December 2, 2025 • 66 mins
Episode Description:
Just saw Wicked: For Good (Wicked Part 2) and wondering what it all means? The sequel to 2024's blockbuster Wicked movie starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande delivers the pure magic and joy of Wicked's fairytale storytelling while also serving as a mirror reflecting our world's darkest patterns of persecution. Join hosts Sarah Jack and Josh Hutchinson for a spoiler-filled celebration of this magical film as they explore both the enchantment of the story and the surprisingly relevant themes hiding behind flying monkeys, sparkly shoes, and that iconic green skin.
From Gregory Maguire's beloved novel to the Broadway phenomenon with music by Stephen Schwartz, Wicked has captured hearts worldwide. This sequel delivers stunning musical numbers, an enchanting fairytale ending, and America's greatest modern fairy story—while also offering profound insights about our world. Discover why Elphaba, Glinda, Fiyero, Dorothy, and the Wizard of Oz create a story that's both entertainment magic and meaningful social commentary.
From the breathtaking songs like "For Good" to the animals in cages vault scene that's impossible to look away from, this episode explores how the Wicked movie with Jonathan Bailey and Jeff Goldblum delights audiences while helping us understand who gets labeled "wicked"—and who decides.
What You'll Explore:
The pure magic and joy of Wicked's fairytale storytelling
Standout musical moments and how the Broadway songs translate to film
The chilling parallels between Oz's animal persecution and real-world witch hunts
Elphaba and Glinda's friendship, sisterhood, and the choices that change everything
Why the treatment of talking animals in Oz mirrors modern oppression
How Dorothy's witch hunt against Elphaba reflects real accusation patterns
Why Nessarose, Boq, and Fiyero's transformations matter for understanding persecution
How the word "witch" is weaponized as a political tool today
Whether movies like Wicked help or harm the fight against modern persecution
Deep dive into Cynthia Erivo's Elphaba and Ariana Grande's Glinda
This is the next installment in our ongoing look at Wicked and Oz! If you haven't already, be sure to check out our previous episodes "Witchcraft and Stagecraft: Unmasking Wicked's Magic with Paul Laird and Jane Barnette" and "Wicked Movie: The Making of a Witch" to explore how this beloved story connects to real witch trial history and contemporary persecution.
Content Warning: This episode includes movie spoilers and discusses themes of persecution, banishment, and contemporary witch hunts affecting millions globally.
Ready to see beyond the emerald curtain? This isn't your childhood Oz anymore—and that's exactly the point. But it's also a wicked good time.
For more information about ending witch hunts or to get involved, visit EndWitchHunts.org
Keywords: Wicked For Good, Wicked Part 2, Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jonathan Bailey, Jeff Goldblum, Elphaba, Glinda, Fiyero, Dorothy, Wizard of Oz, animals in Oz, Wicked sequel, Broadway musical, Stephen Schwartz, Gregory Maguire, Wicked songs, For Good, Wicked movie explained, witch hunts, Wicked themes, Wicked analysis
Links
Watch Episode: Witchcraft and Stagecraft: Unmasking Wicked’s Magic with Paul Laird and Jane Barnette
Watch Episode: Wicked Movie: The Making of a Witch
Sign the Amnesty International Petition for Ghana Anti Witchcraft Legislation
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Which movie that opened ten daysago has already made nearly $400
million, according to Variety magazine?
It's a Which movie? Wicked for good.
This movie is chock full of parallels to modern life and
(00:20):
society. It's herrendable what the
parallels are to, but we'll dig into those as we go along.
So welcome to the thing about witch hunts.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. I'm Sarah Jack.
Today we're going to discuss thenew film Wicked for good.
(00:41):
Here is your spoil alert warning.
We're going to dig right in there and pull out all the
layers of this wonderful film. We're definitely going to dig
deep, but why are we talking about this today, Sarah?
We've created a space here wherewe have talked about beliefs,
magical beliefs, religious beliefs, supernatural beliefs,
(01:04):
witches who's oppressed and popular belief and culture all
around witches. So this hits all of those
bullets. And we've been researching and
synthesizing these themes in thepast and present context for a
combined almost 300 episodes between our two podcasts, with
(01:28):
over 150 specialized experts coming on the show to talk to us
about what's going on in the world, why we accuse people of
witchcraft, and what we do to them.
Wicked for good, Josh. What did you love about it?
My favorite thing about this movie, The sequel, is that this
(01:48):
focuses on the animal situation and I just, I love seeing all
the animals and a sucker for a talking animal in a movie.
So I love Dulce Bear, I love Doctor Dillamond, I love all the
animals in it, and I am a reallybig monkey freak.
(02:10):
You could probably call me. I just adore monkeys.
And even if they're being mean monkeys and flying around
scaring people, it's entertaining.
So, Sarah, what did you think about the movie?
I loved it so much. I love the aspects that you
pointed out. The animal lair and those
(02:35):
monkeys. What they are now is amazing.
I really love the props. I could go really deep, but the
way that they are used to tell the story and enhance the
characters and possibly one of my favorite scene with the props
is the sword fight between the wand and the broom of those
(02:57):
friends. I just loved it.
I loved watching the girls like Ref and tumble with their magic.
Yeah, this movie, I love the animals and everything that
that's about, but it includes a lot of really dark themes,
darker than the first movie by good measure, because it's all
(03:20):
about of the ring and the way that other people get treated in
the film. And there's a lot of tragedy and
heartache in the movie. You really go through all the
feels. But there's a certain scene when
we're visiting Nessa Rose that happens, and the song Wicked
(03:44):
Witch of the East gets sung, andsomething bad happens to Bach.
Nessa Rose wants to be in Bach'sheart, so he's thinking about
her all the time, and he wants her and not Glenda, because he's
threatening to go to Glenda's wedding to tell her how he
(04:06):
really feels about her. And Nessa Rose loves Bach and
adores him, and she wants him for her own.
She really keeps him sort of in captivity and doesn't let him go
anywhere while he's in her employ.
But he refuses to love her and he stays loving Glinda.
(04:27):
So Nessa Rose wants to fill his heart with her, but what she
does, she picks up the grimmery and starts trying to read it,
but she's mispronouncing the words and the spell turns bad.
It shrinks box heart. And so Elphaba, to save Bach,
(04:50):
turns him into a form where he doesn't need a heart.
She turns him into the Tin Man. So what do you feel about that,
Sarah? It was very tragic.
I wasn't sure how that was goingto unfold in the film.
Listening to that song was informative, like ahead of time
when I was listening to the soundtrack.
(05:11):
Before I saw the film, I knew something bad was going to
happen. Now I've read the book to so I
mean, I I knew something bad wasgoing to happen, but I find it
really interesting that they open that.
And Bach has clearly stayed veryattentive to Governor Thropp.
He's been there for her. It appears that he's there at
(05:33):
his unwill. But then we realize that she is
keeping him captive. And what brought him there to
start it was sympathy. He was trying to please Glenda,
who he is truly in love with, but Nessa Rose didn't need his
sympathy to be a strong woman and to make up her mind and to
(05:56):
bloom. So he really was.
He was losing out in so many ways and that was very tragic to
see. Plus, his kind was under
persecution. Yeah, and he gets so angry about
his transformation. He really doesn't like being a
Tin Man. He blames Elphaba for ruining
(06:19):
his life. Absolutely.
I can't wait to talk more about that.
I really want to get into this representation of witches, how
the movie portrays the archetypeof the witch in multiple ways.
It's different because there's different women with power in
(06:39):
this movie. One of the ways, and it's really
part of what we experience here in this real world, is the
perception of women as witches and individuals as a witch.
They really use that lens. The people of Oz, the animals,
particular characters, are they perceiving others as a witch?
