DVD REVIEW: MUPPETS WIZARD OF OZ, THE

BUY IT AT AMAZON: CLICK HERE!
STUDIO: Walt Disney Home Entertainment
MSRP: $24.99
RATED: TV-PG
RUNNING TIME: 100 Minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
• Blooper reel
• Pepe’s Exclusive Making-Of
• Extended Interview w/ Quentin Tarantino

Muppets, man. Even in today’s entertainment climate, the original shows and movies still strike a great balance of humor, between the mean-spirited and the charming and compassionate, while never crossing into either Crank Yankers or Teletubbies territory. I credit the Writers of Yore, and Jim Henson’s creative methods, with the lasting appeal the Muppets possess. Their humor strikes me as just elevated enough to get above that of the recent movies which attract people who evangelize, "It’s a kids movie, but they throw in enough to keep the adults interested!" The Muppets were not childrens’ fare, but their medium, the puppetry, tends to attract children, anyway. I’m all right with that. One day, those children will grow up and, oh, how they’ll laugh.

Or maybe not, if they get stuck with Muppet entertainment we’ve been getting over the last few years. It’s on a downward slide, starting right around the time of Muppets From Space. Starting right before pre-production began on Muppets From Space, actually. Muppets’ Wizard of Oz is a dull, repetitive rehash of young adult plot points with only the barest minimum of the daring, did-he-just-say-that humor of the original show and the better of the feature films. For shame, writers.

The Flick

Ashanti (Coach Carter, waiting patiently for breakthrough role) plays Dorothy Gale, a young waitress in rural Kansas who works at her Aunt Em’s diner. Dorothy wants something more from her life than a slow job in the food service industry, so she scores an audition with the Muppets, in the hope that they’ll like her singing well enough to invite her on tour. Right off the bat, are you getting the sensation that this is just another Disney-affiliated pre-teen empowerment special? If you are, it’s with good reason. I’m grateful, at least, that the writers were upfront about the tone that their movie would be taking.

For the sake of comparison, I’m going to lump Muppets’ Wizard of Oz alongside their feature adaptations of A Christmas Carol and Treasure Island, as all are based on ostensible classics of literature. Plus, it gives me a chance to praise the latter two while lambasting the former. In both A Christmas Carol and Treasure Island, the writers adapted the stories both to the screen and for the Muppets without abandoning the characters, main plot points, or the feel of the original. Not so with Wizard of Oz, which maintains its connection to the original only by way of place and character names. None of the themes remain intact from L. Frank Baum’s original novel, or even from the feature adaptation. (Though, interestingly, a number of small details from the novel made it in here that were changed in the 1939 film. Silver shoes, instead of ruby slippers, for example, and the all-important spectacles inside the Emerald City.)

Baum’s novel was sort of a cautionary tale, slyly condemning wish fulfillment (as I see it, it’s not a happy ending that Dorothy returns to Kansas). Muppets’ Wizard of Oz, however, is the sort of aimless dreck you would expect to feature Hilary Duff. All the charm of the original story is jettisoned in favor of a formula. Be yourself and your dreams will come true, says the dime-store moral, a recycled gift card.

Changing the underlying structure of the story wouldn’t be so bad if the presence of the Muppets made up for it in humor, or by their mere existence. Sadly, the humor is as drearily familiar as the sugary plot. Jokes are telegraphed a minute in advance and the pacing is confused as hell, speeding through the brighter gags and languishing on the dull. Worse than that, only two of the Muppets in major roles maintain their characters. One of the pleasures of a Muppet movie is seeing how crazy Gonzo will affect the plot, or how their individual brands of humor will comment on the situations around them. Here, Kermit is the Scarecrow, and he’s not Kermit anymore. Gonzo is the Tin Thing, and he’s just the Tin Thing (though his love of Camilla is intact). Pepe the King Prawn gets to be himself, but that’s because a role was essentially created for him, which leaves only Fozzie as the Cowardly Lion, a role the writers didn’t have to twist much to get it to match the bear’s psyche.

The humor has two bright spots, one Muppet and one human. Pepe the King Prawn, with his heavy Mexican accent, gets the few funny lines and plays them well, though his shtick does settle into a rut after about forty-five minutes. Also, unless you get pleasure from funny accents (as I do — damn, I loved the show ‘Allo ‘Allo) you’ll probably only laugh at his Pink Floyd reference, and his lonely sexual innuendo.

