It was as much a cultural talisman for Baby Boomers as were tail fins and Ed Sullivan. Once a year like clockwork CBS broadcast The Wizard of Oz, usually introduced by some faded kid-friendly actor, always with a few bits here and there hacked out to make room for a few more advertising dollars. Oz was a cash cow. Kids all over America would have marked their calendars and counted off the days. Family rooms carefully swept clean of any potential interruptions, the faithful would gather near the set, the most faithful sprawled out on the floor at the mininum allowable distance from the supposedly cancer-causing emanations of the tube. Then it all began. For many, Oz was a black & white movie throughout. For others, Munchkinland erupted into an appropriate riot of color, usually followed by somebody's quick fiddling with the color controls as it became clear that Dorothy was unfortunately a brighter shade of green than the Wicked Witch of the West.
I was as much a slave to that zeitgeist as anyone else. I glued myself to the floor during the yearly broadcast, all the more so after 1964 when the family acquired a hand-wired Zenith color set, the first on our block. My poppy field was red, probably too red given the propensity for early adopters to jazz up the color control until the screen darn near bled. My brick road was yellow, my City was emerald, and I had the inside skinny on that line about the horse of a different color.
But that was then. The Baby Boom faded to a low rumble; JFK gave way to LBJ, then Vietnam and protests and the counter-culture and the summer of love. Nixon and Watergate, and the party was over as disillusionment set in. Tail fins were emblems of gas guzzlers and those miles of spanking-new suburban tract houses started looking more like prisons than paradises. Oz stopped being special. It was no longer a once-a-year treat. You could buy it, first on videotape, then on various videodisc formats, then on DVD. Then you didn't need a disc at all, just a computer with a mouse to click. If you wanted to see Oz in surgical precision, Blu-Ray was only too happy to give you the whole enchilada, in fact far more enchilada than the movie's villageworth of creators ever intended you to have.
I bought the Blu-Ray of Oz on an impulse and gave it a spin not long ago. That didn't last long. Within a half-hour I had pressed the 'eject' button on the remote. I fared no better with another attempt a few nights ago. What once enchanted now bores. It used to seem timeless, but now it's just dated and stale. Shorn of its saintly aura, Oz emerges as clunking studio artifice, trite and contrived, pestered with trashy Vaudeville mugging, shot through and through with marketing savvy and studio-machine cynicism. People hit their marks and say their lines, none particularly good nor said particularly well. Everybody looks tired. The creaky dialog is matched by jarring editing and a thicket of continuity errors. So many cooks stirring the pot, so much pummelled and massaged and filtered through committee after committee. Five writers, three directors. Takes and retakes and retakes of the retakes. I was never much for Judy Garland, but with this last viewing I rather wonder how people refrained from throwing tomatoes at the screen. Horrid isn't the half of it. Artificial, coached, directed, pushed and pulled and placed and put, she is the paper-doll center of a sanitized coloring book designed by the PTA with input from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a dozen focus groups, and a pack of beady-eyed lawyers.
Thus is lost another of childhood's pleasures. The movie itself hasn't changed—well, save perhaps being weirdly diminished by the razor-sharp Blu-Ray image. I'm the one who has changed. I'll allow that my progressive weariness with play-acting of all sorts contributes to my overall disenchantment. As I age I find I have less patience with mummers who smear goo on their faces and don wigs and costumes and pretend to be people they are not. My tolerance level is in fact rapidly approaching zero.
But perhaps I'm not so much running out of a willing suspension of disbelief as I am becoming sensitized to the overabundance of such playacting everywhere. Consider that for most of human history, play-acting was a special treat, something that one might encounter once a year, if that. It generally accompanied public festivals of either the religious or secular stripe, and provided a welcome change from the daily routine of life that was often sharply and painfully real. Watching your neighbor making like Mary Magdalene or dancing a silly jig while pretending to be the local constabulary was harmless fun and no doubt therapeutic.
Western civilization progressed and access to mummery and play-acting progressed right along with it. Theaters opened. Theaters closed as the influence of puritanical and godly folk waxed. Theaters re-opened as that influence waned. People went to the theater. Then came movies. Then TV. Now the Internet.
Play-acting is everywhere, ubiquitous and omnipresent. Cable TV with its gazillion channels of nothing, the Internet with its endless and inexhaustible stream of anything and everything. There's nothing rare about mummery any more. A special treat has become regular daily fare. I'll leave judgment about that to the philosophers or self-appointed arbiters of social morés.
All I can say is that I'm tired of being the monkey in the zoo, requiring entertainment by way of dancing bunnies and flashing lights and cool sounds. I will not become restless and frustrated. I will not pull out my fur or bite chunks out of my fellow monkeys. I don't need entertaining. I don't need distracting. I don't need to have my empty head filled with vacuous and meaningless lights, sounds, and motions.
At least I don't think I do. Maybe I'm just kidding myself. Is it possible to live in the 21st century without a daily ration of play-acting, or has such become an essential component of life, right up there with noise tolerance or indifference to obnoxious vulgarity? Can a willing suspension of disbelief be rekindled by restoring mummery to its former place, by requiring it to be infrequent, rare, and utterly non-routine? Might be worth a try.
Nevertheless, it's sayonara to The Wizard of Oz. I don't think I could tolerate so much as a millisecond more of its lacquered, coiffed, and floodlit artifice. So it's off to Amoeba Records and those oh-so-friendly folks at the trade-in counter. I have a lot to offer them this time around.