The Wizard of Oz

For nearly 90 years, The Wizard of Oz has been a beloved American classic. But beneath the flying monkeys, ruby slippers, and yellow brick road lies a story that many people believe contains political and economic themes that still spark debate today. Join us today as we discuss how the movie was made, the reasons we love it and why it’s more relevant than ever. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There's no place like home. There's no place like home. Hello, hello, and welcome back to a really good podcast with Greg and Liz. Greg, we're back.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

I know. It feels good. It feels right. I'm excited about this episode specifically on so many levels. I'm gonna let you get into the intro because that's what I mean. Do they ever have a relationship? This used to be one of those things uh harkens back to a time when you would Harkens? Yeah, yeah. When you would like sit, you would almost wait for this. When this came on TV, this was a big deal. Yeah. You might throw an old tape in the VCR and record this son of a or have the tape. Of course. I mean with the rich folk.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

Oh yeah. I would have to tape over Ben Her.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

No, I mean, I will say that I was shocked when I saw it was only an hour and 40 minutes. Felt like an epic, didn't it? Well, I it it is long. Like the second half drags. I'm sorry. After they go to the Emerald City, it's a little bit a little bit of a slug.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

I don't know. That's when like sort of the grittier moments happen. The scary forest. Come on.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

I know the scary forest. I was thinking the scary forest would be a great inspo for a Halloween decor.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Right. You know? So there's two things for me that stick out with the Wizard of Oz, aside from just this awesome beloved tale. One is that when I first started doing therapy, uh an old, old, old psychiatrist told me that therapy is like the Wizard of Oz. You take somebody along this journey, and the whole point is to make them realize that they had the answers within them the entire time.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Yeah, that's pretty good.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Yeah, that's not bad. So also another thing that sticks out for me with the Wizard of Oz is have you ever heard, of course you have, but I'm gonna ask anyway. If you wait until the third lions roar, hey, on Dark Side of the Moon, these things sink. I've done it. Um, really?

SPEAKER_00 2:11

Yeah, I did it in high school. I was a freshman, my brother was a senior, and him and all his friends decided to do it. So I sat in on it, probably mostly just so I could hang out with them. But so that was actually one of the parts that one of the things we're gonna go over is the rumors.

SPEAKER_01 2:24

Yeah, that's one of the rumors.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

That was one of the rumors, and it it is not true. No. Uh Pink Floyd has come out and said, like, the technology wasn't there. This was years before VHS tapes were invented. So like they didn't have it to like sync up.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Right.

SPEAKER_00 2:40

And it's kind of attributed to a combination of human pattern recognition, the mind-seeking and connecting events to a line and coincidence. Because there is, you know, what is it? The lunatic in the grass lines up with the scarecrow. And there are things, but it's kind of more of a trick of the human brain, finding things where things aren't.

SPEAKER_01 3:00

Yeah, it in terms of a trick for your brain, it's like your brain will find what it's looking for. And if it's there's two ways to look at that. Like one is if you're feeling down or you think you're like the kind of the worst person ever, your brain will find evidence of that. Right. Yeah. Which is kind of like why I stay in business. Um, another thing is like people, you know, in the hospital, people with like cataracts or like some kind of like something in their eye, even, will start to hallucinate because of the there's not enough stimuli to sort of make sense of something. So your brain will make sense of whatever information it's getting and sort of make you see things that aren't there, which is which you can see that, but yeah, no, it's not unfortunately.

SPEAKER_00 3:41

It I mean, what a great idea. You know what I was thinking? Did you know that the Wizard of Oz is at the sphere in Vegas? No, I didn't know that. So the sphere, if anyone doesn't know, the sphere is this new place that they built in Vegas that you basically have video through the entire thing. It's really tall and it's supposed to be crazy. My dad actually went and saw the Wizard of Oz there. They showed it there, but I was thinking it would be cool to do it there with the dark side of the moon and the wizard of Oz.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

And so, like, it's like three, like it's everywhere, right?

SPEAKER_00 4:10

It's like Yeah, it's like tall. So you're basically going straight up when you're walking up, and then there's video everywhere. They actually the Backstreet Boys are there this year, and I think that would be an incredible show. That would be pretty good. That would be good. So, did you watch it this time? Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay, we were gonna originally do this in November, right around Thanksgiving, and so I watched it then, and Dylan could not have cared less originally. She wouldn't watch it with me, but then I made her watch it with me. I think Wicked helped because everyone's obsessed with Wicked, but she watched it like five times, and then we watched it last night, and then she wanted to watch Return to Oz after, which by the way, my kids don't think that Return to Oz is like scary. Well, it is. Yeah, I was like, Are you scared? At one point she made a noise and I was like, Are you scared? And she was like, No, like why would I be scared?

