Hacker Cinema
Return to Oz
1985 · Film · 109 min
Directed by Walter Murch
Dorothy, saved from a psychiatric experiment by a mysterious girl, finds herself back in the land of her dreams, and makes delightful new friends, and dangerous new enemies.
2 positive2 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
The difference is between "I can tell this story better/more engaging/more entertaining/more realistic" vs "let's cash in on the success this movie had five years ago"
The Wizard of Oz was a new interpretation of Baum's original story. They put enormous effort into making the new film better than other interpretations, of which there were several. Which is why it's a successful, beloved classic!
The same really can't be said of this week's Marvel/DC remake of whatever they made a few years ago. It's just about being a cash grab and nothing else.
P.S. If you've never heard of the sequel 'Return to Oz', do yourself a favor and watch it without doing any research. Just go in straight blind, it really enhances the experience. If you drink, keep a bottle nearby, you'll need it.
I kind of like Tron but that statement from the director isn't something I buy.
There's no spirit world in Tron's plot- the plot is literally about a guy getting zapped into a machine. If it was the director's intent to depict a "spirit world" or "shaman" , he did a poor job of conveying it. Other movies like "Return to OZ" do a much better job of opening themselves up to non literal interpretations by having ambiguity between the "real" world and the "fantasy" world.
What I really get from Tron is it is basically Star Wars with "galaxy far far away" replaced with "CGI computer world". The Tron poster is heavily copied from this famous Star Wars poster:
https://www.starwars.com/news/7-things-you-didnt-know-about-the-original-star-wars-poster
Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" influenced Star Wars. So calling your Hollywood formula "mythic" in some fashion was presumably fashionable on account of the success of Star Wars.
I kind of like Tron but the plot is very simple, and very literal. It doesn't really come to life the way Star Wars does, or open itself up to interpretation like more symbolic films.
If the director really wanted us to see the film as shamanic, he probably shouldn't have used such a clunky plot device as a laser beam that makes someone enter a computer.
In case anybody is interested, but isn't aware. The Oz "universe" is quite expansive and extends far beyond the 1939 film.
There's over a dozen books in the series by the original author and they're all in the public domain, free for anybody, and they hold up amazingly well as children's fantasy novels with memorable characters and an impressive amount of creativity. You can find them here (as well as dozens of other creative works by the same author): https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/42
There's also a couple dozen later works set in the same universe by other authors, notably 19 by Ruth Plumly Thomson. Most of these, I believe, are also in the public domain. You can find most of Thomson's works here https://archive.org/search.php?query=Ruth%20Plumly%20Thompson
A complete list of Oz books is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books Notable authors who've written in Oz include Soviet author Alexander Volkov, Philip Jose Farmer, Joan D. Vinge, and even Stephen King.
In addition to the famous '39 film, there's several other films including a 1910 film, 1925 silent film, a 1933 Canadian animated, a 1975 film, a 1982 anime, an 1986 Japanese anime series, a 1950 half-hour tv adaptation, a 2013 film, various musical adaptations (including a Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow urban retelling in the mid-70s), games, comics and so on. There's also a 1985 Sequel film called "Return to Oz".
Oh, you're right in that I was wrong. I was thinking of the movie Return to Oz (1985).