(07:03):
Yeah, and we witness how rumors get spread about witchcraft.
It's the same in the real world.There will be a rumor that
somebody in the village practices witchcraft who most
likely does not. And if something bad happens,
then that person is going to getblamed because they're perceived
(07:25):
to be the witch. Yeah, and it also we could
forget. It really shows how rumors are
intentionally used to oppress and disturb fear in a group.
Yeah, it talks about how groups of people can be manipulated
with speech actions just to believe these rumors.
(07:50):
You can twist words and actions and make it look like somebody's
being a wicked witch. Choices are made sometimes that
other people don't understand and I felt like I saw that
happening in eyes that choices that others were making that
well, Alphabus specifically choices she made.
(08:13):
It reinforced this narrative that she was the wicked witch.
So people using others choices that they may not understand
against them. Yeah, there's one other aspect
here that I want to talk about is the propaganda of the witch.
Madame Morrabel is a propagandist.
(08:34):
When Elphaba writes Our Wizard Lies in the sky, in the Cloud,
she changed Our Wizard Lies to Oz Dies to intimidate the crowd.
And it worked. They started running.
They're in pandemonium. They're screaming.
Yeah, she's like, Elphaba's a threat and a traitor.
(08:55):
She just said Oz is going to die.
Man, that means all of you. Yeah, the film used the
reflection of mirrors constantly.
It was almost I'm like, am I looking at a character in a
mirror or am I looking at the character?
But I felt like that reflection was really about the witch too.
(09:16):
Like, who are we actually seeing?
Who is the character seeing? Yeah, that's very important
point because like we know her back story and her whole life
story, so we know that in her heart she thinks that she's a
(09:36):
good person, She's trying to do good, but she's perceived as
wicked and evil. Yeah, And then, you know, on the
opposite side of that coin, you've got perfect Glenda.
Everyone sees her as perfect. She knows how she's viewed.
But when she looks in the mirror, does she see something
different? No, she sees what they see.
(09:59):
But we see that she is a flawed character like everybody else in
the real world, that nobody's perfect, even though she gets
pretty close with her goodness towards the end especially.
Yeah. So isn't that interesting?
So they put those mirrors in thescenes and to message us.
(10:21):
But also the song that Fiero sings, he talks about him seeing
things in a different way that he is seeing a new with bright
eyes. So it also calls us to use our
own eyes. Like what do we see?
What do we see going on? Let's talk about those
characters. Yeah.
(10:42):
Who do we meet in this movie? It's, you know, people that
we're familiar with from Wicked cut last year and they're back,
but they're changing. They're still evolving as people
and their behaviors change throughout the movie as they
(11:03):
progress on that line of growth.Personal.
Growth. Yeah.
You see characters with different hats on.
Were they popular? Are they popular?
Who's powerful? Who do they worship?
Who's perfect, who's feared, who's hated, which people are
necessary, which ones are unnecessary, Who is celebrated?
(11:27):
The characters are also really grappling with betrayal when
they feel betrayed, and I think the betrayal is used in this way
to surprise other characters, which adds growth.
Like, I was very surprised when the lion cub expressed betrayal
(11:48):
to Elphaba. I did not see that coming, even
though I should have been expecting.
You know, he didn't have courage.
And that's like an origin story there.
But his experience of being taken from the safety of the
cage without a choice and he held that against her.
(12:08):
Yeah, he's a young cub, just abandoned in the wilderness
basically. And how does he even know what
to do as a lion? Yeah, it's got no role models.
Yeah, so they really show how the characters change each
other's lives by their choices. They sing a lot about how
(12:29):
they're changing each other because I knew you, I was
changed and things like that. So it's really important that
they're doing these things together as they go along and
progressing with each other. Another big theme is friendship
(12:51):
and sisterhood. I mean, it is just like
everything is woven around that.Yeah, Sisterhood.
I want to talk a little bit about that, about the
relationship between Elphaba andGlinda.
They really love each other. You see through the story, they
have their fight. They aren't always in agreement
(13:14):
with each other, but in the end they come back to each other and
Glinda visits Alphaba in her castle.
While she's being hunted by Dorothy and her gang, Glinda
comes to help Alphaba and Alphaba.
(13:34):
She knows that she's supposed todie, so she puts this water
bucket in a place where Dorothy,who's coming along, can get it
and splash her and melt her. But just the 2.
When Elphaba and Glinda are parting, Glinda's going into
(13:55):
that closet. They're both just standing at
the door, hand on the door. For a good few beats, they're
just standing there and you can feel all their sorrow at leaving
each other because elf for the clock tick.
(14:16):
They they stood there for a clock tick and elf bud needed
Glinda to believe that she died.So she really sold it.
And she had to make this tough choice, this hard choice to
leave ours. It's is it's another betrayal
(14:38):
that she fakes her death to get away from Glinda and Oz.
Not that she's running from Glinda herself, but she's
running from the country and this reputation as this wicked
witch. And she leaves with Fiero, who
is another character that she loves in the movie.
(14:58):
She has to transform him into this scarecrow straw man to save
his life, but she still loves him regardless of the difference
between them. He loves her even though she's
green, and she loves him even though he's made of stroa.
And I think with that decision, Alphaba believed in Glenda's on
(15:23):
magic, magic that she had what it was going to take to make the
good changes in ounces. Yes, she encouraged her to seek
out using the Grimmery for good,but she knew that Glenda had the
goodness in herself to step out of that closet and start to make
things right in a way that Alphaba was not going to have
(15:45):
the opportunity, even with her magic.
And some of my favorite moments in the movie happened after
that. Some things that happened after
the separation of Glenda and Alphaba.
Glenda goes on this mission to be good and fix all the problems
(16:06):
that the wizard and Matamorable caused in ounces.
She's liberates the animals. She goes and tells the wizard
that he has to leave ounces in his balloon right away or
everybody's going to come. You know the guards are going to
arrest him, so he has to leave. She threatens Madamorable to put
(16:27):
her in a cage like they had doneto all those animals.
How did you feel about the banishment?
The banishment of the Wizard I thought was, I mean, I really
liked it. It parallels the Wizard of Oz
story where the Wizard leaves inthe balloon and then we know
(16:48):
Dorothy stands there and doesn'tknow how to get home until
Glinda tells her about the Ruby slippers in the old movie.
At least that's what happens in the books.
I think she has silver slippers and does the same thing.
I'm not exactly sure how I felt about her pushing him out.
(17:10):
I mean, at this point in Wicked for good, we're in like new Oz
territory as far as story arc. So he's shipped off in his
balloon, but I thought, you know, it suits because was there
really a place for him? And Oz, like all of those who
are being told there wasn't a place of status for them, the
(17:30):
animals and such, that was a lie.
But the Oz the Wizard of Oz truly was an outsider, and he
wasn't going to bring good to Oz.
So he had to go. Right.
He had done a lot of harm to Oz,capturing all these animals.
(17:51):
It was really powerful when Alphabet goes into that room and
there's dozens and dozens of animals in cages and they're
screeching and screaming and sheliberates them and they stormed
through the wedding. It's really wonderful to see
(18:11):
them free, but it's upsetting atfirst when you see them in this
dark detention center, in these cages just.
Forgotten. Forgotten, abandoned, not taken
care of. Who knows how much they're being
fed or anything like that. It's just despicable the way
they're being treated and it's alittle hard to see, but then you
(18:36):
know that they're getting freed and that's really uplifting
moment in the film. Absolutely.
And a fairy tale ending. Especially I love at the very
end Glenda is addressing the crowd as the Wizard is leaving
and the animals just walk into the crowd and start mingling and
(18:59):
the people are OK with it because Glenda says it is good.
It was just so touching. I loved the way this wrapped up
the whole last third of the movie or so.