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Oh, let me ask you this. What is the better movie? The better, I mean, the Wizard of Oz is obviously a better movie than Return to Oz, but No, no, I mean, between like a movie, maybe a combination of movies, I guess the whole wicked world.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

So Wicked is, I don't know, they don't really go off of exactly like it doesn't make sense if you're going off of the Wizard of Oz, the stuff that they're showing from the other side, because I know that you've only seen half of it, so you don't know the full story, but the way they do it, for example, one of the things is that they show how the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion came to be. Spoiler alert, um, Glinda and Elphaba were actually roommates at school and they were best friends. And Glinda was engaged to Prince Fiero, but Prince Vierro was in love with Elphaba and they actually cheated on Glinda, like they hooked up. And then through a turn of events, she ends up turning Fiero into the scarecrow. And so when you're watching it, you're like, this doesn't make any sense. Like, there's no way that this scarecrow and the wicked witch, there's like sexual tension and they're in love and they like run off together, you know. So like it doesn't really, you can't like watch the wizard of oz and then watch Wicked and be like, oh, this ties in perfectly, because it doesn't. However, Wicked, I mean it wicked is an incredible movie, but the Wizard of Oz for what it was at the time was unbelievable. I know they were working with nothing, which is part of why it was such a disaster.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

Right. And isn't it like, didn't it not win an Oscar? Was it going up against like Gone with the Wind or something like that?

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Yeah, Gone with the Wind and a couple other movies, I want to say, and it won't best Somewhere Over the Rainbow won best song. Which funny, they actually wanted to cut Somewhere Over the Rainbow. They didn't like it. They thought it was degrading for Dorothy to be singing in a barn. They thought that it dragged out the black and white part too much. My question is like, is the Wizard of Oz the Wizard of Oz without Somewhere Over the Rainbow?

unknown 7:05

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 7:06

I mean, that's where I got pulled in as a young girl.

SPEAKER_01 7:10

For me, it was like as a kid, what a move to transition from black and white to color.

SPEAKER_00 7:15

I know. You know what's funny though? It's not black and white, it's sepia. It's sepia. You know, like i everyone talks about it being black and white, and it's like if you look at a black and white movie that's black and white and gray, whereas this is all brown.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

It's brown town.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Which does kind of lend to the whole farm thing better. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

The color sepia is like kind of reminds me of like before a storm. Yeah. All very intentional, maybe.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

It's interesting too because I just finished reading a book called The Four Winds by Kristen Hannah, and it's all about people living through the Great Depression in the dust bowl in Texas. And the whole time I'm watching it, I'm like, this is such a great metaphor for that. Because at that time, which would have been the time around the time that the movie was made, not the book was made, so I don't think it's based on that, but it was all tornadoes, dust storms, you know, everything. There was just dust everywhere. And that this really kind of exemplified that. But really quick, what do you think made the Wizard of Oz have such an impact?

SPEAKER_01 8:16

Um, for me, the fantasy portion of it, like it it like there's an un the transition, I think, is like a wildly important thing. I think it's like this like hero's journey, but it's kind of like a forced hero's journey. Like Dorothy wasn't asking for any of this, and she was just kind of thrown into this situation. And I think there's a lot of us who uh it's like across the board people, anybody can have an adventure at any time, but like we have our families and we have like jobs and all these things. So it's like we kind of can't, but it's like ha being forced into it almost gives you permission to experience this adventure, and I think like that's all our secret fantasy in a way.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Yeah, it's kind of incredible that you know this movie came out in 1939 and it obviously captivated people because of the color and because of everything that they did, but it captivated me in the 80s and it captivated people in the 2000s, and it's just stood the test of time, even though, as Dylan said, this is not very good AI. She was watching it, she's like, Look at that bubble, it's not great.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Yeah, oh, and by the way, we'll talk about that. But like the most beautiful princess, like the good witch of the north. Like, I mean, come on.

SPEAKER_00 9:26

She was 54 years old, she was 18 years older than Margaret Hamilton, who is the wicked witch.

SPEAKER_01 9:32

I mean, should we have maybe done a little more?

SPEAKER_00 9:34

I don't know. I I always thought she was beautiful, and you know what, Greg? Maybe we're not gonna go with today's beauty standards.

SPEAKER_01 9:41

You're right.

SPEAKER_00 9:42

Maybe we need to appreciate it's kind of like Dorothy. I was watching her and I was like, she's a normal girl. Like, she's not tiny, which we'll talk about her weight. That's a big thing. But let's get into it. Yeah. In January 1938, MGM bought the rights to L. Frank Baum's popular novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, because Snow White and the Seven Dwarves had shown that films adapted from popular children's stories could be successful. They actually tried to tone down and remove the magical elements because they found that fantasy films weren't doing that well. And the idea was that the scarecrow was a man so stupid that his only employment option was scaring crows. And the tin man was actually a criminal who was so heartless he had to be placed in a tin suit, which we'll discuss the political implications later of that. But the family of L. Frank Baum was like, absolutely not. And they requested it stay true to the books. So they added the magical elements back in, but reconceived it as a dream sequence. You know how I feel about a dream sequence.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

