We start in a mode which can’t help but recall Victor Fleming’s 1939 opening, in black-and-white academy frame 3D with Oscar (James Franco), a smarmy philandering conjurer billed as ‘Oz the Great and Powerful’, griping about his lowly tent show career when he wants to be a combination of Harry Houdini and Thomas Edison. Now, Sam Raimi’s expansive take on Oz has to jostle for attention not only with earlier film versions (remember The Wiz and The Muppets’ Wizard Of Oz?) but Gregory Maguire’s outstanding novel Wicked and it hugely successful stage musical adaptation, which similarly explore pre-Dorothy Oz but concentrate on the early days of another key player in Emerald City politics. A generation ago, Disney made Return To Oz, a darker sequel which drew on Baum’s other works but found it hard to escape from the shadow of Over The Rainbow, Judy Garland and the ruby slippers. Frank Baum’s multi-volume Oz series of books, this big fantasy is essentially a prequel to the famous 1939 film of The Wizard Of Oz, which made several significant changes to Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz.
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