The original Oz story was created by a traveling salesman named L. Their subtext in the images of dirty farm hands, missing parents, and barren Kansas landscapes lurk around the edges of the world Dorothy wants to escape. War was brewing, and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl droughts were still current events. Things in America, and the world, were fraught in 1939. More than anything, The Wizard of Oz represents an escape, a grand dream of something magical that could take audiences, well, over the rainbow from their not-so-fairytale lives. But we lose something when we look at Oz without the context of when and how it was made. It looms so large in our collective consciousness that it's almost impossible to contemplate a world without it. Because of its ubiquity, we tend to think of The Wizard of Oz as this perfect, eternal thing, like a Da Vinci painting or a national park. Every song, character, and image from the film is iconic, from the ruby slippers that now rest in the Smithsonian, to a band named after Dorothy's dog singing about blessing rains, to the rainbow flags that represent pride. While the top spot might be debatable, the prominence of Oz in our culture can't be ignored.
#Real gone records wizard of oz movie#
Last year, a study at the University of Turin caused a stir when it crowned The Wizard of Oz the most influential movie of all time. Since we're looking at iconic movies, there's no better film we could start with than The Wizard of Oz.
#Real gone records wizard of oz series#
This series will explore the classics of 1939 with 80 years of perspective how they came to be, their influence on media, and what they still have to say. Eighty years later, the films of 1939 still matter, not just because of what they achieved at the time, but how they influenced and continue to impact culture to this day. And an astonishing amount of iconic films debuted in the year 1939: The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, The Women, Ninotchka, Mr. Classic films exist as a shared iconography, their influence extending so deep into our imaginations that we may not even know how important they were until we take a deeper look. How we see movies nowadays is so different from how they were viewed in the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, but the films of that era still loom large over our cultural landscape.
With so much media all around us, it's easy to forget a time when television didn't even exist and movies were an event as exciting as a Broadway show, and sometimes just as hard to see. We live in a world with more movies and television available than we could ever hope to consume.
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