It's sewing all these threads together and wrapping things up
and it I just love the way it ends.
(19:20):
Me too. You mentioned the love of
Alphabet and Glenda. There is a lot of romance, love
and loss in the movie. There is, you know, Nessa loves
Bach. Bach becomes a tin man and runs
off to go and basically he's hunting alphabet to kill her.
(19:42):
And Nessa is left without the love of her life, which is Bach,
and eventually Nessa is killed. And that's love and loss for
Alphaba, her sister getting killed.
And of course Glenda engages herself to Fiero.
(20:04):
Basically it's Madam Warble and Glenda's idea to have this
engagement. Fiero gets taken by surprise.
This is in the beginning of the movie.
And then they have the wedding later.
And Fiero? He doesn't love Glenda, he loves
Alphaba. I also think it's love loss.
Everything that's happening withthe animals, they loved life.
(20:27):
They loved having agency and voice and profession and being
whole members in society and that was love loss.
Yeah, just the whole treatment of the animals, this whole
enemies thing and the oppressionof the animals.
(20:50):
We can see these things that happen around the world all the
time. You see plenty of examples in
the past and the present of oppression and people being
declared enemies just because they're different in some way.
They look a little different, they talk a little different.
Something like that can be a excuse to to using autism
(21:18):
basically to enemies people, to make people enemies that aren't
doing anything to you really. You just you need a scapegoat to
blame whatever it is. In Wicked, the wizard has this
whole scheme. He's created an enemy.
(21:38):
He's made the animals an enemy so that he can unite the humans
and that they won't resist him because he's their savior
against these terrible animals that are causing their society
to decay or whatever he's blaming them for.
And you know, Oz doesn't really like pick one response.
(22:03):
They show both responses that usually come out of these
situations, resistance and hiding, and it was really hard
to see those who could collaborate and resist together
choosing to hide because that appeared to be their only choice
for them. Yeah, Alphabet goes into the
(22:25):
woods and she sees these, this chain of animals sneaking out
through basically a tunnel underthe yellow brick road.
And Doctor Dilliman's there, Dulce bears there.
Her friends are there, and she doesn't want them to leave Oz.
(22:46):
She wants them to stay and fight.
Do you believe resistance ultimately brought good to us in
the story? I believe so.
I believe the resistance it built up over time.
It was Alphaba at first, but then you get Glinda involved,
Fiero involved in the resistance.
(23:09):
They're all doing, you know, either subtle things or very big
things throughout the course of the movie to undermine the
wizard. So I do think that it played a
big role in there, especially the Alphaba going to actually
see the wizard in person and then liberate those animals.
(23:32):
She goes and she's wants to openthe monkey cage 1st and let all
the flying monkeys out and the wizard lets her do that.
I think Madame Marble is really the highest culprit in this
story and just, you know, had the wizard fully under her
(23:54):
manipulative control. Because I feel like if she had
been present during their peace talks, those monkeys would not
have come out. There's no way.
So what do you think? What does that mean?
That he was willing to make someconcessions for Alphaba.
Yeah, he seemed to be trying to manipulate Alphaba into working
(24:16):
with him instead of against him,and so he's trying to get in her
good graces to some extent. Basically, he's this is the
compromise. This is how I get her on my side
and then I still just do what I'm doing now, but she's not a
(24:37):
problem anymore. He wants to neutralize the
threat and he's luring her into a trap.
He's got all his guards ready tocome in and arrest her.
So she's really vulnerable then?History can't speak yet, but he
has chosen a side. He's chosen other the side and
(25:00):
he takes her to the vault. History resists.
That's a big moment of resistance because, yeah, it's
getting the animals to stand up for themselves.
That's really important that they do that.
Let's talk about witchcraft in the land of wicked.
I love that we get to look at itas a hoax and as a tool for good
(25:25):
and evil, but it's interesting there's different aspects of
witchcraft portrayed. It's so interesting.
It's not only witchcraft but also magic as a practice,
because there's different meanings of the word magic.
There's different types of magic, and we see them used in
(25:46):
these movies. The wizard is a magician, he's a
performance magician. He's not a real wizard.
He's got no actual power, which is another interesting thing
that the man, he has the power over the land of Oz.
(26:06):
He's got all the power as the leader, but he has no real
authority coming from himself. It's all this guy's, his giant
head that greets people when they come to visit him and
things like that that make him look big and terrible and
powerful and wonderful. It's all the hoax.
(26:28):
But then these women have actualtrue authority and agency.
They have abilities that the mandoesn't have.
So that's very interesting to see.
Yeah, you know, a couple of the witches have natural powers.
You know, they tell us in the movie why Elphaba does have
(26:51):
hers. And then you have Glenda.
She wants it. She wants it and she tries.
She wishes with all her heart, and she does not have it yet.
Right. She takes longer to develop.
There needs to be an inciting incident, basically a spark to
(27:14):
ignite the magic that's within her.
And that's the whole scene at the end where she thinks
Alphabet dies. That gives her the courage to
stand up for what's right. And she takes the Grimmery and
she does do magic at the end. Another theme that I want to go
(27:36):
back to is fear. And I want to talk about fear
management as a theme in this movie, because we see The Wizard
of Oz and Metamorrable manage the fear that the people have of
the animals. They make them very terrified of
(27:59):
the animals. So you see when, for instance,
the animals come into the wedding, there's panic and
pandemonium by all the people because they're so afraid of
animals at this point in the film through manipulation.
And then we see that goodness coming to counter the fear and
(28:25):
the way that Glinda, who is known as this good person, the
ultimate good person, she comes in and she's able to comfort the
crowd after the wizard leaves. Because at this point, they're
just freaking out about what's happening.
They don't understand what's happening to Oz.
(28:46):
Why is the great and powerful wizard leaving?
Why was there a tornado? Why are the animals coming at
us? What what's going on here?
It's very terrifying for the Aussians.
Yeah, absolutely. They were also using posters to
scare them. Just want to.
Yeah, that was an interesting detail.
(29:07):
That's from the very beginning, you know, back to the original
too, but. Yeah, posters.
They're throwing Flyers. There was the machine that just
cranked out Flyers and rained them down on the city, the
Emerald City. Imagine if they had technology
and we're getting status updates, what they would have
(29:27):
been being told just like what we get.
Yeah. Posts about fear.
What to fear? Right.
We see public figures come out and make addresses and speeches
telling us to be afraid of different people because they're
different than us. And we're actually seeing public
(29:49):
figures use the word witch to oppress, to scare, to label.
And they're not talking about fictional witches when they say
it. They are portraying that there
is a witch to fear. Yes, it's.
That's what we're seeing, right?Now, but we're seeing an uptick
(30:11):
in this accusations of people being witches just for speaking
out and, you know, opposing these other public figures.
You get called a witch, especially if you're a woman.
It's like the go to play for a lot of these men is to call
(30:34):
women witches. You don't have to look hard to
see what we're talking about. It's right there for you.
No, just Google witch and look at the news tab and see what
comes up. There's going to be accusations
of people being witches who are not.
One of the pieces of the story that I love are the unexpected
(30:57):
heroes. It's full of unexpected heroes.
Fiero is an unexpected hero. Oh yeah, Fiero, definitely,
because he's so shout, especially in the first film
he's portrayed as. You know, he does his whole
Dancing Through Life song, whichis his big moment.
(31:19):
He takes him to the Ozdes Ballroom, where they're not
really supposed to be going on aschool night.
Alphabet is a huge, unexpected hero, especially with I call it
the betrayal, the Glenda. And I know that it's more than
that, but I can't help but be bothered that Glenda doesn't
know that she's not alone, You know, that Alphaba is really
(31:43):
there somewhere. But Alphaba is a huge hero.
I mean, we see her trying to be a hero.
