Skipp

Had been wanting to revisit this for a while (mind you, I last saw it like 18 years ago or so) as I've gotten into baseball, but especially now that we are expecting not only a possible MLB lockout next year but a new women's professional baseball league at the same time. How exciting! Great film, perhaps the start of Tom Hanks's greatest run as an actor (which, arguably, goes from this to *Toy Story 3*). Everything from here was a step up for him. The same goes for what is really a strong cast overall - Madonna! Rosie O'Donnell! Bill Pullman! Geena Davis! We had it so good. Might possibly be the greatest baseball film ever made.

Stumbled upon it again. Was this supposed to be a proof of concept for something bigger? Because the more I think about it the more I realize the premise is just *Phineas and Ferb *with ducks.

And the cycle continues. *Wizard of Death: Tinman’s Rise* is not the first film made to exploit the world L. Frank Baum created; at this point, everybody’s ridden off of Baum and the 1939 movie, even to the extent that his own great grandson has written his own *Oz* adventures. They all do it in their own ways, too: Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, Liza Minnelli playing the role her mother made famous, lesbian interpretations with musical numbers, animated films with flying monkeys so terrifying that the millennials still get flashbacks. You don’t even need a movie in this day and age to exploit *The Wizard of Oz*; you can gamble at a slots machine with Auntie Em’s face on it, or go see a visual spectacle entirely made in generative AI for one venue in Las Vegas, and society has deemed both of those as perfectly appropriate to do. So, when it comes to making yet another twist on the *Wizard of Oz *story, perhaps the question is this: can you do anything new with Baum’s body of work? The answer, at least to *Wizard of Death*, is… maybe? To its credit, I really like the film’s Tin Man costume. It’s practical, it looks like him, it’s even got the heart clock the Wizard gave him. Contains so many nods to the 1939 film without directly copying it. Good! But that costume is in a setting that is all too typical of the average PDsploitation film: a group of characters go to a place that they’ve never been to before and surprise! The film’s title slasher gets them one by one! **BOOOORING**! Give me something new with this! Something fresh! Are they just copying and pasting new names into the same script over and over? At times you can see a bit of a wink wink nudge nudge towards the source material, an approach these films occasionally take with the material they’re copying from. The lead girl is of course named Dorothy Gale. A character jokes about someone being a good witch or a bad witch. Two characters walk down the yellow brick ro- (a lawyer whispers in my ear) trail. It’s called a trail in the film. But then it strays so far in what could be simple things that it circles back to unsure of what it wants to do, how much it wants viewers in the know. You could name Dorothy Gale, but not her family? You couldn’t have named one of the characters like… Emily? Just to have the chance to call her Auntie Em? And here’s another thing: these films are almost always made by British producers. I never understand this. Is there something about the UK that makes these more possible to make? Are they getting grants or something? You would be mildly pressed to find an American company doing it like this. I would love to get into the heads of the people behind these. This is a very uninteresting film in its base, but a few nice little touches bump it up in comparison to the other Oz knockoffs.