And it ruined the sopranos in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Nothing worse. It's so lazy, so lazy. They originally wanted Shirley Temple, but she was contracted with another studio, so they chose Judy Garland. And also, Shirley Temple was only nine. I don't does she sing? I don't remember if she's a little not like Judy Garland. I mean, for her age, listening to her sing, I was like, holy shit. But so Shirley Temple was nine and they wanted Dorothy to be older, but Dorothy, who was or Judy Garland, who was I think 15, had boobs, so they were binding her chest to make her look like she didn't have boobs. Which, like, if that's not a perfect metaphor for being a woman in Hollywood, it's like they wanted an older Dorothy, but not too old, so she had to exist in the like 12-year-old some boobs. Yeah, you can be a little bit more mature, but you can't have actual boobs. We're gonna bind your fucking chest, like that's crazy. It was a terrible work environment due to the timing, which was post-Great Depression, but just before World War II. Hollywood wanted to pull out all the stops, but MGM didn't have the technology they needed. So there was a ton of improvising and trying things out, which made it a shit show right out the gate. So the cast worked from 4 a.m. to 7 p.m. six days a week. Couldn't be me. No fucking way. Which I'm surprised that Judy Garland, this must have been before the laws, actually, because I was gonna say, being her age, I'm surprised she was allowed to work that much.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

I mean the laws, forget it. I think they had her like on amphetamines.

SPEAKER_00 12:05

Oh, yeah, they do. We'll talk about that in a second. Early technicolor processes required the set to be lit to daylight bright, which was over a hundred degrees, and the electric bill for the entire movie ended up costing $225,000, which was the equivalent of five million dollars today, just for the electric bill. That's wild. They were at the whim of Terry, the dog that was playing Todo, who sometimes would take as many as 12 takes just to get him to run alongside them. But he was actually one of the more highly paid actors in the production. So listen to this breakdown. Terry earned $125 a week, Judy Garland earned $500 a week, Margaret Hamilton had a thousand dollars a week, the cowardly lion made $2,500 a week, and the Tin Man and the Scarecrow made $3,000 a week.

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Why were they raking in the most?

SPEAKER_00 12:50

I guess they were more famous. Judy Garland would have been relatively new, but Judy Garland, Toto, made a quarter of her salary. Can you imagine?

SPEAKER_01 12:59

I mean, you gotta get the union involved in that.

SPEAKER_00 13:01

That's fucking bullshit. The Cowardly Lion's costume was made from real lion skin and fur, and the makeup was so heavy that Bert Lar was on a liquid diet, which eventually made him sick. And after a while he put his foot down and got them to agree to do makeup touch-ups after lunch so he could eat real food. So, like they were only doing it so he didn't have to eat real food because they didn't want to mess up the makeup. It took an hour a day to slowly peel the scarecrow's glued-on mask off, which left permanent lines around his mouth and chin, which couldn't have been good for future employment. Permanent permanent? Permanent lines, yeah. Okay. Um, Buddy Epson was the original tin man, and 10 days into the shoot, he suffered a toxic reaction to repeatedly inhaling the aluminum dust from the powder makeup he was wearing. He ended up being hospitalized for not being able to breathe and put on oxygen for two weeks. And the studio called it an allergic reaction.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Yes, the new guy's like, Are you sure I should do this?

SPEAKER_00 13:54

So then they had the new guy, Jack Haley, come in, who they used like a grease paint over his skin to help, which helped, but he ended up getting an eye infection for it. And then the poor wicked witch, Margaret Hamilton, had it the worst. Her makeup was so toxic, she was also on a liquid diet to prevent her from accidentally ingesting any of it. Had to be removed with acetone, and it turned her skin green for months afterwards. And it was so flammable that when she did the scene in Munchkin Land where she exited and she goes down in like the burst of smoke or whatever, the flames set her skin on fire for her hands and her face, causing third-degree burns. It took her a month-they're not a little Jackson Pepsi commercial. Yes, it took her months to recover, and she refused to do the pickup scene, so they had a stunt double sit-in who was severely injured when a smoke machine malfunctioned.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

Yeah, whatever they used to dye the things green with historically, too, was deadly. Did you ever hear that story about the woman who wore the green dress and at the end of the night she died because the the dye seeped into her skin?

SPEAKER_00 14:53

Isn't that an urban legend?

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Maybe. If it is, it's an old one. It's a Victorian urban legend.

SPEAKER_00 15:00

It's a Victorian urban legend. Um, and then there was and after all that happened, the studio deemed the Wicked Witch scenes too scary and edited most of them out. Then there was the asbestos that was used for the poppy scene, the fake snow during the poppy scene. And then we have the toxic work environment for Judy Garland. For up to a year before the movie, the studio execs were already sending memos about her food intake. They restricted her diet to chicken soup, coffee, cigarettes, and diet pills. They made her wear false teeth and put rubber discs in her nose to give it a different shape, which she actually wore that for five years until a makeup artist, I think when she was on, I think it was Meet Me in St. Louis was the movie. They were like, absolutely not, you're not doing this anymore. But I mean, to be fair, she was already on the diet pills and uppers and downers because her mom started her on that when she was nine years old.

