Saw First Part of WICKED Again…
Don’t Try to Watch the Second Part Without Seeing the First Half…
Kris and I saw it last year, and Kris saw the Broadway play with the original cast. I can say without a doubt that in watching the movie a second time tonight on a big screen, it was even better than the first time. It is simply stunning. Now I almost feel ready for the second half. Almost.
For you writers allergic to copyright and trademark issues, this is NOT the case study to cut your teeth on.
A very strange copyright and trademark history.
L. Frank Baum wrote and published THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ in 1900.
His estate (family trust) licensed movie rights to Warner in the early 1930s. Adaption rights. Warner movie came out in 1939.
Warner is very protective of its copyright on the movie and the trademarks that developed from the movie.
Baum’s original novel long ago dropped into the public domain. The 1939 movie will drop in 2036. Trademarks live on forever, basically.
In 1995 a writer by the name of Maguire wrote a book that was a parody of the movie, carefully avoiding trademarks and knowing the rules of parody very well.
In the early 2000s, Magquire’s book was licensed for a Broadway play and now 20 years later we have adaptions of the play into two movies, basically Act #1 and Act #2.
Bam still has a family trust in existence, or it was as of the early part of this century. L Frank Baum gets no credit in these movies. So generations will think that the 1939 movie and these movies and play will be how OZ started. Baum’s estate has done a shit job at keeping his work alive, not only including OZ books, of which there were a ton, but also his Christmas stories. Very sad. He was a stunning writer.
And if you are wondering why the shoes are not ruby red in these movies, that is a trademark of Warner. In the original book, the shoes were silver. If you have not yet seen the first movie, pay attention to that detail.
But don’t miss these movies.
2 Comments
Joe D'Agnese
I had a weird reaction to the “Wicked” franchise. I read all of the Baum books, starting as a kid, and reread them as an adult, and going on to read many of the ones by Ruth Plumly Thompson. Loved them all, and still have the tall paperbacks with great covers put out by Del Rey. As a (much older) adult, upon the advice of my brother-in-law, I read “Wicked,” and didn’t love it. Hated it, in fact. I could see what he was doing, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the Baum universe. Then, when my preteen niece got hooked on the musical, I saw that. Hated it more.
Here’s where it gets weird. Only this time, walking the theater, I found myself offended that they had dumbed down Maguire’s book. Here I am on Broadway, angry for Maguire, which is an odd response since I didn’t like his book.
Cut to 2025: I have not seen the movies, but maybe I should, because they will probably make me stick up for the stage musical.
-Joe
Kris Rusch
Great post. I’ve been meaning to dig into the copyright history of all of this, because I know that copyright issues held up a movie of Wicked for more than a decade.