We will return you to your regularly scheduled report on The Wiz next time, but in doing research for it, I was reminded of an interesting phenomenon.
Superman, the granddaddy of all superheroes who celebrates his 75th anniversary this year, has been depicted in nearly every medium: comic books, novels, movie serials, radio series, motion pictures, live-action and animated television shows, and even the Broadway stage. Within that time, many performers from one version of the story will turn up in others.
For instance, the silver screen's first Superman, Kirk Alyn, played Lois Lane's father Sam in Superman: The Movie. No less than three actresses, Noel Neill, Phyllis Coates, and Teri Hatcher, have played both Lois Lane and her mother Ellen (or sometimes Ella). Jack Larson has played two incarnations of Jimmy Olsen (in The Adventures of Superman and Lois & Clark) and bar owner Bibbo in Superman Returns, while Terrence Stamp has played Kryptonian arch criminal General Zod (in Superman II) and the voice of Superman's father Jor-El (on Smallville).
You see this also in various versions of The Lord of the Rings. English actors Michael Graham Cox and Peter Woodthorpe played, respectively, Boromir and Gollum first in the animated Lord of the Rings motion picture, then in a BBC Radio series. That same series starred Ian Holm as Frodo Baggins, nephew of Bilbo Baggins; Holm went on to play the elder hobbit in the trio of epic motion pictures by Peter Jackson.
There's a bit of that goes on as regards Oz. Ray Bolger, who never quite left the Scarecrow behind, played the character many more times, mainly in recorded adaptations of other Oz books (including, not unnaturally, The Scarecrow of Oz) as well as in "The Wizard of Oz-Mond." This was a musical skit on The Donny & Marie Osmond Show in which the character was given the name Samuel Solomon Scarecrow.
Margaret Hamilton also revisited Oz, though in a switch from the Witch, she voiced Dorothy's Aunt Em in the animated movie Journey Back to Oz. In that film, the Scarecrow was given voice by Mickey Rooney, who many years later portrayed the Wizard in a touring stage adaptation of the MGM Wizard.
You get the idea.
Somewhat similar is the phenomenon of people from various Oz productions interacting with those from others, in some cases before one or the other of them had even been in said productions. For instance, on her variety television show, Judy Garland (MGM's Dorothy Gale) had as a guest a popular singer named Lena Horne, who would go on to play Glinda the Good in the film adaptation of The Wiz.
Submitted for your approval are these photographs (by no means an exhaustive collection, I'm sure) of various intermingling Ozites past, present, and future.
Comments