in law, who has also been cited as a major influence on the Oz stories.
Our second book that we will be talking about on this episode is Osma of Oz. Colon. A record of her adventures with Dorothy Gale of Kansas, Bellina, the Yellow Hen, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly lion and the Hungry Tiger. Semicolon. Besides other good people too numerous to mention, faithfully recorded herein.
[00:30:36] Speaker A: Oh, old book titles. I Know they're the best I know. 85 words.
[00:30:42] Speaker B: So Asma of Oz is a 1907 children's novel again by L. Frank Baum, and it is the third installment in the Oz series.
This is the first Oz book where the majority of the action actually takes place outside of the land of Oz, with only the final two chapters taking place in Oz itself.
[00:31:03] Speaker A: Do you think. Sorry, do you think that the big, long titles like that, which were way more common back in the day, were. Because you're basically advertising the book on the COVID and so you have to. It's almost like a. It's like putting a. I'm sure somebody knows.
[00:31:17] Speaker B: I think it could be that or.
And I'm not an expert on. I'm not an expert on publishing during this time period, but it was also very common for authors to be paid by the word, right? During this time period.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: Yes, I mean, I was aware of that. But that, to me, it strikes me as like. Because I'm like. I'm thinking of the time period where obviously there's word of mouth and stuff and like, you know, newspapers or whatever, but there isn't like, a very easy ways to, like, find out what is in a book necessarily. And so, like.
[00:31:51] Speaker B: And this title in particular does mention all of our favorite characters.
[00:31:55] Speaker A: This is very much playing on the popularity of the first book by being like, hey, here's a bunch of some of the other characters you liked from the wizard of Oz. They're. They're in this. Don't worry.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: It kind of reminds me of, you know, when you look at a product that's obviously like, like, dropshipped garbage on like, Amazon and the name of it is like, All SEO Keywords Optimization.
[00:32:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it also, It's. It's also one of those things that. And that I think people should often keep in mind when they talk about how shitty, like, modern media or like, modern trends in media are of, like, it's so stupid that, like, how we name movies now or whatever because, like, oh, like, every movie is just one word. Or like, oh. Or the people complain specifically about how movie titles are often clear and TV show titles more specifically are often clearly chosen based on, like, search terms and optimization. And like, the. A good example is like, the Dahmer show that came out was like, monster. Or like, Dahmer Monster. The Jeffrey Dahmer. It's like this absurd, like, you know, like kind of like word salad in order to get every prominent keyword that they need to like in there, especially if it's part of some other series or whatever. But I'm like, that's not a new thing. Like, that's one of those things to me where it's like, it's. People complain about that and I'm like, yeah, but like, they were doing like that in the 1800s. Like, it's just, it's some of that stuff is not that, like, new or interesting or like a sign of the. The generation of society. It's just some of that stuff is just things that we've always done because that's how marketing works or whatever.
[00:33:35] Speaker B: Like, yeah, for sure.
A couple other fun facts about Osma of Oz. It introduces the character of the Clockwork Man, TikTok. Spelled like the app. I don't know if there's any relation there or not, but yeah, I would.
[00:33:51] Speaker A: Doubt it, but I would doubt it too.
[00:33:53] Speaker B: But it is spelled like the app.
But TikTok is one of the first intelligent humanoid automata in literature.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: Oh, I saw him in the trailer. I watched parts of the trailer.
[00:34:07] Speaker B: And it is also the first Oz book to mention Dorothy's last name, Gale.
[00:34:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw that. I was like, oh, didn't know that was her last name. There you go.
All right. That was a little preview of the books that we will be covering on this episode. It's time now to learn a little bit about the film Return to Oz.
[00:34:26] Speaker C: You share with Dorothy Gale the shock of finding everything mysteriously changed.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: What's happened to everybody.
[00:34:33] Speaker C: And you'll delight with her discovery of four wonderful new friends who band together against a wicked queen and the dreaded gnome king.
This is the Oz you haven't seen before. And this is the Oz you'll want to visit again and again.
From Walt Disney Pictures comes a whole new world of entertainment.
[00:34:55] Speaker B: Why don't we just fly back to Kansas?
[00:34:59] Speaker C: Return to Oz.
[00:35:03] Speaker A: Return to oz is a 1985 film directed by Walter Murch, who was primarily a sound mixer and editor. He actually had six Oscar nominations for editing and three for mixing or. Sorry, for film editing and three for sound mixing.
Other than this movie, he directed one episode of Star the Clone wars, the animated TV show. And that is it interesting.
It was written by Walter Murch and Gil Dennis.
Dennis is known for writing a handful of films on my own without evidence. But probably most famously, he was nominated for an Oscar for Walk the Line.
[00:35:36] Speaker B: Which is the Johnny Cash Johnny Cash.