You know, her heroism does unfold in the story.
And the other hero that I love is Chesteri.
He's a huge hero. And these are victims coming
back as heroes, too. He was a victim.
(32:04):
Alphaba was a victim. And they still choose to be
heroes for others. Right.
Alphaba we know as the Wicked Witch of the West, cackling
witch from The MGM movie in the 30s.
That's what we know her as this villain, just she's 1 sided in
(32:25):
that film and as the villain, she's a villain in the books.
So people have grown up knowing her as a villain and suddenly
she's doing good deeds. This.
Story and film is very much a fairy tale.
You have the wedding of Glinda the Good and Prince Fiera.
(32:48):
Remember, he's a Prince. So it's almost a, it is like a
Princess and Prince Hale that you get and a fairy, fairy
story. And there's just so much magic
in the telling of the story. And castles.
Oh yes, castles. You've got Wizards and witches
(33:13):
and talking animals. It is like.
Mystical Forest. It is.
It's America's great, greatest fairy tale.
Indeed it. Really is.
Yeah, These characters, as theirstories unfolding, they're
grappling with belief, secrets. I think those two do kind of go
(33:37):
hand in hand, you know, what do they believe?
What have they been told to believe?
What do they know? What don't others know?
There's a lot swirling around there.
Oh, definitely. They, you know, like a lot of
people today, there is a strong belief in evil witchcraft, a
(33:57):
strong belief in what's called maleficium, which is just
harmful magic. We've done an episode on here
about the percentage of people in the world that believe in
this harmful witchcraft, and it's 40%, according to economist
Boris Gershman's work on this, believe that there are curses
(34:22):
and the evil eye and spells thatcan harm people.
And so you see the same kind of belief in the movie as you get
in real life. And in the movie, although using
the spellbook does cause unintended consequences, who did
(34:44):
we see using the spellbook to harm somebody close to them?
Nobody. There is a character, Madame
Marble, who is using her craft to cause general chaos and havoc
and, you know, specifically targeted.
That's imaginary. That's fairy tale.
(35:06):
Madame Marble can't read the Grimmery.
She doesn't know how to read it.And the Wizard of Oz, who has
tricked everybody into thinking that he can read it, but his
secret is that he can't read a word of it.
He just knows some words that aren't Ozian.
You see in the first movie when they go to the Emerald City and
(35:30):
there's that production that talks about the Wizard of Oz
with Kristin Chenoweth and IdinaMizell come in and there's in
the song, there's the Wizard just repeating the word Omaha
Omaha. And so it sounds magical because
(35:53):
it's a foreign word and he's just using these non Ozian words
to pretend to read the book and he's not doing anything.
He's it's all sleight of hand and that kind of thing with the
wizard. I would say the manipulation
from the person who is harming Oz was because she could count
on them responding to fear. But did anybody actually?
(36:17):
Well, Dorothy gets told that this is a wicked witch and she
goes on a mission to get the broom.
She goes on a witch hunt, Yeah. She goes on a witch hunt with
the other 3 characters. So Dorothy is told that this is
a evil witch that you've got to fear.
(36:37):
This is the Wicked Witch of the West.
She's terrible and terrifying. And so Dorothy goes on this
witch hunt in the movie, and it's like in real life, we're
always trying to differentiate between people's right to
(36:58):
believe what they believe versusthe wrong that it is to use that
belief to do harm to others. So it's OK to believe in
witchcraft. That's your right to believe
that there's harmful witchcraft.But it's not your right to go
(37:19):
out and hurt another person because you think that they're a
witch. That's not OK.
Her hunt for alphabet also demonstrates this equation we
see in real life where it's the sum 0.
She wants to get home so she hasto harm the witch she to get
(37:39):
what she wants which is her safety is what will make her
whole. She has to stop this evil witch
who others have portrayed as harmful, even those in her close
circle. The Tin Man and the Lion have
grievances against Ababa, so then she must be the witch.
(38:04):
I think that really demonstratesscenarios that we have
experienced here on Earth, past and present.
If somebody's doing really good that's harming me, or if I can't
get a leg up, why is that? Yeah, somebody else took that
(38:25):
leg from you. Got it up there.
Yeah, that's that whole belief. And that really plays into
witchcraft accusations because people say that guy is really
successful and has a good job and a good income, but I'm
struggling here and that's not right.
(38:46):
It means that he took something from me.
We should be equal, but we're not, so he must have used
witchcraft to achieve his success at my expense.
That's a false belief. People find success for real,
literal reasons. Sometimes they have a skill
(39:07):
that's better than everybody else.
Other times they've got it in somebody else doesn't have.
Or they have the money it takes to make something happen that
another person might not have. But it's not a curse that is
giving individual success. Right, Yeah.
We see a lot of atrocities we'vetalked about on this show
(39:30):
before, ritual attacks where people actually will take other
people's body parts to use in rituals to gain wealth and power
and influence. And that's not the way that
things work. It's not OK to take somebody
else's body part. It is a lie that is wrong.
(39:52):
One of the fun things that propels the characters forward
are their collective hopes of a better future.
Some people, some characters in the story, of course, have very
selfish hopes, but there's a lotof unselfish hopes for the
future and what it's going to take to have a better future.
(40:13):
At the beginning of Wicked, Nessa's there for a better
future. She's had a rough start.
You know you've got Glenda has her bright future ahead.
She's just prancing onto the stage of her life.
Alpha Bob wants a better future for Oz, for the oppressed.
(40:34):
What did it take for a better future?
Well, for a better future, it took removing the Wizard and
Matamorabel, who were the ones oppressing Oz and keeping it
from having a bright future. They were turned Oz, which is
this colorful, vivid place, especially the flower fields,
(40:57):
and it's just so vividly colorful.
But they've turned it into this,you know, metaphorically very
dark place where very sinister things are being done to the
animals and they have to be removed before the sun can shine
(41:18):
through again. And when the animals were under
control, captured, hidden, they moved on to the Munchkins.
They did. They stopped allowing the
Munchkins to leave Munchkin Landso Bach couldn't go to that
wedding and nobody else could gowhere they needed to go.
(41:41):
And part of this dynamic with the Wizard and Madame Warble and
the wicked witches, the good witches, has to do with this
patriarchy. Because the man has all the
power, even though he's just a hollow, empty vessel.
He's nothing. He's pathetic, but he wields
(42:05):
this huge amount of power to be able to order people to round up
the animals and lock them up in cages and dark rooms.
That takes like a lot of power. People believe that he's so
powerful, they're so invested inthat, but he's not that good of
(42:25):
a leader. He's pretty terrible at almost
everything except doing slight hand tricks and propaganda, but
he's the man. He's leading this place, but he
relies on the power of Madame Morable.
He relies upon a woman, even though he doesn't allow her to
(42:49):
lead. He relies upon her magic, her
actual abilities to be able to do anything.
And so there's this very feminist aspect to The Wizard of
Oz in the 1st place, but especially Wicked, with the
women having the real power and authority and abilities in the
(43:10):
movie. And they have the key roles.
They get the most words in the songs.
They're the center of the film. It's women.
Wicked is a musical, but on the stage, and now it's a film
that's a musical. It is, and the songs really
(43:31):
carry the movie because there's a lot of exposition in the
songs. We learn a lot of the details
about what's going on through the words that the people
saying. There's a couple of songs in
there that stood out to me. There's this really powerful
song that opens it. It's everyday more wicked and it
(43:54):
has some elements of from the previous movie of the nobody
mourns the wicked come into thismovie as well.
And so all this song about Wicked really just gets me into
the film. It was a good way to to open it.
And really the instrumentation in it is so just bold and
(44:19):
powerful. I really love the use of the
bass trombones. I'm a former trombone artist or
trombonist, and I just really thought really speaks to me.
