Saturday, March 11, 2017

There's no place like . . . Izmir





Turkish adaptations of classic movies are always particularly bizarre. Well, bizarre to US maybe, though not to the average Turk. 

As with most of these things, there are no subtitles, but we can kind of guess at the action. I mean, if you haven't seen The Wizard of Oz five thousand times - But I guarantee you, you've never seen it quite like this.

Instead of Over the Rainbow, the movie opens with this:





Let it never be said that corners were cut in this production, but the entire storm sequence is done in animation. Calling it animation is stretching a point, as very little moves in it. The figure of Dorothy is dragged across the screen while the credits roll (or blink on and off). 






The actual storm scene is a bit incomprehensible. It collapses 20 minutes or so of film into half a minute of cheap cartoon.





From what I am able to make out, Mama doesn't make much effort to get Dorothy into the storm cellar, which is located INSIDE the house.

Like the original, this is a musical. Sort of. Sometimes the characters just get up and spontaneously dance. The music is so strange, however. Some of it is traditional Turkish stuff, I guess; some sounds like Little House on the Prairie, but then this thing breaks in:






I wouldn't advise watching the whole thing. I didn't. It's more fun to skip through it. You'll find an atrocity at every point.


P. S. The screenshots from this are uniformly hideous, so I must include a few of them.














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