NEW YORK -- Lorna Luft, Judy Garland's daughter, stood on the stage of Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center last week and beamed as she introduced The Wizard of Oz to the New York Film Festival: "Isn't this wonderful -- 70 years later!"
Luft, along with five original little people who played Munchkins in the famous MGM musical, then sat down to watch an immaculately restored version of the 1939 family classic. "This is an extraordinary film," Luft said before she left the stage to help guide the elderly Munchkins to their seats. "I think it is one of the most perfect films ever made."
The perfect film may never been seen again in that perfect way on a big screen. So we will have to "make do" with home entertainment. Warner Bros. has just dramatically improved that experience. As Oz author L. Frank Baum penned in his original storybook in 1900, this really is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
The wonderment begins with the film itself in both box set versions. There is one in standard DVD and one in Blu-ray. Both are called The Wizard of Oz: 70th Anniversary Ultimate Collector's Edition. Both are housed in large green boxes and boast major bonus materials, recycled and new, along with collectibles, including an Oz anniversary watch. But the focus should be on picture and sound: The restoration is so spectacular that it looks terrific on DVD and absolutely awe-inspiring in Blu-ray.
Meanwhile, there is a cheaper alternative in DVD only: The two-disc 70th Anniversary Special Edition. It comes in a silver sleeve and has the same restored film. There are no collectibles. It does have an excellent selection of extras -- most recycled from past DVDs -- but there are obviously not as many as in the box sets. Among these basics is a group commentary led by Oz historian John Fricke, documentaries on the restoration, Angela Lansbury's quick hits on Oz stars, her storybook reading of Oz excerpts, deleted scenes and a variety of docs, including on the effects tricks for the famous tornado.
In contrast, the DVD box set is a five-disc offering, with one disc reserved for the digital copy (both iTunes and Windows compatible). The box set adds extras not in the two-disc effort. Among recycled material is the doc on the original author, L. Frank Baum: The Man Behind the Curtain. Among new material is a doc on the Walk of Fame star for the Munchkins. There are five Oz-related silent films and one Technicolor cartoon, two making their DVD debut. These early films range from Baum's own 51-minute, very bizarre drama, The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914), to Larry Semon's utterly fascinating, 72-minute, hand-tinted feature, The Wizard of Oz (1925).
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The Blu-ray set has two discs in high definition containing everything you get in the four discs in the DVD set. The quality of the material varies, depending on source, and there is one weird problem: Scenes from the movie excerpted in the extras expand to widescreen and should not. It's a technical problem Warner should have solved but didn't. This does not happen with the standard DVDs.
Exclusive to the Blu-ray box, there is also a flipper disc in standard DVD that contains the four parts of a massive 1992 doc, MGM: When the Lion Roars.
The truth is that The Wizard of Oz is a timeless classic that deserves the best treatment it can get on DVD and Blu-ray -- and it may have just reached its pinnacle as home entertainment.
