MovieMonday: The Wizard of Oz

This 1939 movie was well-regarded at the time of its release, but it didn't turn a profit until 10 years later.  Then, starting in the 1950s with annual television releases over a half-century, it became one of the most loved films of all time.  Strange how things work.

Its plot comes from a popular children's book published in 1900.  In it, a girl named Dorothy (Judy Garland) is swept into a different world with good witches and bad witches, and where she sets out with three new friends (scarecrow, tinman and lion) to find a wizard who will grant their wishes -- a trip home to Kansas,  a brain, a heart, courage, respectively.  After frustration and a battle with the Wicked Witch of the West, they learn that each of them had what was needed from the get-go.

There are all kinds of lessons here:  Friendship, courage, self-reliance and skepticism toward even the most benevolent fakery.   And, perhaps, a less resonant theme today:  There's no place like home.

For Dorothy, there are parallels in the two worlds:  The three farmhands on her aunt and uncle's farm become her friends in Oz. The mean woman, Almira Gulch (Margaret Hamilton,) who seizes Dorothy's dog becomes the Wicked Witch of the West.   Doctor Marvel (Frank Morgan), a kind charlatan who performs at county fairs, turns out to be the Wizard of Oz.

It is likely that this film never would have been made if Walt Disney hadn't established there was a theater market for full-color children's movies two years earlier with the laboriously assembled  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. 

This was only the second MGM film with full-color scenes.  In it, Dorothy's Kansas farm home is rendered in black and white while Oz is in full of brightly dressed munchkins, a good witch who travels in a big pink bubble, blooming red poppy fields, a dreamy emerald kingdom and a dreadful witch's castle patrolled by green-skinned goons.

The film was well done, but its delayed popularity also may have to do with demographics.  The Wizard of Oz was released toward the end of the Great Depression, when people had delayed marriage and family formation for economic reasons.  Should we be surprised that that it found its audience only after the adoption of home television and the birth of the baby boom generation?

Now The Wizard of Oz is broadly available on streaming channels.  I hope parents are continuing to share what they remember with their children.  The only reservation, already known to adults, is that the scenes in the wicked witch's castle still frighten young viewers.

MovieMonday: The Great Mouse Detective

This still-enjoyable movie from Disney was among the first to use CGI, or computer-generated imagery.

Disney began doing cartoons the hard way with Snow White, which featured laborious hand-drawn cel-by-cel movements and a multiple image camera that moved characters and backgrounds at different speeds as a story progressed.  Later cartoon productions were clunkier and produced with much less attention to detail, which showed.  By the middle of the last century, the character-driven Warner Brothers cartoons were valued, but those and Disney classics are the only ones remembered today.

Besides good animation, this comic film is a loyal, mouse-driven derivation of the Sherlock Holmes stories and books written by Arthur Conan Doyle and published between 1892 and 1927.

Its story begins in London when a toymaker is kidnapped after giving his daughter a handmade gift.  The daughter, Olivia, seeks help from a gentleman, Dr. David Q. Dawson (Watson.) She needs help  to find Basil of Baker Street (named after Basil Rathbone who played Sherlock in a the mid-20th century film series, no doubt,) to find her father.

Dawson is a kindly fellow, and together the two find Basil's mousehole under the Baker Street apartment where a gentleman upstairs (Sherlock?) plays a violin in silhouette in a window in the evening moonlight.

Basil's landlady, Mrs. Judson (Hudson in the books) welcomes Olivia in a motherly way, and Basil agrees to help find Olivia's father, who has been kidnapped by an agent of the dastardly Ratigan (Professor Moriarty.)

From there, the adventures and conflicts build and build, climaxing finally in battles over and inside London's most famous timepiece.

This film is fun to watch for children and adults.  It also is true enough to the character of Sherlock (who always has been what we would now call "on the spectrum" but whose hard shell is cracked by the distress of innocent victims) and Watson to prepare children for later literary or film versions of Conan Doyle stories.

Besides being more visually arresting, the film is anchored more in history than popular culture of the current day.  Almost 35 years after its release, Mouse Detective retains interest because it refers to old stories that don't rely on tropes like Lego/DC superheroes, Pokemon characters and twerking animals.  (Twerking was a 1980s dance phenomenon that was said to have ended in 2013, but you wouldn't know it if you watched more recent children's animation.)

If you share time with a young person who has seen this movie, by the time the person is 10, for instance, you can enjoy the Rathbone movies that date to 1939, or the still-enjoyable British Granada television series that features Jeremy Brett as Sherlock.  A young person who has enjoyed Mouse Detective many times (as children do with favorite books or videos) will appreciate instantly Sherlock's deductive reasoning, his reliance on Watson for human interaction and his absolute and unswerving focus on solving mysteries.

In short, this cartoon is nearly 35 years old but still worth enjoying.


