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How Many ‘Wizard of Oz’ Projects Are Headed to TV? Would You Believe Five? Here’s the List, Including the Newest Addition

Oct 14, 2013  •  Post A Comment

Yet anther high-profile "Wizard of Oz" TV project is in the works, bringing the total at this point to five. Deadline.com reports that the latest addition to the list is a Lifetime project.

Lifetime is working on "Red Brick Road," described as a "Game of Thrones"-type take on the classic story, the story reports.

"In the classic 1939 feature, when Dorothy set off for the Emerald City, she followed the Yellow Brick Road," the piece notes. "But among the yellow bricks at Dorothy’s feet, there was also a swirl of red bricks. They’ve been there the whole time in plain sight. Unnoticed. Unexplored. Which raises the question — just where do they go?"

In the Lifetime project, Dorothy will go to the "oldest, darkest and most dangerous parts of Oz," the story notes.

"’Red Brick Road’ is the fifth Oz-themed project to land a network sale in the past three months," Deadline reports, noting that the project joins "NBC’s drama ‘Emerald City,’ a dark reimagining of the classic tale of Oz in the vein of ‘Game of Thrones’; CBS’s ‘Dorothy,’ a medical soap inspired by the characters and themes from ‘The Wizard of Oz’; the CW’s ‘Dorothy Must Die,’ a revisionist take on L. Frank Baum’s classic based on the upcoming young adult novel by Danielle Paige; and Syfy’s miniseries ‘Warriors of Oz’ from director Timur Bekmambetov, a fantasy-action reimagining of the classic story."

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One Comment

  1. A word of advice to the networks, and everyone involved in such projects. Stop… just stop. Now, please!
    How lazy and unimaginative. The world doesn’t need filmic “re-imaginings” (dark or otherwise) of classic fantasy literature.
    How well do those things work? Not very, if rating and BO returns are any indicators. Grimm, Once Upon a Time, and Sleepy Hollow being the exceptions… although our family agrees OUaT appears to be wanting so far this season. I hope (but I’m not holding my breath) that Sleepy Hollow steps beyond its rather limited, apocalyptic, end-of-the-world storyline. We had our fill of that with the X-files and Millennium… and that was before the millennium came and went.
    “Re-imagining” (“revisioning”, or “improving” as some like to delude themselves into thinking) is what (along with a really poor title change) killed Disney’s John Carter… what should have been a classic fantasy adventure story made in the vein of the timeless 1938 Adventures of Robin Hood. But no… the filmmakers had to give us unnecessary details, “backstory”, and “character depth” that made John Carter a whiny reluctant warrior instead of portraying him as a character of heroic outlook.
    Rather than the ever-continuing, soap-operish character development where characters go thru constant existentialist angst without ever learning anything, we need exciting new stories with new characters in new worlds with an emphasis on story, plots, and accomplishment.
    What the world needs is “new imaginings”, not rehashes of old ones.

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