Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Jerry Maren: The broken filament to a darkening past


Part of the appeal of “The Wizard of Oz,” at least for those of us who are a certain age, is that it was available to watch just once a year, sometime in the spring, I believe, and like the Charlie Brown Christmas special and the annual airing of “The Ten Commandments” at Easter, once the movie ended that was it for another year. It was a situation one accepted with some melancholy; there was nothing to be done about it, after all, at that time. But it made you watch the movie. You wanted to fully absorb it, because it was going to be a long time before it came around again.

The annual viewings allowed more attentive viewers the opportunity to anticipate when the first commercial would come up (I remember it being just as the tornado was about to arrive, and Prof. Marvel says of Dorothy, “Poor little girl, I hope she gets home all right.”) and to wait with great anticipation for one's favorite lines and scenes.