But then later there's a song they actually sing a song called
No Place Like Ohm. So throughout the this movie and
(44:40):
the first one, they're evoking all of the Wizard of Oz themes
and songs and phrases that we know by heart.
There's no place like home. There's no place like home.
There's no place like home. There's a whole song about that
in Wicked for Good. And then at the end they're
singing a song called For Good. So you start the movie with the
(45:02):
wicked and you end with the good.
It shows the whole like story arc.
You can trace just through the progression of the songs and the
themes that they're singing about.
I also feel like with this musical specifically, and maybe
not uniquely, but specifically, these duets and vocal
(45:27):
collaborations are a way that bring these characters together
at another level. You know, there's these tides
from the story pushing them apart, pushing them together,
pushing them apart. But when you're enjoying the
parts of the story that are being sung, they're so together,
(45:48):
and I really found that so powerful.
Their voices are so different and yet when they come together,
it's so very powerful. It really just gives you
goosebumps at times. The way that they sound
together, the emotion in the songs, the passion of the songs.
(46:11):
You really feel. What if you're meant to feel?
The music really helps to guide you emotionally through the
story. The language is also used to
bring that Oz feel, so you always are remembering.
Even in the old's like intense moments, there's words used as
(46:36):
fun. The ASEAN language is riddled
with melapropisms, which basically are it sounds mostly
like a word, but one of the, youknow, the suffix or the prefix
will be altered to change the sound of the word.
But it still has the same meaning in the film.
(46:59):
Like instead of saying that's horrendous, they might say
that's horrendable, but we know what they're talking about, even
though the word sounds a little funny.
And I just, it brings the fun right from the gate, 'cause
there's plenty in there. There's not just a few of those.
It's like a prop or a character too.
Words as themes are also a part that I like.
(47:21):
They use the word wonderful so poignantly, on purpose of
course, and you enjoy it. You love seeing that play on the
word. Wonderful.
They do with the language of Oz because the wonderful Wizard of
Oz goes right back to the beginning of the story with L
Frank Baum, who by the way, Alphaba is named after his
(47:43):
initials, LFB Alphaba. But they use these wonderful,
the wonderful, they use this funphrase a clock tick instead of
like wait a moment, they're likejust wait a clock tick.
I love that aspect to it. I've been saying that myself.
It's just. It's so fun.
And doesn't that also, like, go back to Gregory Mcguire's device
(48:11):
that's part of the opening of that story, the clock?
Yeah, the what is it? The Time Dragon clock.
Yeah, the Time Dragon, the. Clock of the Time Dragon.
Yeah, yeah. And that clock, if you go to the
musical, especially at the Broadway production, the clock
is a big part of the staging. It's part of the set.
(48:33):
And so this just using that word, that phrase evokes, it's a
Broadway edition. And what about Dorothy?
I mean, going back to the original Oz film where she's
been dreaming, She's had this whole adventure and her family
and friends are just beside her bed waiting.
(48:56):
And how long has it been? We don't really know.
We don't, but I found it really interesting with Dorothy how we
never really got a direct look at her.
It was just glimpses of the gingham dress that she wears and
glimpses of the shoes. The in this movie, they're the
(49:18):
silver sparkly, I don't know what you call them shoes.
They're just glitter shoes. And we see them walking along,
and we know that's Dorothy. This story that Wicked is
telling can't be told from Dorothy's lens.
She is a secondary character. She has to be.
(49:43):
You can't have another main character at the point that she
comes into the movie. It's you know, she's, it's late
in the game that she enters the picture.
Yeah, I also think the words areso powerful, and I mean the
regular words, they're statements.
(50:03):
Single words in this story can be statements, obviously wicked.
There's so much with that word, the word witch.
Those words carry so much meaning beyond just the initial
definition. There's so much to wickedness,
(50:25):
there's so much to what a witch is.
There's so many layers of that. Then on on the flip side, they
start using in this movie words like love and good.
And you see that there's still people who want those good
things in the world and they want good for other people and
for animals as well. So people who are different from
(50:48):
them or even encompassed in thislove and this wishing for good
things for others. It shows us that we here need to
look past the labels to discoverwhat makes the people around us,
our neighbors, our loved ones, look past the label that you
(51:09):
might perceive them as. Interact with people who are
different than you. You can talk to your neighbor
even though they might look different or they have a
different feeling about an issue, you talk to them.
It's good to mingle with other people so that you get a sense
(51:31):
that we're just all in this thing together.
We're all humans, we're the sameexcept for very superficial
differences. With hopes for a better future.
Everybody has hopes for a betterfuture.
Your neighbor that you don't like has similar hopes to you.
They want a better future. They're striving towards some
(51:54):
level of prosperity and comfort.I got to talk about the props
before we finish this out because there's so many fun
props in this story. We've talked about the mirrors,
I've talked about it a lot, but take the mirror imagery out of
the story. It's a whole different story.
(52:15):
These props are just really key images for the storytelling.
The hat of this hat, it's, there's so many layers, there's
so many different feelings that you have towards the hat during
the course of these two films. At first it's given to her as a
(52:37):
joke. It's supposed to be there so she
can be ridiculed, but by the end, it has so much power to it.
That's a symbol of the Wicked Witch.
It's a symbol of alpha. Her costume represents an
element of an aspect of her persona and tells us much about
(53:03):
her. When she's almost fearless,
she's brave. We know that because she wears
that hat to the Oz's ballroom inthe first movie, and she's out
in public wearing that hat. She use it as a prop in the
dance that she does. And I believe Glenda takes it at
(53:23):
the end of the story. She it's in the possession of
Linda again after all this. It's important at the end
because it's part of what gives the illusion that Elphaba is
dead, that her cloak and her hatare left behind.
And Linda lifts the hat and finds the green bottle
(53:46):
underneath it, the green bottle that tells us that Elphaba is
the wizard's daughter. And that's a huge moment in the
film. When she confronts the wizard
with that bottle, which is another prop.
I have a list here of what Josh like, like maybe only 25, and
that's probably only 1/4 of the important props.
(54:09):
So when you're watching this film, really think about the
props and what they're telling you about the characters or the
environment or the context. Yeah, pay attention to the shoes
and the broom, how it gets used and the wands, how they're
different from each other and what the facts they have.
(54:33):
And then the bubble thing that Glenda flies around in, which is
one of my favorite props in the movie.
I just, I loved it when it came in in the first film.
I love seeing it introduced to her in Wicked for good.
It's a very fun prop. Yeah, the cages, the forest, the
(54:55):
trains, they're all very important.
Even the darker props are so important.
We've talked about how the characters are transformed
through the movie and through their personal growth, but
there's some real literal transformations in the movie,
too. There's characters that actually
(55:16):
change their whole form. We talked about Bach becoming
the Tin Man, but what happens toFiero?
He becomes the straw man becausehe's being beaten up and pulled
apart while he's physically tiedto a post in the field.
(55:38):
And he's. Getting it and he has to be
saved by being turned into a straw man that they can't break.
And it's interesting because he seems to have embraced his
change. It brought him back to the love
of his life and enables him to continue his work for good.
(55:59):
The tragedy of Bach is his transformation took him further
from everybody. It isolates him.
It radicalized him. He became a dedicated witch
hunter after that where before he was friends with Alphabet.
But he gets changed and it just doesn't go down well.
(56:25):
The animals are transforming back to their selves at the end
of the. Animals.
They're getting their speech back at the end of the film.
They're getting their jobs back.Doctor Dillamond, I love seeing
him back in the classroom. It's amazing.
I was very interested and beyondOz from the first film 'cause I
(56:48):
remember when Alpha BA runs out from Shaz and is going out to
the beautiful valley, all the colors, and she goes and goes
and goes. And it really struck me in that
film when she reaches the edge, how it's just beige or white.