[00:35:37] Speaker A: By biopic, however you want to pronounce that interesting.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:35:41] Speaker A: The film stars Firuza Bulk, Nicole Williamson, Jean Marsh, Deep Roy, Brian Henson, Denise Breyer, Sean Barrett Pons Marr, Matt Clark and Piper Laurie, among others.
The film has. I wonder how old Deep Roy was in the sequel. Well, 85. He's probably older than I think, because I think he's pretty old now. Deep Roy's famous little person actor who's in tons of stuff, but he's more recently. One of the things people everybody will know him from is he plays all of the Oompa Loompas in Tim Burton's.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
[00:36:16] Speaker A: But he's been in tons and tons of movies, but often doing characters or creatures and stuff because he's a little person.
The film has a 59% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 42 on Metacritic, and a 6.8 out of 10 on IMDb. And it was nominated for one Oscar for best visual effects. It made 11.1 million against a budget of 28 million. Whoa. Big flop. Big flop.
For lots of reasons, but yeah. So Merch began development on Return to Oz in 1980 while he was in a brainstorm session with Tom Willett, who was Walt Disney's production chief at the time.
Walt Disney Productions production chief. At the time, Disney owned the rights to the books or to Oz or. I don't remember that they owned the rights to be able to make the next movie and wanted to make a new movie before those rights expired.
It's also complicated because at this time, some of it was public domain, but they had the rights to something I.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: Yeah, and I imagine MGM had some other rights to.
[00:37:13] Speaker A: We'll get it. We'll get to that here in a second. In September 1981, it was announced that Disney would be making the film, but not as a sequel to the 1939 film, but it would be an entirely new story.
That this complicated thing where it is kind of a. It's a sequel in the sense that it's the story continuing, but it's not a direct sequel to the movie.
[00:37:32] Speaker B: Right.
[00:37:34] Speaker A: Merchant, Dennis intentionally made their script very. Or yes, intentionally made their script very distinct from the original because they wanted to avoid being criticized for blaspheming the original. Obviously, it is like one of them, if not maybe the most famous movie of all time, arguably, like probably the most famous movie of all time.
And so they were like, we're not going to even try to touch anything. We want it to be very different so that people don't compare it, basically.
But one of the original or one of the only details that was carried over were the ruby slippers, because as people. Most people know, the slippers in the book are silver, crystal or whatever.
Whereas in the movie they made them red, famously, because of the. They would pop more on the.
[00:38:16] Speaker B: The Technicolor. Technicolor.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: And so they had to pay MGM a fee, a legal fee, to be able to use the ruby slippers in their movie. The other main detail that they kept, which is not like a specific thing, but was that the concept of the real characters in Kansas also appearing, or the real people in Kansas in Dorothy's life also appearing as members as characters in Odyssey, which is the classic thing that the movie did, they decided to keep that because they thought it, you know, and I think that makes sense. It's like kind of a stylistic idea that you can carry over without it being like a direct copy of it. Anything so faruza. Balk was one of 600 kids from Vancouver who auditioned for the role, and over a thousand kids across eight cities who auditioned. And I read on IMDb trivia, they said tens of thousands across the world. So I don't. Who knows, but thousands of children auditioned for the role. And apparently she was the second youngest to audition.
The producer of the film said of her quote, she is Dorothy as described by Baum. She is also Dorothy as I think Julie. Julie.
She is also Dorothy as. I think Judy Garland would have loved to play her if she were that age, end quote. Because Fruza Bulk was 10 at the.
[00:39:28] Speaker B: Time of the movie, which is much closer to Dorothy's age in the books.
[00:39:33] Speaker A: I believe, because Judy garland was like 16 or something like that.
Emma Ridley, the actress who plays Ozma, had to have her voice dubbed by Beatrice Murch, who I assume may be related to the director. I actually don't know, probably. I think, because Emma Ridley, who they cast as Ozma, had a British accent accent that she could not get rid of. And so I was like, so one of your main characters. Oh, I say Maine. I don't know how prominent she is in the movie, but it's very funny to me that they're like, well, we'll just dub her entire performance. Yeah.
For the role of Bellina the chicken, around 40 real chickens were available during filming. Each being good at different things, supposedly. And supposedly the cages were tagged with the chicken's purpose, including perch, sit, carry, run. Like, these are chickens that were better.
[00:40:18] Speaker B: At different chicken talents.
[00:40:19] Speaker A: Yes, interesting. They also had a puppet that they used, like a robotic puppet that they used for a lot of stuff that apparently is very good in this. Actually, people were saying that some of the people on the film crew were, like, astonished at how indistinguishable it was from an actual chicken. In some of the shots, the dog playing the role of Toto is named Tansy and was a brown eyed border terrier, was a family pet.
