It’s pretty hard to touch the peerless 1939 classic, The Wizard of Oz, but that hasn’t stopped folks from trying. Well, kind of, anyway. The 1939 film is firmly off-limits, of course, and Warner Bros. is always the first to say so, plus Disney owned the film rights to the other thirteen original Oz books starting in 1955, although it apparently lost them forty years ago.
Nobody seemed to care, however, when Barry Mahon mounted his own production, The Wonderful Land of Oz, an adaptation of Baum’s second Oz novel, The Marvelous Land of Oz. Who knows, they may have been afraid to.
While the credits hint at the atrocities to come, nothing prepares the viewer for one of the first: A papier mâche cow’s head. It blinks. It’s nightmare fuel. And it’s only the beginning. I almost wish this was a video review just because printed words are sometimes grossly inadequate.
Anyway, a boy named Tip (Channy Mahon) lives with his stepmother, the evil witch, Mombi (Zisca Baum), and life isn’t great, but it’s not completely terrible, either. While Tip has to work like a general lackey, he also finds the time to use Mombi’s Life-Giving Powder to create a new friend, Jack Pumpkinhead (George Wadsworth), an affable fellow who doesn’t mind hanging out in the barn with the cow.
When Mombi tells Tip she’s going to turn him into a statue after dinner, Tip forlornly watches her go before warbling a song about how he doesn’t want to be a statue. Then he bolts with Jack, the Powder, and a few provisions. He’s thinking the Emerald City sounds good.
Naturally, Tip has to lay down to sleep after a few hours, and Jack decides to make himself useful by finding the easiest route to the Emerald City, which he does, but instead of going back to tell Tip, he stays in the Emerald City for some reason. As for Tip, he meets up with General Jinjur (Caroline Berner), a rather snippy young lady who’s out to conquer Emerald City. She and her Army of Revolt belt out a song, “On This Great Takeover Day,” before setting out for their target armed with giant knitting needles. I wish I were making this up.
The Scarecrow (Michael R. Thomas), who rules the Emerald City, hands over his crown right away because he’s been feeling lately that being a king isn’t really his speed, but he, Tip, Jack, and a new friend, the Woggle Bug (Gil Fields) are still prisoners. Tip gets the bright idea of roping some palm fronds to a couple of divans and tying yet another hideous papier mâche head to it all using some of the Life-Giving Powder, thus creating the Gump. The group flies off to the Land of the Winkies to ask the Tin Man for help.
In the end, the solution is very simple: General Jinjur and her merry Army of Revolt basically turn on each other because they’re hungry and none of them know how to cook, plus Tip has a white mouse in his pocket and the whole Army is scared of mice. And oh yeah, Glinda the Good Witch of the South is always there, and she has some important information about Tip that will change his life forever. It’s not a huge spoiler to anyone who’s read the books, but we’re going to give The Wonderful Land of Oz at least a measure of dignity.
Not to seem condescending or anything, but the movie can use all the dignity it can get. In its favor, the plot is fairly similar to that of the novel. On the other hand, Tip can’t sing or act, the action is clumsy, the Army can’t march in sync, and the whole thing looks like something someone would put on at home for their own amusement. Everything looks extremely cheap; there’s even one scene in which a cardboard box had clearly been unfolded and hacked into something resembling a box hedge or a fence. Too bad no one painted it first.
The whole film has a seat-of-the-pants feel. According to TCM, the actors playing Royal Translator Jellia Jamb and Palace Guard Omby Amby only worked one day, were paid in cash, and Mahon never learned their names.
It’s highly ironic that this monstrosity was made in 1969, the year Judy Garland died, but it’s also fortunate that it came out after she had already passed, because she probably would have been horrified if she had seen it. Funnily enough, Barry Mahon told Variety that Judy would narrate The Wonderful Land of Oz, but she clearly didn’t, thank goodness. Who knows if Mahon was bragging or he did approach Judy, but either way, it would have been ludicrous for her to have anything to do with this movie.
In fact, a lot about Barry Mahon seems a little suspect in terms of his filmmaking. While he made several children’s films, all of them atrocious, he mostly directed supremely schlocky nudie films, only leaving the nude film industry when it began turning to more overt porn(!).
He could have done so much better, too. Mahon got his start in the film business producing films for Errol Flynn, who employed him as his own personal pilot and later as his manager. Mahon even worked brand-new computer technology into the management of films, including budget, scheduling, and financial planning and analysis.
What happened between that time and when he made The Wonderful Land of Oz is anyone’s guess; but the film was made on a $50,000 budget and had to recoup a loss of $300,000 because there had to be enough prints going around to enough theaters for Mahon to make his money back. AFI notes that Mahon expected to make almost a million dollars in gross receipts between 1969 and 1971, which was rather an optimistic figure. The film ran for two days in Los Angeles, garnered poor reviews before being bought by Paragon Pictures and slated for a re-release which never happened.
Mahon may have been happy with the cheap, shoddy look of his Oz movie as well as his other children’s movies, because he apparently said, “We have not aimed for the single picture that is going to make us rich. We are looking for the business that’s like turning out Ford cars or anything else. If there is a certain profit per picture and we make so many pictures, then we have established a business that is on a basis that’s economical.”
Huh. I haven’t been able to verify this quote, but judging from the quality of the man’s work, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Mahon really did say this. Either way, it’s doubtful if any Oz film before or since has been as forgettably bad as The Wonderful Land of Oz.
Another review is on the way Tuesday. Have a good one, all, and I hope to see you then…
The Wonderful Land Of Oz is available to own on DVD from Amazon and is free to stream for Prime customers (RiffTrax version only).
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Bibliography
Simpson, Paul. A Brief History of Oz. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2013.
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