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I just got a combo DVD with Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned, but I haven’t had time to watch it yet.
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Hey, my favorite film growing up was Watership Down. I don’t tell many people that because… Well. You know.
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I grew up watching movies that were likely too intense for young kids to watch. Not saying it’s totally fine or not, just that i can relate 
But really there’s a lot of kids movies from the late 70s-90s that are pretty messed up. Watching kids movies today in comparison the current ones are super tame.
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Oh, here we go!
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It’ll be on Neflix next year, and Brian Henson says that filming is nearly complete. He recently said:
I’ll be honest, I thought those days were gone. I thought by the ’80s, the idea of being able to walk into a stage and see an incredible fantasy world realized was just long gone because of CG and everything like that. But they’ve REALLY done it right. It’s GREAT. The workmanship is just stunning, the artistic quality is RIGHT THERE again; what I thought maybe was lost, it’s still there.
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I recall following the sequel/prequel on this… 2008? 2010? All i know is that they had a livejournal with seldom pre-production updates. I’m psyched its going to come out finally but cautiously optimistic at the same time. I really hope its worth watching, i doubt it’ll be as grand as the film but i don’t mind being surprised.
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Oh SHIT, I completely forgot about this! TDC was probably my second-favorite film as a kid.
Even now, I’m blown away by what a completely original (yet still recognizable) mythology Henson had for that movie, and managed to convey so much of it just visually and through implication instead of info-dumping.
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Mombi scared and continues to scare the crap out of me.
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The sequel went through production hell, with various directors attached back then, including Genndy Tartakovsky. But that movie was scuttled entirely and released as a graphic novel. The new miniseries is set before the events of the film and as far as I know doesn’t have a purely-CG character like the sequel would have.
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The level of detail in that movie is just mind blowing. I mean take a look at this scene, it’s the kind of thing one could realistically make an entire college-level course on:
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The movie was kind of uneven overall but I really liked that Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy used a lot of puppets instead of just CGI.
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I recall both seeing the film in a theater, and it disappearing before I could talk anyone else into seeing it. A few months later, Harlan Ellison wrote a review of Return to Oz in his film column in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction were he called it something like a lost masterpiece. He wrote of how the film was made with care by Disney, but before it was released, Eisner and pals took over the company. They knew it was a fine film, but having it succeed would be a mark upon their takeover of a struggling corporation. Nearly no ads, no TV show roll out, no interviews, a week or less in theaters. Why have the old leadership take authorship of a successful film as the first thing on new leadership’s calendar? Now that Eisner’s gone, Disney has reclaimed authorship of this film.
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There’s also Labyrinth, of course. And The Witches was, I believe, the last movie Jim Henson worked on. Very faithful and excellent adaptation up until the end, which was changed to be “happier” and was kind of awful.
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Ah yeah the practical effects in that was actually rather delightful, great example.
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The weird thing about The Wizard of Oz is that no studio has attempted a straight adaptation of the original novel since the 1939 musical. We’ve had “reimaginings” (The Wiz) and sequels (Return to Oz) and prequels (Oz the Great and Powerful) and even a spinoff musical (Wicked) but no one has yet attempted a big-budget remake of the original story about Dorothy’s first visit to Oz.
Not that I think we need one, mind you. It’s just odd that Hollywood actually seems to have enough reverence for the original that they haven’t tried to do a big-budget CGI-fest to get some money out of a new generation of moviegoers.
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I half remember seeing this while tripping my balls off with a couple of road crew members of one America’s most notorious ‘Punk’ bands back in the day. It had its moments, but the effects and story as I recall bogged down in the second half.
Considering it was a Disney production, I’ll give it a solid 3 microdots.
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I’d say the Return to Oz seems like the most honest and direct adaptation of the source material. Everything else tries to add a spin to it, sometimes successfully but usually ends up being a bloated confused mess (the one with James Franco most of all).
I would love to see someone try to do a Wizard of Oz movie that doesn’t try to turn it into a fantasy epic, or an action movie. Hell i’ll even take another musical as long as it actually tries.
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There’s 14 or 15 L. Frank Baum ones, the 3 John R. Neill ones, 19 Ruth Plumly Thompson ones, um, about five more by people I can’t remember… so a little under 30 in the lineal canon.
(Plus there’s related stuff that’s not in the main thread.)
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