(57:08):
And that really means something more.
In Wicked for Good the Beyond Odds, because we know that's
where the oppressed animals werehiding.
For them, it became a place of refuge.
For Elphaba, it's a self banishment.
It's a place of refuge. And unfortunately, that is
(57:31):
something that women and children and other vulnerable
individuals in our world, for a variety of horrible reasons, are
experiencing banishment right now.
Millions of people around the world specifically accused
witches, experience management and never get to come back.
(57:56):
Accused witches, they are thrownout of their communities.
They're left to either wonder for the rest of their lives,
from community to community, trying to find one that'll
accept them, or they have to go to a place of refuge.
They have to go to one of these places.
Like in Ghana, there are these places called witch camps, and
(58:22):
they're places where women who've been banished from their
communities have gathered to have the safety with each other.
They're terrible places to live,but they're safer than being in
a community where everybody wants to kill you.
They. Can't go back.
(58:42):
They can't go back. They need to go somewhere.
They should be reintegrated intosociety as long as they can do
that safely. But they might not be able to go
back to their own village ever. They might not see their
families again because of the banishment.
And often these accusations comefrom your own family.
(59:06):
AB children accusing their own mother or grandmother of
witchcraft and kicking her out of the village and out of their
lives. We've talked a lot about the
characters in a little bit aboutthe actual actors, but we need
to specifically highlight something amazing.
(59:28):
The star of the show, Elphaba, Cynthia Areevo has made a video
where she talks about the witch camps in Ghana and the need for
legislation that's currently before the parliament to be
passed and signed by the president of the country to go
into effect to outlaw witchcraftaccusations and put in place
(59:53):
mechanisms to help the women transition to new homes,
cleaner, better homes. With more opportunities.
It brings awareness to their situation in their current
villages, their refugee villages.
I believe that will hopefully bring them better
(01:00:15):
acknowledgement and resources and safety there as well.
Partnering with Amnesty International like that is very
powerful and important. And if I'm wrong on this, reach
out and tell me. But I believe that Cynthia is
the first celebrity to make a statement acknowledging and
(01:00:39):
asking for support of victims ofwitchcraft accusations.
If there's another celebrity whohas done this, thank you.
But I am pretty sure that it wasa very historic clip that is out
there on Instagram. Check it out.
You can find out how to sign a petition to support the
(01:01:02):
legislation. It's all right there on Amnesty
International's Instagram page. Yeah, you can even see it.
We've got it embedded on one of our websites of our nonprofit
organization in Witch hunts. You can go to intwitchhunts.org
and see the Instagram post from Cynthia right there.
(01:01:23):
It's so amazing to have someone who's so widely recognized as
her to come out and say something about it.
And Cynthia's parents come from West Africa, from Nigeria, and
that can resonate with people inWest Africa as well as gain
attention from people around therest of the world.
(01:01:47):
Share her clip. Thank you, Cynthia.
Thank you so much, Cynthia. Another thing that happens with
banishment, entire families willbe implicated in witchcraft
accusations and have to live together.
We know there is a village in India that is made-up of accused
(01:02:08):
families that have found each other and are now living
together from different cultures.
But what they have in common isn't necessarily their local
history, heritage and culture, but they are identifying as
accused witches and finding a life together.
When we look at the witch trial history in the US, there was
(01:02:31):
case after case of banishment. We know Dorothy Good never
settled down. She was wandering the rest of
her life, essentially. She was warned out of town after
town because she had this reputation from when she was a
four or five year old child thataccused of witchcraft that
(01:02:55):
stayed with her for her life, staying of the witchcraft
accusation. And we know that witchcraft
accusations aren't the only reason that people get banished.
We can look around in this country right now and there's
this coordinated effort for massdeportations.
That's another form of banishment that's kicking people
(01:03:18):
out of their homes, out of theircountry that they live in, and
forcing them to go off into a country that they've never even
been to. And who knows how they're going
to be treated there and how they're going to make a living
in a foreign land that they didn't want to go to.
(01:03:40):
What does Wicked Wicked for GoodOz tell us about good and evil
and popular culture? What's happening in Oz makes
sense because of our own popularculture, beliefs about people
and witches and magic. We look around at things like
(01:04:02):
television and movies and we seethese portrayals at people as
being either good or evil. They're representing the
extremes that in reality people are in the middle.
But in popular culture, there's a lot of vilification of people
(01:04:22):
as being so wicked that they're actually evil.
And we see that in life, too. People get accused of being evil
all the time. And we can really take a lesson
from Glenda and Alphaba that we can change each other, that we
have choices to make and that can make a better future.
(01:04:47):
So my big question is, does the portrayal of witches and
othering in Wicked in Ounces in other pop culture stories and
films about witches like this? Does it hurt or help oppress
people? Well, it depends really on the
audience reaction, how audiencestake the film.
(01:05:11):
If audiences are seeing the veryclear parallels in the film to
modern life and oppression, thenit can help people because
people can step up and say I want to do something about that.
I want to resist and take some action.
(01:05:32):
That's very true, because there really are others that are
othered and there really are accused witches.
And if you want to do something about it, you may know what to
do. Be brave and do what you know to
do. If you're not sure, reach out to
us. We can plug you in with projects
(01:05:54):
and people that can use your skills and platform.
Wicked. It shows us other ring.
It shows us a dark reality that we tend to want to look away
from. It makes us look at it, at the
oppression of the animals. We have to look at the animals
(01:06:16):
in the cages in that vault. We have to see their suffering
and the harm. And so we need to, as
responsible adult human beings, look at our world with the same
lens and see the oppression and harm going on around us and do
(01:06:36):
something. Speak up, talk to your friends,
your family about it. Get people involved.
Find an organization that's working on the issue that you're
passionate about and get involved.
Have a great today and a wicked good tomorrow.
Which movie that opened ten daysago has already made nearly $400
million, according to Variety magazine?
It's a Which movie? Wicked for good.
This movie is chock full of parallels to modern life and
(00:20):
society. It's herrendable what the
parallels are to, but we'll dig into those as we go along.
So welcome to the thing about witch hunts.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. I'm Sarah Jack.
Today we're going to discuss thenew film Wicked for good.
(00:41):
Here is your spoil alert warning.
We're going to dig right in there and pull out all the
layers of this wonderful film. We're definitely going to dig
deep, but why are we talking about this today, Sarah?
We've created a space here wherewe have talked about beliefs,
magical beliefs, religious beliefs, supernatural beliefs,
(01:04):
witches who's oppressed and popular belief and culture all
around witches. So this hits all of those
bullets. And we've been researching and
synthesizing these themes in thepast and present context for a
combined almost 300 episodes between our two podcasts, with
(01:28):
over 150 specialized experts coming on the show to talk to us
about what's going on in the world, why we accuse people of
witchcraft, and what we do to them.
Wicked for good, Josh. What did you love about it?
My favorite thing about this movie, The sequel, is that this
(01:48):
focuses on the animal situation and I just, I love seeing all
the animals and a sucker for a talking animal in a movie.
So I love Dulce Bear, I love Doctor Dillamond, I love all the
animals in it, and I am a reallybig monkey freak.
(02:10):
You could probably call me. I just adore monkeys.
And even if they're being mean monkeys and flying around
scaring people, it's entertaining.
So, Sarah, what did you think about the movie?
I loved it so much. I love the aspects that you
pointed out. The animal lair and those
(02:35):
monkeys. What they are now is amazing.
I really love the props. I could go really deep, but the
way that they are used to tell the story and enhance the
characters and possibly one of my favorite scene with the props
is the sword fight between the wand and the broom of those
(02:57):
friends. I just loved it.
