Todd McFarlane, the guy who brought you Spawn and a lot of the action figures sold in Hot-Topic, is taking Hollywood back to Oz. Variety says the WB has bought up a McFarlane movie idea which is being called “a revisionist take” on the classic L. Frank Baum authored “Wizard of Oz” series of books.
Because it’s McFarlane and he knows no other way, his version of Oz is likely to be a dark, edgy, PG-13 take on Dorothy’s yellow-bricked adventures. Apparently he even did a toy line that turned Dorothy into some sort of big-bosomed S&M freak (see the pic to your right) and transformed Toto into a snarling warthog. That’s right, a warthog.
That sounds pretty horrible, but luckily Variety says McFarlane and his partner Josh Olson (who fleshed out their pitch to Warners) are still working out the tone for the project. Olson apparently wants something tame and PG. He says, “Dorothy as some bondage queen isn’t something I want to do.” McFarlane on the other hand seems mostly interested in getting his hands on some of that elusive Lord of the Rings money. He says: “How do we get people who went to ‘Lord of the Rings’ to embrace this?” My question is: Between this and his crazed, pandering, Spawn 2 rantings a few weeks ago… how did anyone ever respect this guy? He seems kind of like a deluded, money-hungry tool.
The really depressing thing here for me is that Frank Baum’s books have still never really been done right on screen. We don’t need a skewed version of Oz. What we need is the correct version, the Frank Baum version. There are 15 books in the Oz series. The classic Wizard of Oz movie you all know covers only the first one, and at that rather poorly. Do yourself a favor and pick up Baum’s Oz books. Or better yet, since they’re almost all in the public domain now, you can read them online and for free. Try clicking to here and start reading.