Notes

This movie was enhanced by the participation of two film legends.

The first was the late Henry Mancini, who scored the movie and is most famous for "Moon River" the song (with lyrics by Johnny Mercer) for the Breakfast at Tiffany's film (that I mean to see someday) and the "Pink Panther Theme" from the Peter Sellers movie series.
           If you have a moment, enjoy the first minute or so of this Mouse Detective scene, in which the three heroes search for clues in a factory of wind-up toys (a perfect setting for a Disney movie.) The musical accompaniment matches the action perfectly.  Mancini also contributed catchy music for Ratigan and his goon team.

The second is also-late Vincent Price, who voices the character of Ratigan, a rat, yes, who aims to replace the mouse monarch of England on the1897 occasion of the actual Queen Victoria's 50-year jubilee.
            Price died in the last century after a long film career as a master of evil.  You can almost hear him twirling his mustaches as he reads his lines with devilish glee

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Contemporary parents are getting mildly leery of this film because it includes a mouse chanteuse singing and stripping off (some) clothing in a performance at a sleazy riverfront bar, and because Dr. Dawson is made briefly silly after being served a mickey at the same locale.  So while film experts recommend the movie only for children over the age of six, some parents are upping the minimum recommended viewing age to eight.

             Difficult as it is to protect children now from all the coarsening content of our popular culture,  if parents focus their distress on a 1986 Disney cartoon in which honorable good guys help a frightened young heroine, the parents surely will have their hands full every time a child uses a computer tablet or walks outside the family home's front door. 

MovieMonday: Sonic the Hedgehog

Background

If you are not a longtime videogamer, you may be unfamiliar with Sonic the Hedgehog, who will celebrate his 30th birthday next year.  He is a smart-alecky teenage superhero who appeared on the planet Mobius in 1991 as the Sega company's answer to Nintendo's popular Mario.  Sonic is known for his blinding speed, his blue fur and his iconic red shoes.  He has appeared in 66 games, a comic strip and a cartoon series of limited distinction.

Before

Over the years, Sonic has gathered a durable fan base that is heavily invested in its understanding of the hedgehog and his personality. 

This group blew its stack last April when film previews showed a similarly colored but somewhat more animal-like Sonic who, worst of all, had TEETH.  The objections were so strong that the film's planned November 2019 release was cancelled so animators could extract Sonic's teeth and give him his familiar, stylized look. 



Sonic the Movie

The Sonic redesign seems to have satisfied the critics.  It opened last week, and sales were very good indeed --- even better than last year's opening weekend for Pokémon: Detective Pikachu.  (For context, let's note that the Pikachu movie was ranked 19th in North American sales for 2019, just ahead of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.)

If only the filmmakers had managed to devise a marginally interesting story, Sonic the Hedgehog might merit all the attention it has received.   But it comes up way short.

The plot: Sonic uses one of his magic rings to leave his home island and escape nasty predators.  He arrives in Green Hills, Montana, where he spends 10 years hiding from the locals and growing very lonely.  One evening, after playing a solo baseball game -- being supersonic means he can play pitcher, batter, fielder and catcher -- Sonic inadvertently sets off a power surge that causes the Joint Chiefs of Staff to call in the creepy and evil Dr. Robotnik (Jim Carrey,) a longtime foe in the Sonic oeuvre, to deal with the problem.  Meanwhile, Sonic is discovered and befriended by Green Hills cop Tom Wachowski (James Marsden,) and the shock of their introduction causes Sonic to lose his bag of rings, which he must get retrieve.  Cop and creature become a buddy team and set out for San Francisco, each for his own reason.  Along the way they are pursued and menaced by Robotnik.   

This is an unusual effort.  Sonic is a computer-generated character amid human characters, including Robotnik, who is played by a human but whose authority and vehicles and weaponry clearly belong in some branch of the cartoon world.  To be fair, the movie would be impossible without a mega-villain like Robotnik, and it is difficult to imagine anyone but Jim Carrey in the role.

That said, there are many weak spots.  Midway along, the plot reveals a Sonic superpower that would have spared him the need to leave his island home.  His magic rings allow Sonic to go only to one place except when they don't.  After his 10 years in Green Hills, he has figured out how to read, write, play popular games and make idiomatic jokes (like calling his policeman friend the "donut lord,")  but he's still surprised by new terms.  A scene set in a theoretically typical Montana redneck bar is just as unrealistic as Robotnik's technological weaponry.  All the characters are two-dimensional at best. 

The result is a thin mess that seems to be aimed at young audiences while the most loyal Sonic devotees range in age from their late teen years to their 40s.  These groups want different things in movies.  For the kids, there are family themes and really nice people who prevail in the end.  For the older set it has many knowing references that kids will not understand.  For both it has Jim Carrey doing the floss dance.   

The worst of it is this: Children deserve better.