By Joshua Tyler
| Published
The Wizard of Oz is being ruined, and it’s fine. It’s fine because the movie is now falling out of cultural relevance, and our choices are to live in a world where no one under the age of 20 will have seen or probably even know what The Wizard of Oz is, or do something really stupid and gimmicky with it to try and get people interested in the original movie.
So, how is it being ruined? They’re using AI to modernize it for viewing at the gigantic Sphere in Las Vegas.
The sphere is a mega-size globe screen, and The Wizard of Oz was, obviously, not shot for that. So AI is being used to expand the picture and show us more that might have been happening around whatever is in frame.
Obviously, this is horrible since these AI fantasy additions do not represent what the filmmakers intended. Worse, most of the ones we’ve seen look kind of terrible.
Is a wide shot that looks like the sky is on a green screen better than a close-up on the Scarecrow? It is not. But if you want to show the movie in the Last Vegas Sphere, you’ll have no choice but to go with the terrible, AI-generated wide shot.
You can hate it, but it’s better than the alternative. The alternative is that this movie will soon be forgotten.
Young people don’t care about The Wizard of Oz, and you can’t make them care. I have four kids, ages 8 through 17. I watched it with all of them at some point. They don’t know another kid who has ever seen it, and to them, it was just this weird thing their Dad made them do. They don’t understand why anyone would want to watch such fake acting and bad special effects.
It’s hard to blame them. While it was beautiful and groundbreaking for its time, for new viewers watching The Wizard of Oz is like showing up to a modern comedy club and being forced to watch a vaudeville act. It’s a style of entertainment that’s about as relevant as a traveling circus.
Your great-grandfather likely loved radio plays and Burlesque. But those forms of entertainment can’t possibly compete with television and strip clubs, so they are gone.
The very few kids who’ve been forced to watch Wizard of Oz, for the most part, definitely won’t be watching it with their kids. Instead, they’ll be showing them The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. This means The Wizard of Oz dies with Gen X. Unless, of course, something drastic changes. And here that drastic something is.
We have two choices, Wizard of Oz fans: ruination or irrelevance? You have to pick one.