SPEAKER_01 15:51

I wonder if Dorothy, Dorothy, uh Judy broke the sort of cycle with Liza, or was Liza like doing that kind of stuff too?

SPEAKER_00 16:00

I don't know. I mean, I would imagine that she probably learned a little bit from her, right? I Liza, I mean Liza's still kicking. She's still kicking. She is still going. All right, so the rumors. The Wizard of Oz was the first film to use Technicolor. That is false. It was one of the first films to use it, but not the first. And they actually changed the slippers from silver in the book to red in the movie just to show off the color because they thought it popped better against the Yellow Brick Road.

SPEAKER_01 16:28

Yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

Judy Garland was assaulted by the Munchkins. That is debatable, but likely not true. So the claim has been made that she was like sexually assaulted by the munchkins. They were like sticking their hands up her skirt and everything. Have you ever heard that?

SPEAKER_01 16:42

No. Um those lollipop guys looked a little trustworthy. Yeah, I I and like assaulted by the munchkins, like all of them.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Yeah, like apparently they were out of control. This was a claim made in a 2017 memoir by one of her ex-husbands. It's been pretty much debunked. They said that one of them asked her out and she said no. But she told the story that they used to get hammered every night and were rounded up by the police in like a butterfly net. That was what she said. That seems inappropriate. I don't think you can get away with saying that today.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

Um, old school Hollywood talk there. Like rounded up in a butterfly net.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

It's like that's become that seems like sizist.

SPEAKER_01 17:23

Really, really. And then they they would have to the cops have to go around and put them in their pockets. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

Like, what? One of the people who played the munchkin said, like, we didn't get paid enough to get drunk every night. Like, we didn't have any money. And by the time these claims came out, most of these people were dead. So they can't refute. They did, it did lead to the creation of a little people activist group. They all became friends and formed lifelong friendships. I would imagine at that time it would have been hard to find other little people. It's not like you have Facebook groups or like the internet to like connect, you know. It's true. It led to the formation of Midgets of America Advocacy Group, now known as Little People of America. It's still around today. And then one of the biggest rumors, the suicide. You know about that one. So it alleges that one of the munchkins killed themselves, and you can see them swinging in the background after they hung themselves. This is false. It is likely a bird, an emu that was on set. There was live birds. You can see the live birds that were like walking around, and it seems like it was a shadow cast by an emu.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

So really it was emu.

SPEAKER_00 18:27

An emo, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:28

Emu's are having their moment in pop culture.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

Really?

SPEAKER_01 18:31

Emu, emu, and Doug?

SPEAKER_00 18:32

I don't know what that is.

SPEAKER_01 18:34

You don't know the the the insurance?

SPEAKER_00 18:36

Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. I got you, I got you. So now I'm gonna throw it over to you, and we're gonna talk about the political ties to the Wizard of Oz.

SPEAKER_01 18:45

Okay, so around 1900, there is like a populist movement, an American populist movement, and there's this huge debate over the the gold standard versus silver-backed currency. And farmers and workers, industrial workers of all kinds are gathering together. Almost like feels socialists, feels it's just like a labor party thing, like for the people. The people want silver.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Well, pretty much like anytime they talked about like unionizing or anything at this point in history, they were considered commies, right? A hundred percent.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

And and it almost feels like, you know, admittedly, it almost feels like you are talking about sort of it feels very like Russian, right? Yeah. During the the Bolshevik Revolution, like talking about like the workers' uprising, which in and of itself is not a bad thing. It's like, you know, communism has its its serious flaws. Because like in like you when you think about like communism, it's like your family is a communist sort of society, and there's becomes difficulties when you put it because people are become corrupted. So someone's always gonna be in charge, someone's always gonna be corrupt. Whatever.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

I think anything's bad if it gets too extreme, but I think that there's a lot of good ideas in communism.

SPEAKER_01 19:54

Yeah, okay. We can we're not in danger of being names, so we're not worried about it. The yellow brick road, I am not a communist. The yellow brick road represents the gold standard, which you know populists would say is a dangerous path. And maybe they were right. The silver shoes, obviously, they are Ruby famously in the movie, uh, were originally silver, and that sort of re represented this free silver movement where farmers and workers were thought that everyone should have access to money. And so, like when Frank Baum is uh populist, and when he's writing this, he's thinking it's like an allegory for this whole sort of era, which I always think is fascinating. Like 1984, or not even 1984. Uh, we can stick with Orwell though, like Animal Farm, where it's like, this is a cool little story on its own, but then it's talking about in that case communism. Also, actually, you know what? The crucible was talking about communism too, but also an allegory. It's cool when you can make a cool story and sort of have this like underlying message at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

It just Yeah, like when you're reading it in seventh grade, it like is great on its own. But then wow, there's actually something else to it.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

Yeah, yeah, which is very cool. So um Dorothy represents the innocent, straightforward, every man, although she's a woman. Yeah, you know, your typical Midwestern Americana values.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

Yeah, and I was thinking how she's like her whole thing is you know, the power to change was hers all along.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