The director Murch had already had to audition around 50 dogs before he got to Tansy and cast Tansy as Toto.
The film was originally planned to film primarily on location in Algeria and Italy in a lot of like kind of historic buildings and stuff that they thought would really capture the look of Oz.
But unfortunately after budget cuts, because Disney was. There was a fair amount of turmoil in the making of this film and I believe this Disney studio heads changed. Like the guy that I mentioned earlier, Tim whatever, who was like the head of Disney Productions at the time. During the production of this film he got fired or quit and a new guy came on and there was a bunch of budget cuts. So everything ended up being filmed entirely in Elstree studios in the uk.
So they didn't film any of this on location.
Building wise, they did film some stuff on location in. I thought this was interesting. They filmed the Kansas scenes in. And I can't remember the name of it now but the area where Stonehenge is like the fields are near Stonehenge. Like that, that region of England because it was flat enough and looked vaguely like Kansas enough apparently I'm interested to see because I haven't been to Stonehenge but I've been in the English countryside and that shit don't look anything like Kansas.
[00:42:02] Speaker B: They saw flat ground and grass and they were like close enough.
[00:42:05] Speaker A: I mean maybe it's flatter than that region. Again, I haven't been there. So maybe it is flat enough and looks more like Kansas than some of the other areas. But I.
I would never mistake any part of England I had been in with Kansas. But.
So five weeks and this is the production again, pretty turbulent. Five weeks into shooting, the production had fallen significantly behind schedule. Disney did not like the footage from the dailies they were getting back. So they fired Merch, the director.
Merch apparently did not fight it and said of his firing quote, had I fought back, they might have said okay, but I couldn't fight back. I felt what the soul feels after it's left the body after a car accident. Pain, but tremendous relief. End quote. However he did appear. It's. He says that but he also did petition some friends of his, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. And I saw another thing that said Steven Spielberg, so literally maybe the three biggest directors of the time period and three of the biggest directors of all time.
And two of those. And all of those guys he had, like, worked with, done sound for, or he was like. He did sound, I believe, on, like, the Godfather movie. And so he. Yeah, he had a prolific kind of background working with these people, all went to bat for him, called the studio and was like, no, hire this back. And if George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg call you, you go, okay, well, and this I thought was really funny. Supposedly, Lucas promised to fill in and finish filming if there were any further issues. Like, if he was. If he couldn't get it to work out or whatever, that Lucas is like, I'll do it. It. Which maybe we would have got a better movement. I don't know.
[00:43:42] Speaker B: I mean, in 1985, I'm a little surprised Disney wasn't just like, okay, you do it.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: Oh, he messed up again. Sorry. Yeah, no, yeah, that was interesting. But again, that may be apocryphal. This is IMDb trivia. Who knows how true any of that is?
Actually, I think everything before this, actually, now I look at it, I think this all was from Wikipedia. I think that. Which, again, even on Wikipedia, I've noticed there are things that are in some of these. There's. It's not that it's not true. It's just that, like, some of these are things like people think or, like, have heard or has been reported, but not necessarily true in the sense of, like, this is obviously verifiable fact.
Tim Burton has acknowledged that Jack Pumpkinhead, one of the characters in this movie, was an inspiration for the iconic Jack Skellington from the Nightmare Before Christmas, which, after watching a trailer, I could definitely see.
[00:44:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:44:34] Speaker A: This was apparently the first film that used the classic Walt Disney Pictures logo with the rainbow going over the blue castle.
[00:44:41] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:44:43] Speaker A: Supposedly, this is the first movie that had that opening logo.
[00:44:46] Speaker B: The Disney opening of my childhood.
[00:44:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
Getting to some reviews, and there weren't a ton, but we're going to talk about them here.
For the New York Times, Janet Maslin said, quote, children are sure to be startled by its bleakness.
[00:45:01] Speaker B: And, you know, I think the children were sure startled.
[00:45:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
For Empire magazine, Ian Nathan gave the film three out of five stars, saying, quote, this is not so much a sequel, but an homage, and not a good one, end quote. He did give it 3 out of 5 stars, though.
Canadian film critic Jay Scott felt that the protagonists were too creepy and weird for viewers to relate to, saying, quote, dorothy's friends are as weird as her enemies. Which is faithful to the original Oz books, but turns out not to be a virtue on film, where the eerie has a tendency to remain eerie no matter how often we're told in. But it's not end quote.
We'll see. I don't some again. Sometimes I read these reviews, I'm like, I don't know, maybe you just lack imagination, man.
It's bleak, it's creepy, and occasionally terrifying, said Dave Keir of the Chicago Reader. And Amelie Gillette of the AV Club frequently refers to its dark nature and says that it was unsuitable for its intended audience of young children, although it had been one of her favorite movies growing up in an article that she wrote. And then finally I could not. Ebert was not quoted on Wikipedia. And I went to his website. He doesn't have a review of it on his website, but Siskel and Ebert talked about it on their TV show. So they used to have a TV show. It was called, like, Siskel, Ebert at the Movies or something like that.