I loved watching the girls like Ref and tumble with their magic.
Yeah, this movie, I love the animals and everything that
that's about, but it includes a lot of really dark themes,
darker than the first movie by good measure, because it's all
(03:20):
about of the ring and the way that other people get treated in
the film. And there's a lot of tragedy and
heartache in the movie. You really go through all the
feels. But there's a certain scene when
we're visiting Nessa Rose that happens, and the song Wicked
(03:44):
Witch of the East gets sung, andsomething bad happens to Bach.
Nessa Rose wants to be in Bach'sheart, so he's thinking about
her all the time, and he wants her and not Glenda, because he's
threatening to go to Glenda's wedding to tell her how he
(04:06):
really feels about her. And Nessa Rose loves Bach and
adores him, and she wants him for her own.
She really keeps him sort of in captivity and doesn't let him go
anywhere while he's in her employ.
But he refuses to love her and he stays loving Glinda.
(04:27):
So Nessa Rose wants to fill his heart with her, but what she
does, she picks up the grimmery and starts trying to read it,
but she's mispronouncing the words and the spell turns bad.
It shrinks box heart. And so Elphaba, to save Bach,
(04:50):
turns him into a form where he doesn't need a heart.
She turns him into the Tin Man. So what do you feel about that,
Sarah? It was very tragic.
I wasn't sure how that was goingto unfold in the film.
Listening to that song was informative, like ahead of time
when I was listening to the soundtrack.
(05:11):
Before I saw the film, I knew something bad was going to
happen. Now I've read the book to so I
mean, I I knew something bad wasgoing to happen, but I find it
really interesting that they open that.
And Bach has clearly stayed veryattentive to Governor Thropp.
He's been there for her. It appears that he's there at
(05:33):
his unwill. But then we realize that she is
keeping him captive. And what brought him there to
start it was sympathy. He was trying to please Glenda,
who he is truly in love with, but Nessa Rose didn't need his
sympathy to be a strong woman and to make up her mind and to
(05:56):
bloom. So he really was.
He was losing out in so many ways and that was very tragic to
see. Plus, his kind was under
persecution. Yeah, and he gets so angry about
his transformation. He really doesn't like being a
Tin Man. He blames Elphaba for ruining
(06:19):
his life. Absolutely.
I can't wait to talk more about that.
I really want to get into this representation of witches, how
the movie portrays the archetypeof the witch in multiple ways.
It's different because there's different women with power in
(06:39):
this movie. One of the ways, and it's really
part of what we experience here in this real world, is the
perception of women as witches and individuals as a witch.
They really use that lens. The people of Oz, the animals,
particular characters, are they perceiving others as a witch?
(07:03):
Yeah, and we witness how rumors get spread about witchcraft.
It's the same in the real world.There will be a rumor that
somebody in the village practices witchcraft who most
likely does not. And if something bad happens,
then that person is going to getblamed because they're perceived
(07:25):
to be the witch. Yeah, and it also we could
forget. It really shows how rumors are
intentionally used to oppress and disturb fear in a group.
Yeah, it talks about how groups of people can be manipulated
with speech actions just to believe these rumors.
(07:50):
You can twist words and actions and make it look like somebody's
being a wicked witch. Choices are made sometimes that
other people don't understand and I felt like I saw that
happening in eyes that choices that others were making that
well, Alphabus specifically choices she made.
(08:13):
It reinforced this narrative that she was the wicked witch.
So people using others choices that they may not understand
against them. Yeah, there's one other aspect
here that I want to talk about is the propaganda of the witch.
Madame Morrabel is a propagandist.
(08:34):
When Elphaba writes Our Wizard Lies in the sky, in the Cloud,
she changed Our Wizard Lies to Oz Dies to intimidate the crowd.
And it worked. They started running.
They're in pandemonium. They're screaming.
Yeah, she's like, Elphaba's a threat and a traitor.
(08:55):
She just said Oz is going to die.
Man, that means all of you. Yeah, the film used the
reflection of mirrors constantly.
It was almost I'm like, am I looking at a character in a
mirror or am I looking at the character?
But I felt like that reflection was really about the witch too.
(09:16):
Like, who are we actually seeing?
Who is the character seeing? Yeah, that's very important
point because like we know her back story and her whole life
story, so we know that in her heart she thinks that she's a
(09:36):
good person, She's trying to do good, but she's perceived as
wicked and evil. Yeah, And then, you know, on the
opposite side of that coin, you've got perfect Glenda.
Everyone sees her as perfect. She knows how she's viewed.
But when she looks in the mirror, does she see something
different? No, she sees what they see.
(09:59):
But we see that she is a flawed character like everybody else in
the real world, that nobody's perfect, even though she gets
pretty close with her goodness towards the end especially.
Yeah. So isn't that interesting?
So they put those mirrors in thescenes and to message us.
(10:21):
But also the song that Fiero sings, he talks about him seeing
things in a different way that he is seeing a new with bright
eyes. So it also calls us to use our
own eyes. Like what do we see?
What do we see going on? Let's talk about those
characters. Yeah.
(10:42):
Who do we meet in this movie? It's, you know, people that
we're familiar with from Wicked cut last year and they're back,
but they're changing. They're still evolving as people
and their behaviors change throughout the movie as they
(11:03):
progress on that line of growth.Personal.
Growth. Yeah.
You see characters with different hats on.
Were they popular? Are they popular?
Who's powerful? Who do they worship?
Who's perfect, who's feared, who's hated, which people are
necessary, which ones are unnecessary, Who is celebrated?
(11:27):
The characters are also really grappling with betrayal when
they feel betrayed, and I think the betrayal is used in this way
to surprise other characters, which adds growth.
Like, I was very surprised when the lion cub expressed betrayal
(11:48):
to Elphaba. I did not see that coming, even
though I should have been expecting.
You know, he didn't have courage.
And that's like an origin story there.
But his experience of being taken from the safety of the
cage without a choice and he held that against her.
(12:08):
Yeah, he's a young cub, just abandoned in the wilderness
basically. And how does he even know what
to do as a lion? Yeah, it's got no role models.
Yeah, so they really show how the characters change each
other's lives by their choices. They sing a lot about how
(12:29):
they're changing each other because I knew you, I was
changed and things like that. So it's really important that
they're doing these things together as they go along and
progressing with each other. Another big theme is friendship
(12:51):
and sisterhood. I mean, it is just like
everything is woven around that.Yeah, Sisterhood.
I want to talk a little bit about that, about the
relationship between Elphaba andGlinda.
They really love each other. You see through the story, they
have their fight. They aren't always in agreement
(13:14):
with each other, but in the end they come back to each other and
Glinda visits Alphaba in her castle.
While she's being hunted by Dorothy and her gang, Glinda
comes to help Alphaba and Alphaba.
(13:34):
She knows that she's supposed todie, so she puts this water
bucket in a place where Dorothy,who's coming along, can get it
and splash her and melt her. But just the 2.
When Elphaba and Glinda are parting, Glinda's going into
(13:55):
that closet. They're both just standing at
the door, hand on the door. For a good few beats, they're
just standing there and you can feel all their sorrow at leaving
each other because elf for the clock tick.
(14:16):
They they stood there for a clock tick and elf bud needed
Glinda to believe that she died.So she really sold it.
And she had to make this tough choice, this hard choice to
leave ours. It's is it's another betrayal
(14:38):
that she fakes her death to get away from Glinda and Oz.
Not that she's running from Glinda herself, but she's
running from the country and this reputation as this wicked
witch. And she leaves with Fiero, who
is another character that she loves in the movie.
(14:58):
She has to transform him into this scarecrow straw man to save
his life, but she still loves him regardless of the difference
between them. He loves her even though she's
green, and she loves him even though he's made of stroa.