The power so yeah, totally. And like the what people still still don't seem to understand is that like we as a society, as Americans, have way more like us, like sort of normies, yeah, have more in common. And when I say that, I don't mean like any specific group of people. I mean like all of us together that don't have millions and billions of dollars and have just like zero power. We have way more in common than we think we do. And like we are always kind of led astray by illusions and and delusions and deceit. And this this was true then, and this is true now. The scarecrow represents the farmer who the elite considered unintelligent, but any of them have to be super intelligent because they are like into In touch with earth and like stuff. Resourceful. Are you kidding me? Like without the farmers, still we don't eat. So I mean and especially back in the late 1800s when people are like literally farming, you know? Yeah. Tin Man represents, of course, you can have this side of things, the industrial worker paralyzed by all this like depression. There's a there's a depression in the 1890s, just like there's a depression in the 1920s, and you know, they're all over the place.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

And right now.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

Right now, right? So and in 2008, and you know, a million other times. The cowardly lion symbolizes the politician Williams Jennings Bryan, which was a wildly popular champion for the people, criticized for being a coward. And, you know, maybe he this the he kind of like represents the leader of the populist party, and he tried and he tried and he tried. And he had one thing that McKinley at the time well, he didn't have one thing that McKinley had. McKinley had the banks and money. The wizard symbolizes maybe McKinley, um, maybe the banks, but like a manipulative, sort of deceitful person in power who rules with, you know, illusion. And this is, I mean, come on, this is true right now. It's like the more things change, the more they stay the same, really. Yep. Emerald City obviously would represent DC, the illusion of prosperity, uh promised by the gold standard. Green, you know, money, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:24

Or like somebody I saw something that said Oz was supposed to be like ounces because that's how silver was counted.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

And even if that's not true, we can do that thing if we look for it, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:35

Yeah. No, it's interesting. In Wicked, they go a little bit deeper into it, and it's a little bit more now because the whole thing is the wizard is trying to take down the animals. So in the beginning of the story, the animals are teachers and they speak and whatever, and the wizard is trying to say like the animals are dangerous. So it's kind of like a plan immigrants a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:56

And the whole thing, and he actually has this quote in it, which I'm I don't remember exactly, but it's basically like the best way to get people together is to give them a common enemy. And that's kind of what he does. He turns the animals into an enemy, which I think is a lot of what they're doing with immigrants right now in society.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

And it's sort of insidiously brilliant that they've been doing this since colonial times, where it's like, okay, there's there's these indentured servants and there's slaves. Slaves, witches. Witches, there's American, there's Indians, right? There's all these things, and it's like, let's bring one slightly above the other so that they're like that fosters hate, right? And then separate them, and then they will do all this infighting. And behind the scenes, we can just be the few colonials here with money and and just kind of do whatever we want while while this while they all fight each other. And boy, did that ever work.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

It's like that quote that says, you know, the men who make $8,000 an hour convince the men who make $80 an hour that the men who make $8 an hour are the ones to blame. And it's true. It's like these people are not the issue. And however you feel about all this stuff. If you go back though to this time when the movie was actually, because that's all the stuff in like the 1900s. But like I said, I just read this book about the Dust Bowl and when they started going. And it really was, you know, looking at like the tornado forced her into to try to go to this new land. And the tornado could be all the weather problems because it was the droughts and all this stuff that was happening at that time. And then you have the Yellow Brick Road, which is kind of like all these politicians convinced everybody, go to California. It's the land of milk and honey. That was the big thing. And then they got to California and they were really just trying to get all these farmers to go and work the jobs that the Mexicans didn't want to do anymore. So there weren't really many jobs there. They only wanted to pay them 75 cents for whole days of work. And that's kind of like the hoodwinking that the wizard does, where he's the man behind the curtain, you know, he's trying to say, like, I'm gonna give you a heart, I'm gonna give you this.

SPEAKER_01 25:56

You know, something that's even like a little like deeper than like when I have thought about it. It's like the wizard is saying, I'm gonna give you things that were always intrinsically yours.

SPEAKER_00 26:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

That's like the politicians, like, I'm gonna give you peace.

SPEAKER_00 26:08

Like taxes.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

It's like what are you talking about? Like, we should we're entitled to these kinds of things anyway. You know, it's like in Rhode Island that we have people who like own seemingly like private beaches. Like, you own the ocean? Are you serious?

SPEAKER_00 26:21

That doesn't No, I mean, right now in Coventry, and anyone lives in Rhode Island may have heard about this. They have Johnson's Pond. Like this one guy bought Johnson's Pond and he pretty much drained it. What? It seems not even Johnson's. No, and he like pretty much drained it, and he's made wants everyone in the town to pay him to put the water back in, and all these people pay all this extra money to live on this pond that like they can they have boats on and everything, and they can't do anything because he won't open up the dams and like let the water come in, and it's like yeah, you need to pay me all this extra money, and it's like this is a natural resource.

SPEAKER_01 26:54

Water in a hole. Like, what are you talking? How do you own this? Yeah, no, I don't. Don't even get me started. And and you know what? What's what's ironic and kind of funny is like you know, if anybody knows, like we are certainly on like sort of different Yeah, you say that.