[00:46:14] Speaker B: I vaguely remember that.
[00:46:15] Speaker A: On the movies or whatever, where they would discuss movies. And so some movies that Ebert didn't officially review are talked about on that show.
They both hated it, which is classic for them.
They were not afraid to be boisterous. Not boisterous, but very, like, firm in their feelings on a movie. And as a result, said there's. In retrospect, they've said some very silly things about some movies, but, you know, they're also.
They're classic critics for a reason. But they both hated it. Siskel said. I was just clicking through their review, which was like two minutes long.
Siskel said it was trashy and lacked the joy of the original film. They loved calling things trashy and like.
[00:46:58] Speaker B: I don't know if I would call this trashy.
[00:47:00] Speaker A: They had. They were very.
I don't want to say they weren't puritanical, but they were kind of puritanical about movies. We talked about this with one of the Halloween Hellraiser. Ebert was not a big fan of Hellraiser, and part of it was that he thought it was, like, trashy and like, they could not. They had this weird, sticky. They were very much like highbrow movie people, but in a weird kind of like, they had this sticking point, seemingly where they just could not appreciate anything, like, overly gory, overly. They just couldn't meet certain movies at where they were coming from.
And so, like, a movie like this, they're just like, it's trashy and it's not like Ebert basically complained the whole time about how it was too scary for kids and not good and just. They didn't really say anything of substance. They basically just called it trashy and too scary for kids. And they got kind of. They would occasionally get kind of moral grandstandy about movies, especially movies that they thought were trying to appeal to children. They would get really weird and moral grandstandy about it in a way that I find odd. But whatever. So.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: So I don't know if you remember way back when we covered the Neverending Story.
I don't when we covered that. And I believe this segment was on the prequel to the Neverending Story Part two.
[00:48:28] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:48:29] Speaker B: I did this whole researched segment about traumatizing kids movies and, like, went through all of these different lists and, like, tallied up how many times different movies.
[00:48:45] Speaker A: It was a great segment. Yeah, it was one of my favorite prequel segments.
[00:48:47] Speaker B: A top 10 list.
So if you want to listen to that, I believe it's on the prequel to A Never ending Story Part 2.
[00:48:54] Speaker A: I think you're right. But it was either that or the first one. One of the two.
[00:48:57] Speaker B: One of the two. It was one of the.
[00:48:59] Speaker A: I think it was the second one. And it should say. You'll see in the episode description, it should say, like, yes, that.
[00:49:06] Speaker B: But I agree with you. I thought that that was one of my favorite segments. I actually did a lot of work for that segment, but. But this movie was in the top 10.
[00:49:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:49:17] Speaker B: Mentioned movies that traumatized us as children.
[00:49:20] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I have heard people talk about it in that way numerous times. I've heard it referenced on, in, like, you know, it's constantly in, like, YouTube videos and, like, video essays and stuff. People reference this movie being, like, a creepy movie from their childhood or whatever.
[00:49:34] Speaker B: So, yeah, it is pretty creepy. I'm very excited to watch it with you.
[00:49:39] Speaker A: But where can people watch it, Katie?
[00:49:41] Speaker B: Well, as always, you can check with your local library or if you still have a local video rental store, you can check with them.
Otherwise, you can stream this with a subscription through Disney plus or you can rent it for around $4 from Amazon, YouTube, Apple TV or Fandango at home.
[00:50:00] Speaker A: Sweet. But yes, I agree. I'm also very excited to watch it. I.
I've heard. Like I said, I've heard it. I've heard. I don't know if I've heard anybody.
I don't know if this one has. Has gotten, like, the critical reappraisal that I like, you might think, like, of people coming back and going, actually, it's pretty good. I don't know if I've heard a lot of people say it's actually like really good, but I have heard people say that it's more interesting than it was given credit for, I would definitely agree with that. And I definitely have heard a lot of people talk about that. It's very creepy and was like nightmare fuel for a lot of children when they, when they saw it as a. As children. So that's gonna do it for this prequel episode.
As always, you can do us a favor by heading over to Facebook, Instagram, threads, Blue Sky, Goodreads, any of those places interact, we'd love to hear from you. You can also drop us a review. 5 star rating on Apple Podcast, Spotify or wherever you listen to us. And you can Support
[email protected] ThisFilmIsLit come back in one week's time. We'll be breaking down and talking about all the creepy weirdness that that is return to Oz. Until that time, guys, gals, non binary pals and everybody else, keep reading books.
[00:51:06] Speaker B: Keep watching movies and keep being awesome.
