Vital Viewing (Hex and Violence Edition)

 

Halloween is not too far off, and what better symbol of the holiday than a witch? Here's one of cinema's scariest. If fact, she just might be the gold (or mold) standard for cinematic scary witches:

Did you notice how the Tin Man put out the fire with his oil can hat? That's because a fire needs oxygen or else it's likely to die out. Nice to know that even in a land of witches and talking scarecrows, the basic laws of science still apply. 

By the time she died at age 82 in 1985, Cleveland native Margaret Hamilton had lived through decades of TV showings of 1939's The Wizard of Oz, and was well-aware that her Wicked Witch of the West character had become a cultural icon. It didn't seem to bother her any. Also, cultural icons often attract the attention of other cultural icons, which seems to be the case in this clip that pairs Hamilton with a man who was considered anything but wicked: 

  

Mister Rogers seems positively gleeful at the prospect of this sweet old lady transforming herself into a wicked witch. Walk on the wild side, Fred!

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood wasn't the only 1970s TV instance of Margaret Hamilton donning the pointy black hat and the rest of the black ensemble. Here she is alongside a man with a wit so wicked it could have turned Dorothy's face as red as her ruby slippers:

Nice place for the clip to end, huh? I take what YouTube gives me, folks. I did see this special when I was in high school, but I've long since forgotten what kind of truck driver Paul Lynde turned into. Since I don't want you to feel deprived, let's just say this came next:

Betty White, bless her soul, got her wish.  

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 Now, let's look at a different witch. Well, I thought she was a witch at first because there's a black cat, and the lady herself is dressed in black, but that's where the similarity ends:

And I don't care if she's a witch or not. She's still magical.

Mitzi Gaynor 1931-2024

Quips and Quotations (Gale Force Edition )

The elements in The Wizard of Oz powerfully fill a void that exists inside many children. For kids of a certain age, home is everything, the center of the world. But over the rainbow, dimly guessed at, is the wide earth, fascinating and terrifying. There is a deep fundamental fear that events might conspire to transport the child from the safety of home and strand him far away in a strange land. And what would he hope to find there? Why, new friends, to advise and protect him. And Toto, of course, because children have such a strong symbiotic relationship with their pets that they assume they would get lost together.

--Film critic Roger Ebert

 Some hifalutin' talk there. So just what is this Wizard of Oz that Ebert's so gung ho about? Let's look at the trailer (by the way, don't be fooled by the Warner Brothers logo in the bottom right-hand corner. It was made at MGM, but Ted Turner, who owned the once mighty studio for about three minutes in the 1980s, sold it off but kept the film library, before selling it and just about everything else he owned to Time Warner.) 

Oh, all right, Rog, you win. I'll give it a thumbs up.

Now, I got another quote for ya:

Let bygones be bygones.

--Anonymous.