The other anchor for your flailing attention is Jeffrey Tambor (The Larry Sanders Show). He plays the titular wizard as car salesman tripping on power, and, while the lines he gets aren’t particularly witty, his delivery is a blast.

Other deliveries from the human interlopers? Not so much of a blast. Queen Latifah (Chicago) as Aunt Em is arrogant and doesn’t seem to be having any fun. Ashanti is so broad in her emotions, so terrible in her lip-synchs, so earnest in her line deliveries that she seems to be herself a puppet. Remember Michael Caine and Tim Curry as Scrooge and Long John Silver, respectively? They played their characters straight; there’s no awareness in either of their performances that they are sharing the stage with a bunch of hands shoved into foam. Ashanti, on the other hand, always looks nervous, unsure of how to act with the Muppets, possibly afraid that they are magical and will come to life, hungry for her blood.

All right, that’s hyperbole, but she does look as if she is walking on pins, except when she gets to be sassy.

Henson’s original Kermit puppet finds its final resting place.
All over now but for the pissing.

One of the joys of other Muppet movies are the original songs. Sometimes they’re funny ("Hope That Something Better Comes Along"), sometimes they’re touching ("Going To Go Back There Some Day"). The original songs in both earlier Muppet literary adaptations were instantly hummable, and their lyrics were clever. Muppets From Space didn’t feature much in the way of music, and Muppets’ Wizard of Oz continues the trend. There’s only one song that even approaches the clever lyrical playfulness of previous movies, and that’s a barely two-minute song about friendship crammed into the Cowardly Lion’s scene. The other songs are Ashanti singing about how great it is to be a girl, or some crap like that.

The level of fun available for a Muppet fan here is abysmally low; call it the second-worst feature they’ve ever done (the worst being the Christmas special with Whoopi Goldberg as a sassy, computer illiterate Lord of Heaven and Earth). For non-fans, this is mostly harmless, though it is rated TV-PG for a couple of jokes with adult implications. It’s not the Muppets, though, except in look alone. It’s not even the story of The Wizard of Oz; it’s a Disney-tinted after school special shoehorned into the structure of the original film.

4 out of 10

The Look

Fullscreen, 1.33:1, since it was originally a television special. The colors in the real world are desaturated, the colors in Oz supersaturated. It’s not as dramatic an effect as that of the B&W to Technicolor shift of the 1939 film, but it does the subtle job of carrying the same implications.

There’s the distinct impression that the whole thing was filmed on video, and then heavily tweaked in post-production. The depth of field is almost always as shallow as can be, which gives the whole film a cramped feeling, as though it were shot on the smallest stage on the lot.

5 out of 10

The Noise

Nothing more than you’d expect. Though there is a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix provided, it isn’t particularly stunning. It’s usually a lot of fun in Muppet movies to listen for the one-liners in the background during dissolves or other unexpected times. There are a few of those, here, but they’re often mixed too low to discern actual words.

The music’s nothing special, poppy hip-hop with repetitive structure. No Queen Latifah singing, thank goodness.

6 out of 10

The Goodies

The extras are all played for humor. There’s a blooper reel, which is funnier than normal because the puppeteers stay in character when they screw up. Maybe that’s just creepy.

Pepe hosts a mini-documentary backstage of the production. Around this part, I started to notice how similar his accent was to Triumph’s; fortunately, Pepe’s casual idiocy distinguishes his gags from the plastic dog’s.

There’s also an extended bit of Pepe’s interview with Quentin Tarantino, which consists of Tarantino being delighted to be involved with a Muppet movie.

There’s nothing really informative in any of the extras; they’re just here to entertain.

4 out of 10

The Artwork

The angles of Ashanti‘s face are so harsh, she looks just like a less-than symbol. The floating heads are caught in the draft of the twister, which frames, illogically, the heavily-Photoshopped Emerald City. There’s also a field of poppies, which doesn’t appear in the movie, because the characters are instead shunted to an opium den of a nightclub for the all-important sleepy scene.

It’s all tinted yellow. The yellow of decay.

Overall: 4 out of 10