Oz News

It's been awhile since I blogged here about something besides the podcast... But I have some updates.

First is a sad one as late last month, we learned that Robin Olderman had passed away. I heard later that she had her family nearby and knew it was coming. I'm sure she also knew the good wishes of her friends in the Oz community were with her.

Robin was a lifelong Oz fan and longtime member of the International Wizard of Oz Club, who told me when I interviewed her for the podcast that when she first saw the MGM Wizard of Oz, she said aloud "That's not right!" in the theater when Glinda introduced herself as the Good Witch of the North. She wrote many pieces for The Baum Bugle and served as editor for Oziana for several years, even writing a few pieces for it.

But Robin made a lot of friends, particularly at Oz events and conventions. During my years at Winkie Con/Oz Con International, she attended every year. I've heard how she would "adopt" some friends and become very close with them. Her friendship with Oz artist Rob Roy MacVeigh was legendary enough that the two were immortalized as a caveman and his wife by Dick Martin in his Ozmapolitan of Oz.

At OzCon 2015, she happened to attend a video screening room I had provided a DVD of short Oz subjects to be shown. Part of them was my color tinting of the 1910 Wonderful Wizard of Oz film, and she later told me she enjoyed my treatment of the film. During our live commentary of Return to Oz with a handful of the cast and crew, Robin whispered her own commentary to me. It was this that led me to ask her to appear on the podcast, which I'm glad I did as it preserved her voice for other fans to hear. My title "Robin Olderman Spills The Beans" came directly from the candid nature of her conversation. She'll be missed.

We also have some home video news. If you recall, we noted that 2013's home video editions of MGM's The Wizard of Oz dropped the classic documentary The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The Making of a Movie Classic, hosted by Angela Lansbury. It had been replaced with a new documentary, and seemingly, producer Jack Haley Jr. even sued about it as the new documentary seemed to derive content from the old one, plus with it dropped, no royalties were being paid any further, and with it no longer being a bonus feature, there were not many other avenues for it to be released.

Well, Warner Brothers seems to have rectified this with a solo release of the documentary on DVD in the Warner Archive collection, the manufacture on demand branch of Warner Home Video for titles with limited market appeal. It complements the special features very well, even with some repetition. Anyone with a DVD or Blu-Ray of MGM's The Wizard of Oz from 1999, 2005 or 2009 (with the exception of some DVD editions) already has it, though I'm sure that there are collectors who will pick up this release regardless.

Discotek—a home video producer specializing in anime and other Japan-originated properties—will finally be releasing the complete Wonderful Wizard of Oz anime series from PanMedia, using Cinar's English version to home video on August 29. No preorders are live. I am curious of the disc count of the DVD edition, as there are 52 episodes. However, they will also release it on SDBD: Standard Definition Blu-Ray, a Blu-Ray disc that uses DVD quality video (usually because no higher quality version can be made), but can take advantage of the large capacity of a Blu-Ray to hold a lot more content, which could easily fit all 52 episodes on a single dual-layer disc with a good amount of space left for some modest bonuses, which haven't been announced either.

The series has a lot of fans, so I know many people will be glad to hear that the English version is available on physical home video at last.

Diskotek has also released the first episode of the series in Japanese with English subtitles to YouTube, reportedly to "gauge interest." Whether this affects the home video edition or if they're considering somehow also releasing a Japanese language version with English subtitles, I'd suggest fans give it a watch or two, drop a like on YouTube, and share it with their friends.