Standing On Boxes

Had the sudden urge to watch the old MGM movie Wizard of Oz. Had to find it first, and then had to hook up my Blu-Ray player, which required a software update first… and phew… 30 minutes later I’m watching Dorothy singing about teen-angst in a 30′s Hollywood kind of way.

Has anyone noticed that Dorothy lives on a farm with her aunt and uncle and 3 farm hands and a large number of hogs, and Toto too! So, not exactly a Depression era hard scrabble existence.

Of course, we’ve all noticed by now the foreshadowing with the farm hands, and Professor Marvel, right?

It was all a dream.

Poor Almira Gulch. She looks like she could use a friend. Thanks to Wicked we’re all aware of the UST between the Wicked Witch and Glinda but that doesn’t help poor Almira though I might have seen Dorothy/Almira femslash used to explain why she was so mean to Dorothy. ( Farmgirl + spinster teacher? Serious recipe for disaster.)

Ah… trivia. Margaret Hamilton (Gulch and the Wicked Witch) was the voice of Auntie Em in that mid 70′s Oz movie ( Journey to Oz) with Liza Minnelli as Dorothy (and a boat load of Hollywood has-beens as other characters.). She was also Morticia’s mother in The Addams Family. Have to wonder how she made a living on character parts – the Wiki says she refused to join a studio.

I have a Wizard of Oz movie poster calendar for 2011. The Witch isn’t on any of them surprisingly. Hmmm… not sure if Billy Burke ( Glinda ) is either.

(Ah… more spelunking in the trivia. Billie Burke was 18 years older than Margaret Hamilton, making her 55 when she played Glinda. (Have to wonder what she thought when someone else played her in a movie about her deceased husband Florenz Ziegfeld in ’37.) Hadn’t realized she was that old. Both of them lived into their mid 80′s.)