Excellent rant on both Wizard of Oz and Wicked

Kalinara has a great takedown of both the movie Wizard of Oz and Wicked’s shotgun critique of it. There’s spoilers for both, although I only throw that in because of Wicked, decade old movies don’t get spoiler warnings.

But really, the only real evidence we have to her evil is 1) what the munchkins say, which is awfully one-sided and they cheer when someone is crushed to death in front of them. 2) She’s got winged monkeys and a seekrit hideout. As opposed to some carnival guy who lives in an Emerald castle with weird underlings inclined to give people makeovers who he rules via trickery with giant machines. 3) She attacked her sister’s killer, which okay, really isn’t kosher, but obviously given the ruling people of Oz, she wasn’t going to get any sort of justice. And 4) She’s ugly.

Whereas, in the movie, Glinda and the Wizard convinced a young girl that the only way she could go home was to KILL SOMEONE. When she had the way home all the time...

I think in the end, this is why I don’t have any interest in Wicked. I
mean, it’s an interesting story (from what I’ve been told), but
ultimately, I tend to think there’s more than enough support for a
pro-Wicked Witch, re-viewing the movie at least, without changing or
adding a lot of things out of nowhere.

Read the whole thing. I think for the movie writers, this is just one of those cases where they figured something was intrinsically evil based on what it was. I’ve had similar thoughts about a level in Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles where you just break into this monsters house and kill the family and the staff. There may have been some setup before hand that I missed but it looked pretty dang weird.

My personal favorite parody of the Wizard of Oz was the one by Futurama’s Tales of Interest. Managed to hit all the obvious jokes while still having a fair number of surprises.