SPEAKER_00 27:07

I don't think that's really true. I think you've come a long way.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

You know, and it's funny, like I have um, but I I have like I have conservative values, but I also like have you have the conservative values of like the 1990s.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

You don't have the conservative values of today.

SPEAKER_01 27:24

Like I would I'm like a Kennedy Democrat. Yeah, that's what I am.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

Like exactly.

SPEAKER_01 27:28

Like you have conservative values in certain aspects, and then some worlds today makes me like wildly conservative, but not really.

SPEAKER_00 27:37

But no, the things that fundamentally matter, you know, I think we're pretty much aligned up.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

Social stuff, like people stuff. I'm I'm all for people, like exactly. And so uh yeah, that's just my my life, it's become my life. So coming of there's other like alternative sort of interpretations too. There's always going to be a million interpretations. One is like this coming of age empowerment where like personal growth, self-reliance, and finding one's own power in realizing this. It's a good message because it's like you have to go on a sort of journey to not only appreciate where you come from and your and your home, but but to like figure out who you are, even if you land in this, even if you're if you end up in the same place, you've changed wildly, wildly by like the journey that you're on. So like this is a hero's journey thing. Also, there's like a for those out there who uh are interested in a queer interpretation.

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Friend of Dorothy.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

Yeah, so it that's that's right. Wait, that's the clueless, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:30

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:32

So some he friend of Dorothy, there was a bunch of them little comments that well, like the rainbow, you know, it's yeah. Oh yeah, of course. And like outfits and makeup. I don't know. So some critics suggest that it functions as like a coming out, right? Finding this chosen family and seeking acceptance in a a restrictive world, I guess we could say. I could see that.

SPEAKER_00 28:56

I don't necessarily know that like that's what L. Frank Baum was doing. Really not. But I think it's great to be able to take things in art and interpret them as you want them. That's the best kind of art.

SPEAKER_01 29:09

Oh my god, I totally agree with that. Like reading books differently and like reading like poetry differently, and what does this mean to you? What does this mean to me? Like, I don't know. That's why, like, in in my own work, like I do a lot of like dream interpretation too, because it's like it doesn't really matter which do I think dreams have like specific meanings? Maybe sometimes, but most of the time it's pretty nonsensical. But by trying to figure out what it could mean to you in your own subconscious, you are doing some like in-depth work by using something. It's a cool sort of tool when maybe there isn't any.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Um I agree.

SPEAKER_00 29:38

I honestly I did all my like background research, and then you brought that up this morning, and I was like, oh shit, I didn't even like think about looking into that. And then I started looking at it, I was like, this makes so much sense. And I picked up on a lot of the political stuff from Wicked, but when I was watching this, I didn't really because Wicked kind of beats you over the head with it. I mean, there's also like the whole factor of her being green, because it's all it's the Wicked Witch's story. So like her going there being green, everyone being like disgusted by your skin color. Like it's so easy to pull that together.

SPEAKER_01 30:09

Yeah, and this was like also before there was like this like wild sort of hate for workers. Yeah. Right. And like union and everything like that. This is all kind of where that was still kind of good. Um and and I think in a lot of ways, of course, it still is. Like everything kind of gets now, you uh it's just like everything gets sort of manipulated and exploited over time, and then whatever the meaning was supposed to be kind of gets lost in like you know, the unions become rich and the people entities and get tied up with the businesses, and it's just and politics, all this. But I I don't know. This was like it's a pretty cool piece of media and history.

SPEAKER_00 30:50

I mean, just like so much of this is it's a great story, obviously.

SPEAKER_01 30:53

It's like a kid going on and there is something like Stranger Things and like E.T.

SPEAKER_00 30:59

Yeah, the Goonies.

SPEAKER_01 31:00

Yeah, like that age kind of going, like coming to age. All right, should we talk about it? Yeah, sure. I thought we did talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 31:06

No, like the actual movie.

SPEAKER_01 31:08

Oh, okay, yes.

SPEAKER_00 31:11

So we jump into the movie, and it I always thought it was interesting. You jump right in to Miss Gulch just being an asshole. Like they don't really give me any backstory, she's like flipping out to begin with. Now she says, Um, Auntie M says, Elmira Gulch, you may own half this town, but I'm not afraid of you. And I'd like to let know a little backstory there. How does an unmarried woman own half the town?

SPEAKER_01 31:35

In in the 1800s, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

Like uh, what's her deal? She's a bit savvy. I know. So Dorothy, she's flipping out, you know, she comes, she's like, rah, she's fallen into the pig pen. It does seem like she's a little bit dramatic.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

She is a lot.

SPEAKER_00 31:51

You can understand why they were like, Did you go to a yeah?

SPEAKER_01 31:56

I know. She's always in a half, like, oh, like you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 31:59

Yeah, but like what else does she have to do? She's a child, and it doesn't appear there's anyone around. No, there's no friends. I'm sure she doesn't go to school. So then there's the three men. Did you catch their names?

