It’s hard to blame a nation that had barely put the tumultuous “wild west” era to bed for wanting to protect its children from the harsh realities of life, even if the end result was a bloodless, one-dimensional tale. It aspires to being a modernised fairytale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out.”

As he wrote in his original introduction: “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written solely to pleasure children today. L Frank Baum, who first imagined Oz in his hugely popular 1900 novel, wanted to create a wholesome magic world drained of the spikier elements of European fairy tales and therefore more suitable for conservative US audiences.

And yet, in 2021, the story feels like a pretty drab, common-or-garden American children’s fantasy. The songs are splendid, and Garland holds the stage as if she really has cast a spell on us. The original Wizard of Oz is imprinted on our cultural hive memory: the scene in which Judy Garland’s Dorothy emerges from the bland sepia of Kansas into the splendid Technicolor of the magical land of Oz is perhaps equalled only by the one in which Margaret Hamilton’s swivel-eyed, green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West finds herself hideously melting away into nothing. Studios love to remake classic movies because they come with built-in audience awareness. Yet it was a critical and commercial bomb, eventually helping to signal the downfall of the very subgenre it had hoped to propel to greater heights. The 1978 musical The Wiz was intended to capitalise on the popularity of Blaxploitation movies and featured a high-profile, all-black cast including Michael Jackson, Diana Ross and Richard Pryor, with music by Luther Vandross and Quincy Jones. Raimi is an accomplished director of brutally silly cult fantasy films, but his attempt to present a prequel featuring James Franco as the titular wizard lacked sparkle. Sam Raimi is perhaps the most notable recent director to take on the challenge, with Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful, in 2013. Myriad film-makers have attempted to recapture the magic of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s pioneering movie, but none has really been successful. N ews comes this week that Nicole Kassell, award-winning director of the dazzling Watchmen TV show, is to oversee a remake of The Wizard of Oz, the classic 1939 musical starring Judy Garland, for New Line Cinema.

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