Fox remakes The Wizard of Oz

There's an apocryphal story about Shirley Temple being up for consideration to play the part of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, a role that ultimately went to Judy Garland. Of course, there was no way this was ever going to happen as producer Arthur Freed was at MGM and Temple was at Fox, and Freed had Garland under contract at MGM. It's possible that Temple wanted to play Dorothy -- what female child star wouldn't? -- and this got blown up into the story we have today. In any case, Fox responded by finding a similar property to utilize Temple. That movie has been in the FXM rotation recently: The Blue Bird. Not having done a post on it before, I recorded it and recently sat down to watch it.

The movie, like The Wizard of Oz, opens up with a scene in black and white (although not sepiatone). Temple plays Mytyl, a young girl living in a rural part of Central Europe during the early 1800s when Napoleon was on the march. Mytyl and her kid brother Tyltyl (Johnny Russell) are out in the forest when they capture a beautiful songbird. They pass by Angela (Sybil Jason), a sick girl, on their way home, and selfish Mytyl doesn't give Angela the bird.

Mytyl is increasingly unhappy, with her parents (Spring Byington and Russell Hicks) admonishing her. Things get worse for Mytyl when Dad learns that Napoleon is on the move again and all the able-bodied men are going to be called up to fight. Both kids go to bed in a very glum mood, but amazingly, both of them have the same exact dream.

Not only that, but as in The Wizard of Oz, they dream in Technicolor and get visited by a fairy, this one named Berylune (Jessie Ralph). She tells the two kids to look for the bluebird of happiness, and sends them off to a magical land to try to find the bird. Meanwhile, several characters from the kids' real life show up in this land, although where in The Wizard of Oz the characters were changed from humans to animals, in The Blue Bird the characters become human instead of the family dog and cat. Tylo the dog (Eddie Collins) is loyal and tries to help the two kids, while Tylette (Gale Sondergaard), the family cat, is mischievous and tries to thwart the children.

Mytyl and Tyltyl visit a series of places, starting with their dead grandparents, who come back to life because people are thinking about them, which is supposed to impart a message on both the two kids in the movie as well as any kid watching. Never forget your elders, and they'll always live on in your heart, if not biologically. The kids also suffer the danger of a forest fire, see a land of great wealth, and finally, the place that must have been the inspiration for Fox to make For Heaven's Sake a decade later: children waiting to be born.

If Fox had made The Blue Bird before The Wizard of Oz, it might be better remembered today. But watching The Blue Bird, it's impossible not to make comparisons to the more famous movie, and come away less than impressed in all of those comparisons. The Wizard of Oz is one of those movies where the MGM gloss really pays off. Here, in The Blue Bird, everything feels like it's being done on a tight budget, with the result that it feels like there's just something missing. Mytyl is also a heck of a lot less likeable than Dorothy, which doesn't help matters.

Still, The Blue Bird should be watched, at the very least to study what can go wrong when one studio tries to imitate the classic results of another studio's film.