By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive to Rense
11-24-25

This season’s “Wizard of Oz” rip-off titled “Wicked: For Good” is a tired Asian version of the foibles and follies of filthy rich pretenders - produced by John M. Chu, whose earlier hit “Crazy Rich Asians” made a worldwide laughing stock of the upper middle-class aspirations of eager social climbers infesting the contemporary western world. The conspiratorial domineering queen bee is performed by the ageless kung-fu heroine Michelle Yeoh, sprucing up the same-old tired act of the glum Wizard (Jeff Goldblum).

Then again the by-now tired plot of Dorothy Gail, the girl who flew in from Kansas aboard a Midwestern tornado, needed updating with compassionate feminism as opposed to brutal witch murders in cold blood by a real frontier woman in the Annie Oakley shooter tradition of the Wild West. Here again, the ladylike manners of the principal female characters – songstress Ariana Grande as Glinda (aka Galinda Arduenna “The Good”, the Wizard’s hostess with the mostess, and the recently installed politically correct feminist witch character El-phaba Tropp (an invention of Jeffrey Maguire’s 1995 copy-cat novel) performed by the Nigerian-British actress Cynthia Errivo) are key to keeping the plot from descending to the level of an alley cat-fight.

A point of note: “Phaba” is not just a contraction of “alphabet” as in soup, but originated as the phonetic Arab pronunciation of a female grower of fava beans. Those culinary treasures are reputedly able throughout the Near East to cure health defects in newborn babies and are thus associated with “good” witchcraft, the midwife’s best secret. (Given the hordes of evil-to-inane witches I’ve encountered after midnight I need to toss back favas into my mouth in lieu of hot dogs and booze.) Elphaba dearest, save me!

Unfixable

There’s actually no saving this umpteenth version of The Wiz on film and stage, especially across the wide world outside of the increasingly isolated and therefore still gullible USA, the global hub of humorless comedies. Most sane residents outside the USA shudder at the thought of witches as heroines or public-relations savvy despots like the Wiz – one of the last one in the cruel rest-of-the-world being the late dictator Gaddafi – skewered in his most tender bodily regions by the CIA under orders from President Barack Obama, that best friend of the Third World. Dictatorial crooks in the real world of this brutal planet (as opposed to polite and merciful Oz) do not die of old age in bed nor do they make an escape with Treasury ingots by hot-air balloon like Glinda’s hokey boss (The Wiz aka Jeff Goldblum). Take note of that traditional role-casting my amigos, Senor Maduro and son – your family drama would make for an outstanding Telenovela series ending with a bang and fall of aircraft parts thanks to the soon-unemployed Wiz.

Here is where the Americanized John Chu errs with a traditionally maudlin story line of sorority sisters instead of doing the right thing with a massive dose of ancient Chinese vengeance, for instance winged apes and angry wolves ripping the cynically cruel Wizard into bloody shreds over the rainbow to the rejoicing of bats, pigeons and angels while air-freighting Glinda to an alligator-infested swamp near Florida’s Universal theme park. “Oz: Revolt of the Ferocious Beasts” would have made a far more popular movie, especially among eager audiences across the downtrodden Third World – in places like the Congo, Sudan and coming soon to cocky Brazil: Liberation as ultimate Vengeance followed by American military occupation. Unfortunately, the current version of Oz has flopped in foreign markets, which have zero interest in Disney-style girl dolls instead of magnetic sexy broads with frontal ferocity.

Shadows of the Real Dorothy

The utter failure to provide for a worse future than the horrific past is the fly in the Wicked ointment. Every sensible regime prepares for the inevitable with the (biological) production of the next-in-line monster with back-up from his cruel fascistic younger bro’. What was the Wiz thinking or drinking? He was losing his acute faculties of mass repression and hoarding of fake gold (his rows of yellow lilies tinting the clay bricks of his cheap but impressive royal highway aka The Yellow Brick Road).

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings or at least in a jungle hideout, Glinda’s fecund rival witch Elphaba with big breasts and wide hips is munching fava beans in expectation of child-bearing with the much-needed supporting role of a tough but lonely British trooper, itching to be the disloyal captain of the royal guard to capture his dark-complexioned poster girl while eliminating his idiotic boss. Trouble is brewing in Paradise with the howl of wolves and so the PG-rating for Wicked should have advised mom or dad to deploy the palms of their hands over young eyes during the more lurid scenes focused on Adriana’s undersized breasts. That slight deficiency despite its massive hint of disappointment had its upside of not diminishing my fond enthusiasm for her latent untapped capabilities besides high-pitch singing.

The question naturally arises: How can the mad dictator abandon Lady Glinda without the manly courtesy of royal impregnation, which would have raised the hostess-with-the-leastest to the enviable position of Queen Mother? OK, the original Oz stage-plays of the early 20th Century were penned by L. Frank Baum, an author with proper Midwestern reserve aka avoidance of frontal nudity along with lesser facts of life. Munchkin children are birthed inside cabbages, right? In a movie set mistake neither carrots or cabbages nor sauerkraut (in event of a bad night) were shown growing in the royal estate, peasant gardens or put on the dinner tables of the downtrodden hungry Munchkins (losers who munch too much of the harvest in the opinion of their royal masters). Eternal greatness for works of art, including film, depends on such fine details – which doesn’t say a lot for Wicked’s avoidance of hard facts on the ground. For instance, the Wiz knew well his lack of an incompetent successor. By contrast, Colonel Gadhafi of Libya had – count them – 10 children, two being adoptive, and still failed to ensure his familial line of succession against cruel NATO bombardment. What was the Wizard thinking when he wasn’t drinking out of his tiny flask? The near-total lack of standard human behavior is why OZ remains a non-credible happy fantasy set in another, much different universe than ours without any chance of survival beyond this coming weekend.

