Declared by the U.S. Library of Congress as "the most-watched film in history", I could never hope to count how many times I've seen The Wizard of Oz, whether on television, where it seemed to get a biannual airing in my youth, or on a well-worn VHS copy buried in my family's video collection (taped from one such TV broadcast with the ads paused out).
One common element that each of my childhood viewings share is that the film looked and sounded like absolute balls. Tracking issues, warped audio and inconceivable amounts of static were lovingly familiar watching a 50-year-old film on a 10-year-old VHS.
So it is with great anticipation that I finally received my copy of the Emeral Edition three-disc Blu-ray release this week, coincidentally the same week I'm supposed to watch The Wizard of Oz for my film analysis course. And man, does it ever live up to the expectation.
The first thing I noticed when I put it on is that it looks amazingly sharp thanks to a new 8K digital transfer of the original film, and once Dorothy finds herself in Oz the super-saturated Technicolor really pops out of the screen. Compared to other films of the time (I watched Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on DVD a few months ago), and even previous releases of The Wizard of Oz, it looks fantastic.
Its massive three-disc presentation explores the context and history of the film in great depth, with a multitude of retrospective and archival documentaries, outtakes and deleted scenes and a commentary recorded by historian John Fricke. The second disc contains the TV movie The Dreamer of Oz, starring John Ritter as L. Frank Baum, and there is also a bonus standard-definition DVD with a six-hour (!) documentary called MGM: When the Lion Roars.
This is exactly how Blu-rays should be. I hate nothing more than spending $40 on a BD which contains the film itself and nothing else (except perhaps a theatrical trailer or two). That tactic is extremely popular in the DVD world, where you'll have no trouble finding Goodfellas in full-frame panned and scanned 4:3 with glorious stereo sound. Even The Wizard of Oz's first DVD release contained exactly zero supplemental features.
But to their credit, studios generally seem to have realised that Blu-ray and its 50 GB of available data can be used to create definitive editions of classic films. The Wizard of Oz's Emerald Edition Blu-ray is the perfect example.