In our series "Catching Up On", we watch a classic movie that is new to us, and we discuss how we experienced the movie with fresh eyes and try to understand its historical context and cultural impact.

This week we watch "The Wizard of Oz", a fantasy musical from 1939 directed by Victor Fleming and starring Judy Garland, Frank Morgan and Margaret Hamilton, about Dorothy who is transplanted by a tornado from Kansas to the magical land of Oz and has to find a way home while evading the schemes of the Wicked Witch.

We talk about how we experienced the Wizard of Oz as someone who has no childhood nostalgia for it and how it compares to what we had picked up through cultural osmosis, go over the highlights of the nightmarish production of the movie that is terrifying even by early Hollywood standards, whether the movie works as a story on its own merits and where breaking the usual rules of storytelling works for the movie and where it doesn't, whether the Wicked Witch is a good villain, and whether we would show this movie to our hypothetical children, and much more.

Check out our other fantasy movie reviews:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5O7bUTf5FmPBrVRUFKRgJo