And the strangeness of that strange land renders the closing scene of a miraculously surviving Elphaba – who narrowly evaded nasty Dorothy’s ax – to escape with her British toy-boy lover into the dunes of another story reminiscent of “Dune”. Much like the unsubtle Bruce Lee, Director Chu still has a lot to learn about the intricacies of story-line in film production besides imbecilic kung-fu action and fool rich Asians. Despite the incomplete plot lines, this rehash of Oz at least has a racially diverse cast as opposed to the 1977 Broadway spectacle “The Wiz” featuring the adorable Diana Ross, a questionable Michael Jackson and the coke-mutilated Richard Pryor, which due to its exclusionism was an infringement on the civil rights of other minority actors (and nowadays whites who are now an unrecognized minority) – as in two million-plus wrongs don’t make up for everyone else’s right to appear on the equal opportunity Boob Tube.

Random Points of Discomfort

Animal rights get a huge boost from this presentation of endangered giraffes, warthogs, parrots, rabbits, vicious flying monkeys and other inhabitants of Dorothy’s Eden, thus making Wicked: For Good a notable contender of an annual award from PETA, since I failed even to spot meat on the menu in the Wiz’s palace, which could account for his slender hostess’s bare-bones fat-free figure. Excuse me, but a little extra weight on a feminine figure is insurance for grandiose midnight assignations under the cover of palatial darkness and thick quilts pulled over a poster bed.

As for the curious phenomenon of breast suppression: This revisionist WOZ starring a truly frightening specimin of female anorexia is the very height of slander against a naïve and buxom Judy Garland, who reached the ripe old age of 13 at the start of filming of the original MGM color movie (released in 1939), whereas her challenger for the juicy role was her arch-rival Shirley Temple some 7 years younger. To hide precocious womanhood, Judy’s domineering mother, therefore, pumped her with amphetamines aka pep pills, wrapped a corset around her waist and tied bandages over her scrumptious budding breasts – all of which combined to transform her into a miserable alcoholic who died at age 45 in 1969. You might conclude poor little Dorothy was put under the spell of a witchcraft diet of herbs and small snifters of blood somewhere under the Rainbow.

The pair of spooky witchcraft books – toward the film’s end – are remembered as the Grimmorie (grimoire in feudal French, which translates as a book of magic), which were reputedly a collection of magic spells passed down through the ages since the esoteric findings of King Solomon – without doubt through the secretive aid of the Queen of Sheba, a mysterious sorceress from the gold-rich land of Ophir. Besides incantations summoning angels and demons, the mysterious book contained protective defenses against hostile spirits and their exotic weaponry such as poisons and curses aka hexes. The biblical King of Kings added to that assemblage of ancient lore with his research into the religious practices of powerful tribes that surrounded his kingdom, thereby incurring the wrath of God against contraband witchcraft of foreign demons, which were preserved and passed on in the Grimmorie.

The rather strange practices and weirdness of Oz – as seen from the long prospective of the Grimmorie - is in all likelihood referential to the Oz series writer Frank Baum and his wife Maud’s keen interest in Theosophy and mystery religions along with paranormal events. In this dark light of “Christianity Plus”, the Wizard of Oz is the role model for sanctimonius hokem as practiced by zealots, pastors and mercenary churchmen – in the Elmer Gantry style of religious con artists abounding across America of that era, who although lesser in sheer numbers remain a noxious influence over religious thought today.

Given this background on the mercenary interests of preachers of falsehood and pulpit-sanctioned immorality, TWOZ series is a warning against being taken in by “religious” hucksters. It is the displaced innocent and naïve child Dorothy who assumes the unthinkable task of ripping the mask from an all-powerful Wiz, thereby enlightening the oppressed munchkins – the common people relegated to near-slavery by a corrupt self-serving elite. In Baum’s original story, the witches are part and parcel of the corrupt Establishment, spreading public fear of complaint and revolt among the heavily exploited commoners along with rejection of genuine religious belief.

As the studio behind the current revival of Oz, with its blatant rejection of the anti-witchcraft zealot Dorothy, the deeper motivation – philosophical and otherwise - of the Universal Studios media operation comes into question with no immediately apparent answer, at least not quite yet. The corporate leadership team is notably not forthright about their individual religious affiliations and educational backgrounds, which of course is a troubling matter, indeed.

For now, at least, the strange biases expressed in the latest Oz movies indicate a clear tolerance of witchcraft and rejection of Christian values - Catholic and Protestant values – and Jewish heritage and even simple faith in its world struggle between species, an indicator of secular evolutionism – all indicators of systemic atheism at best and at worst of a deeply concealed idolatry aka Satanism and from that barely discernable pin-point straight down to the depths of Hell. Who am I to point the holy-roller finger? Certainly not a lion heart warrior nor an unbreakable man of metal in Dorothy’s entourage but more of a straw effigy – a scare crow - easily fired up and a foe of annoying crows, my professional calling being putting facts on paper into print.

What is truly amazing after more than a century of publication and film, “The Wizard of Oz” still has profound relevance to the contemporary human condition. Yes, indeed: “Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true!” More fiction than proven fact, that’s a lot better than the alternative of perennial depression.