SPEAKER_01 32:11

No. Well, kind of. If as soon as you say it, I love him.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

Hickory, Hunk, and Zeke. So Hunk is the scarecrow, and I think he's kind of implied to be a love interest, which I don't know, like compared to Wicked, where he's the Prince Fiero. I'm like, is the scarecrow supposed to be like a hottie? He is. He's the youngest, and he's definitely the best looking. Although the Titania's nothing to sneeze at. I know, but I was watching it and I was like, the lion seems like the most fun to play. Like, he's funny. He is funny. I used to do an impression of it, but I can't anymore. I'd love for you to try. Maybe you can do it online. No, and then like when she leaves Oz, she's like, I'll miss you the most to the scarecrow. Like, she has the deepest bond with him.

unknown 32:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:57

Well, she met him first. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it's not like it was a long time. So she runs away because they're gonna steal Toto. Where are you? Where are you going?

SPEAKER_01 33:04

Yeah, and where are you going? And I did that did stick out to me too, actually, now that you mentioned it. Like, wait, they got really close quick.

SPEAKER_00 33:11

I know, because it's only a couple days, if that.

SPEAKER_01 33:14

Yeah, well, they don't show him sleeping or anything. Oh, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 33:15

And he's like, You have to come back tomorrow. I'm like, where are they gonna go? So then the tornado comes. Auntie M is the only one that even seems mildly concerned about Dorothy. Uncle Henry's like, sorry, we don't have time for this. We gotta go. The horses are running wild. Don't you feel like they should have some kind of better system here?

SPEAKER_01 33:33

Yes, they should.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

They probably get hit with it all the time. And then they're going through the tornado, and the window has all the stuff going by. At one point, people are canoeing.

SPEAKER_01 33:42

People are canoeing. There's a cow.

SPEAKER_00 33:45

The cow just randomly going.

SPEAKER_01 33:47

It's like I think Twister did like a play on that. They did the cow on the cell.

SPEAKER_00 33:50

I think so too. And they did do the cow. Yep, they did the cow. I also was thinking, like, why haven't they made this into a ride somewhere?

SPEAKER_01 33:56

They made Twister into a ride, but you're right.

SPEAKER_00 33:58

You know, go in the house, have it twisting around, seeing things on the side. It's right there.

SPEAKER_01 34:03

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:03

So she goes to Munchkin Land. We get to color. Dorothy's kind of a ginger. You don't realize it. It's colored though. They colored her hair.

SPEAKER_01 34:10

You can see her roots. She's she's not a ginger.

SPEAKER_00 34:13

She's not in real life. I'm wondering why they did this. Like, why did they color her hair? And then one thing, no, you won't note this, but they always talk about her having French braids, but it's really more twists. It's not really French braids.

SPEAKER_01 34:25

Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

And I just thought that was interesting because anytime you'd see someone being Dorothy, you'd see them with the French braids, and it's not French braids. So I'd just like to point that out. It's all very Willy Wonka.

SPEAKER_01 34:35

I guess I could see that. Yeah. It is all very Willy Wonka, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 34:38

Which it doesn't seem like Willy Wonka is that far ahead in technology, which it was 40 years later. So it's weird, right? And then when they did the Lollipop Guild, I was reminded that I was actually a Lollipop Guild member when my seventh grade class did The Wizard of Us. That was my part. Really? Yeah. I have a picture. I do have a picture. I'll try to find it. And then there's a dude in a tower with a sword guarding Munchkinland. Which why? The wicked witch just shows up right in the middle of Munchkinland.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

The army.

SPEAKER_00 35:10

Like this guy's not doing anything. And then so they go, she meets the scarecrow, yada yada yada. They see the apple trees. Now my question is would you prefer an apple tree like in the original or the one in Return to Oz when they're lunch pails with ham sandwiches?

SPEAKER_01 35:25

I think that the ham sandwich lunch pail is way more convenient.

SPEAKER_00 35:30

Yeah. I do get concerned about foodborne illness, so I'm not sure I would eat a ham sandwich.

SPEAKER_01 35:35

That seems like a listeria. But uh the apple you can trust. And it's thrown. It's thrown at you.

SPEAKER_00 35:43

I love how you can see their bodies dancing in the trees. Yeah, yeah. When they're doing yeah, it's a good time. So then they go and they go to Oz. I looked it up because they have the horse of a different color, which actually they used jello to dye the horses.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

So they they were even they had to do everything.

SPEAKER_00 36:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:04

So wild because I I just figured they were like shining some kind of light on it.

SPEAKER_00 36:07

No, no, they actually dyed them with jello, which probably wasn't great for the horse. And I was like, is this the origin of a horse of a different color? But apparently it wasn't. It was 12th night, the Shakespeare play. There was a quote. And what is that supposed to mean?

SPEAKER_01 36:20

Well, that's a horse of a I I always was confused by that.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

I think it's just like uh that's a a same thing with a different color.

SPEAKER_01 36:28

Yeah. Yeah. I think that's what about like the work schedule in Oz? They say that they don't work, but they are working.

