Wicked

We completely overwrite their actual lived experience with a fantasy superpower.

It's much easier to stomach the Wicked Witch of the West throwing a fireball than it is to stomach a sixty-year-old widow being thrown into a freezing river because her neighbor's cow died.

That is incredibly dark, but it explains so much about how we consume history.

I really want to paint a picture for you, the listener, to solidify this contrast.

And there is one specific movie and one specific performance responsible for locking this image in place for the rest of time.

The 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film, The Wizard of Oz.

Margaret Hamilton playing the Wicked Witch of the West.

It is almost impossible to overstate the cultural impact of this single piece of character design.

Yes.

Maguire, of course, is the author of Wicked.

He is arguably the definitive modern master of the subversive prequel.

He really is.

Darabont took a novella with a confusing title from a horror author, stripped it down, and used the auditory grammar of cinema to create a universally beloved myth

We see a much more drastic visual rebranding in the adaptation of Wicked

The layers of adaptation here are fascinating.

Gregory Maguire's original novel Wicked is a complex, deeply cynical, mature, political revisionist history of the Wicked Witch of the West.

It is dark and often quite grim

But the 2024 film adaptation with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande isn't grim at all.

Oh, definitely.

The source material grounds this current literary hunger in another defining cultural juggernaut, which is Wicked.

Right, Wicked.

Yeah.

When you look at Gregory Maguire's 1999 novel plus the hit Broadway musical that, you know, just celebrated its 20th birthday-

You just see a total recontextualization of the witch.

Right.

I mean, Maguire basically looked at the Wicked Witch of the West, who was literally just this two-dimensional green villain designed solely to scare kids.

I did a murder board.

I descendants is the product of, uh, decades of sharkification, uh, It goes back to Gregory Maguire's Wicked.

Oh, got it.

Yeah.

This actress also received an Academy Award nomination for her work in a musical film, portraying a character in a musical based on a novel by Gregory Maguire.

Yeah, Gregory Maguire wrote Wicked.

We're talking about Ariana Grande.

All right, number four, the protagonist of this 1976 song is described as someone who, quote, couldn't help thinking that there was a little more to life somewhere else.

Yeah.

I find it interesting when I think about Wicked.

I don't know if you've actually read the book, but it is-

I have not read the book