This is why I hate, hate, hate, HATE the 2003 print of The Wizard of Oz so much. They just kinda slapped a sharpness filter on it and called it good.
Thing is, The Wizard of Oz was shot on film that is objectively garbage. It was in the early days of mass-market movies, it was one of the first films to be shot in color (it was literally one of the first 30 filmed that way), like we didn’t know shit yet about how to make film. It was heavy, brittle, extremely flammable, and you could damage it by looking at it cross-eyed. But the filming crew knew this. And so they used that to their advantage. Here’s an example. I pulled both these screenshots off YouTube, because I refuse to have the abomination that is the 2003 print or 4K rerelease in my house and I’m still waiting for a restored version rather than a remastered version, but, uh. Autistic. Special interest. I gotcha covered.
So I’m 90% sure the screenshot below is from the 1989 50th anniversary. What I want you to look at specifically is that field behind Dorothy, and where her feet are.
You can see that the backdrop is painted if you look at it for a bit, but it’s not super-obvious where the line is unless you stare at it for awhile. This shot in motion is rather quick and also the munchkins are providing a lot of movement, so your eyes are going to skate right over it. And the perspective tricks with the painting are good enough that, again, in motion, you don’t really register that it’s a painting.
This bullshit is the 2003 print.
It’s extremely obvious now that whole backdrop is painted. And you can see exactly where the backdrop meets the floor. You can also start to see details that shouldn’t be at all obvious, like how they switched paint colors for the Yellow Brick Road. (Look just above Dorothy’s hand.) And don’t even get me started on the guard in the tower and how the brightness filter makes that red coat super-distracting from what we’re supposed to be looking at, which is Dorothy waving goodbye.
(And if you think this is bad? You should see the 4K release. Except don’t do that. I saw it and wanted to cry. What the fuck did they do to Oz.)
This movie shouldn’t be in HD or 4K. It wasn’t meant to be in HD or 4K. In fact it was specifically designed with the limitations of its own time period in mind, and trying to apply modern film technique to it damages the original creative intent. Literally the only way to remove the bumps and warts from this movie isn’t to slap it in 4K and say it’s “better,” it’s to give it the Labyrinth 30th Anniversary treatment: go back in with an airbrush and lovingly, carefully go frame-by-frame to edit those areas where higher screen resolutions make things like the flying monkeys’ suspension wires more obvious. They used the low film quality to their advantage to mask that shit! You can’t just sharpen it all up and call it “better!” You have to look at the original creative intent and sometimes that means just leaving shit alone!
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