SPEAKER_00 36:35

Oh no, they're working. And then the wizard is actually the guy who is the gatekeeper. He's all over the place. He's the guard, he's the coachman that's driving the horse with a different color. And I looked it up, and apparently it's supposed to be the wizard. And like he almost wants to travel around the Emerald City without people knowing who he is. He's like a spy, kind of, I think.

SPEAKER_01 36:58

So and he can control pop propaganda that way.

SPEAKER_00 37:01

Yeah. He can probably like plant seeds and people. Also, in the book, apparently, it's not all green. You're supposed to wear green glasses when you get there, and it makes everything look green.

SPEAKER_01 37:11

Oh, another dis delusion or deceit.

SPEAKER_00 37:16

Deceit. And you know what was funny? So the wizard is Professor Marvel, the guy that she meets when she's in Kansas. And he actually has on the thing like sleight of hand, you know, like that's what it is. You're like a trickster. So he like even says it, and you see it. I mean, he looks in her basket to like find info. So he's even a con man.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

So the politician thing is all written all over this. Oh, for sure. And it's like, honestly, can you be a politician? I don't know about this isn't in a critique on politicians. Can you be a politician without being deceptive and deceitful? Probably not.

SPEAKER_00 37:47

I don't think so. Yeah. I don't think I think because you get beholden to so many people, and if you try to be truthful, you lose out on your constituents.

SPEAKER_01 37:57

You have to be very careful. Like you so you answer questions by not answering questions. Yeah. Like such a strange thing.

SPEAKER_00 38:04

I know. So then they're doing the beauty scene, they get there, the lion gets a permanent. He actually says at one point, I got a permanent for this, which is hilarious. They have a stuffing station. It's like, how many scarecrows are showing up here?

SPEAKER_01 38:16

Right.

SPEAKER_00 38:17

How often is this happening?

SPEAKER_01 38:19

Like oh, we've got just the the setup for you.

unknown 38:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:25

Like this is a little this is a little interesting. So then finally they go, they see the wizard. He's got these fillers on his cheeks and chin, which it was prosthetic cheeks and chin. It was not his face. Although he he would fit right in now. Yeah, he would. Right. It's funny because he says, like he calls himself when he gets revealed. He's like, Oh, I I ended up here. I was an expert balloonsman. And then when they go to leave and he starts to fly away and they're like, You need to come back. He's like, I can't. I don't know how to work this thing. It's like, you really are a con man.

SPEAKER_01 38:55

You really are. So that part when he begins to fly away, right? So like the things about to fly away. Did you notice that the tin man chops the rope? Really? No, I didn't. I don't like look into that. There's like this weird thing that happens where like the tin man, it was part of the problem. Like, what was going on there?

SPEAKER_00 39:13

Maybe you wanted Dorothy to stay.

SPEAKER_01 39:15

Yeah. But like that's not cool. No.

unknown 39:19

No.

SPEAKER_00 39:20

And also, like, you can't just plant yourself down and hold down the rope. That's what I thought was weird. It's like there's so many people there. Like, somebody grabbed the rope. What are you doing? You know?

SPEAKER_01 39:29

Yeah, exactly. So he sort of is the one. If you if you watch it, the tin man is the one that chops the damn rope.

SPEAKER_00 39:36

Yeah. The tin man was a villain all along. But then Glinda comes and then she's like, You can just click your heels. And do you think like Dorothy was like, You bitch? I could have been home this whole time.

unknown 39:46

What the fuck?

SPEAKER_01 39:47

She didn't say that, but she should have. She should have been like seriously the whole time.

SPEAKER_00 39:51

But then again, like, what is she going back to?

SPEAKER_01 39:53

Yeah, and it is a dream.

SPEAKER_00 39:55

And it is a dream. So and you know, Glinda's she's in her mid-50s. She's getting up there.

SPEAKER_01 40:01

Is getting up there.

SPEAKER_00 40:02

Maybe she didn't remember.

SPEAKER_01 40:03

Or it's like, okay, she does look pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 40:04

She does look for mid-50s at that time, too. I mean, she's not getting Botox. You're not looking like B. Arthur. No. No, no, definitely not. And that's it. I mean, I feel like I'm glad we got to do this.

SPEAKER_01 40:16

Yeah, me too. I loved it. Maybe there needs to be a reel on that. And that could be the thing that our saving grace. The tin man. Check it out. Check it out. Like, I don't know how you would record that, like a phone record. Um I could just record the screen. Yeah. And say, like, wait a minute.

SPEAKER_00 40:31

Wait a minute. This guy's the who's the problem here? Another another toxic man.

SPEAKER_01 40:36

Here we are.

SPEAKER_00 40:37

Here we are. Once again, it's always it's always the men. Really is always always the men. All right. Well, this was great. I'm glad to be back.

SPEAKER_01 40:44

I'll be back. This was a good episode.

SPEAKER_00 40:46

Yeah. We will see you next week.

unknown 40:47

All right.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

Happy little bluebirds by the rain.