And I think with that decision, Alphaba believed in Glenda's on
(15:23):
magic, magic that she had what it was going to take to make the
good changes in ounces. Yes, she encouraged her to seek
out using the Grimmery for good,but she knew that Glenda had the
goodness in herself to step out of that closet and start to make
things right in a way that Alphaba was not going to have
(15:45):
the opportunity, even with her magic.
And some of my favorite moments in the movie happened after
that. Some things that happened after
the separation of Glenda and Alphaba.
Glenda goes on this mission to be good and fix all the problems
(16:06):
that the wizard and Matamorable caused in ounces.
She's liberates the animals. She goes and tells the wizard
that he has to leave ounces in his balloon right away or
everybody's going to come. You know the guards are going to
arrest him, so he has to leave. She threatens Madamorable to put
(16:27):
her in a cage like they had doneto all those animals.
How did you feel about the banishment?
The banishment of the Wizard I thought was, I mean, I really
liked it. It parallels the Wizard of Oz
story where the Wizard leaves inthe balloon and then we know
(16:48):
Dorothy stands there and doesn'tknow how to get home until
Glinda tells her about the Ruby slippers in the old movie.
At least that's what happens in the books.
I think she has silver slippers and does the same thing.
I'm not exactly sure how I felt about her pushing him out.
(17:10):
I mean, at this point in Wicked for good, we're in like new Oz
territory as far as story arc. So he's shipped off in his
balloon, but I thought, you know, it suits because was there
really a place for him? And Oz, like all of those who
are being told there wasn't a place of status for them, the
(17:30):
animals and such, that was a lie.
But the Oz the Wizard of Oz truly was an outsider, and he
wasn't going to bring good to Oz.
So he had to go. Right.
He had done a lot of harm to Oz,capturing all these animals.
(17:51):
It was really powerful when Alphabet goes into that room and
there's dozens and dozens of animals in cages and they're
screeching and screaming and sheliberates them and they stormed
through the wedding. It's really wonderful to see
(18:11):
them free, but it's upsetting atfirst when you see them in this
dark detention center, in these cages just.
Forgotten. Forgotten, abandoned, not taken
care of. Who knows how much they're being
fed or anything like that. It's just despicable the way
they're being treated and it's alittle hard to see, but then you
(18:36):
know that they're getting freed and that's really uplifting
moment in the film. Absolutely.
And a fairy tale ending. Especially I love at the very
end Glenda is addressing the crowd as the Wizard is leaving
and the animals just walk into the crowd and start mingling and
(18:59):
the people are OK with it because Glenda says it is good.
It was just so touching. I loved the way this wrapped up
the whole last third of the movie or so.
It's sewing all these threads together and wrapping things up
and it I just love the way it ends.
(19:20):
Me too. You mentioned the love of
Alphabet and Glenda. There is a lot of romance, love
and loss in the movie. There is, you know, Nessa loves
Bach. Bach becomes a tin man and runs
off to go and basically he's hunting alphabet to kill her.
(19:42):
And Nessa is left without the love of her life, which is Bach,
and eventually Nessa is killed. And that's love and loss for
Alphaba, her sister getting killed.
And of course Glenda engages herself to Fiero.
(20:04):
Basically it's Madam Warble and Glenda's idea to have this
engagement. Fiero gets taken by surprise.
This is in the beginning of the movie.
And then they have the wedding later.
And Fiero? He doesn't love Glenda, he loves
Alphaba. I also think it's love loss.
Everything that's happening withthe animals, they loved life.
(20:27):
They loved having agency and voice and profession and being
whole members in society and that was love loss.
Yeah, just the whole treatment of the animals, this whole
enemies thing and the oppressionof the animals.
(20:50):
We can see these things that happen around the world all the
time. You see plenty of examples in
the past and the present of oppression and people being
declared enemies just because they're different in some way.
They look a little different, they talk a little different.
Something like that can be a excuse to to using autism
(21:18):
basically to enemies people, to make people enemies that aren't
doing anything to you really. You just you need a scapegoat to
blame whatever it is. In Wicked, the wizard has this
whole scheme. He's created an enemy.
(21:38):
He's made the animals an enemy so that he can unite the humans
and that they won't resist him because he's their savior
against these terrible animals that are causing their society
to decay or whatever he's blaming them for.
And you know, Oz doesn't really like pick one response.
(22:03):
They show both responses that usually come out of these
situations, resistance and hiding, and it was really hard
to see those who could collaborate and resist together
choosing to hide because that appeared to be their only choice
for them. Yeah, Alphabet goes into the
(22:25):
woods and she sees these, this chain of animals sneaking out
through basically a tunnel underthe yellow brick road.
And Doctor Dilliman's there, Dulce bears there.
Her friends are there, and she doesn't want them to leave Oz.
(22:46):
She wants them to stay and fight.
Do you believe resistance ultimately brought good to us in
the story? I believe so.
I believe the resistance it built up over time.
It was Alphaba at first, but then you get Glinda involved,
Fiero involved in the resistance.
(23:09):
They're all doing, you know, either subtle things or very big
things throughout the course of the movie to undermine the
wizard. So I do think that it played a
big role in there, especially the Alphaba going to actually
see the wizard in person and then liberate those animals.
(23:32):
She goes and she's wants to openthe monkey cage 1st and let all
the flying monkeys out and the wizard lets her do that.
I think Madame Marble is really the highest culprit in this
story and just, you know, had the wizard fully under her
(23:54):
manipulative control. Because I feel like if she had
been present during their peace talks, those monkeys would not
have come out. There's no way.
So what do you think? What does that mean?
That he was willing to make someconcessions for Alphaba.
Yeah, he seemed to be trying to manipulate Alphaba into working
(24:16):
with him instead of against him,and so he's trying to get in her
good graces to some extent. Basically, he's this is the
compromise. This is how I get her on my side
and then I still just do what I'm doing now, but she's not a
(24:37):
problem anymore. He wants to neutralize the
threat and he's luring her into a trap.
He's got all his guards ready tocome in and arrest her.
So she's really vulnerable then?History can't speak yet, but he
has chosen a side. He's chosen other the side and
(25:00):
he takes her to the vault. History resists.
That's a big moment of resistance because, yeah, it's
getting the animals to stand up for themselves.
That's really important that they do that.
Let's talk about witchcraft in the land of wicked.
I love that we get to look at itas a hoax and as a tool for good
(25:25):
and evil, but it's interesting there's different aspects of
witchcraft portrayed. It's so interesting.
It's not only witchcraft but also magic as a practice,
because there's different meanings of the word magic.
There's different types of magic, and we see them used in
(25:46):
these movies. The wizard is a magician, he's a
performance magician. He's not a real wizard.
He's got no actual power, which is another interesting thing
that the man, he has the power over the land of Oz.
(26:06):
He's got all the power as the leader, but he has no real
authority coming from himself. It's all this guy's, his giant
head that greets people when they come to visit him and
things like that that make him look big and terrible and
powerful and wonderful. It's all the hoax.
(26:28):
But then these women have actualtrue authority and agency.
They have abilities that the mandoesn't have.
So that's very interesting to see.
Yeah, you know, a couple of the witches have natural powers.
You know, they tell us in the movie why Elphaba does have
(26:51):
hers. And then you have Glenda.
She wants it. She wants it and she tries.
She wishes with all her heart, and she does not have it yet.
Right. She takes longer to develop.
There needs to be an inciting incident, basically a spark to
(27:14):
ignite the magic that's within her.
And that's the whole scene at the end where she thinks
Alphabet dies. That gives her the courage to
stand up for what's right. And she takes the Grimmery and
she does do magic at the end. Another theme that I want to go
(27:36):
back to is fear. And I want to talk about fear
management as a theme in this movie, because we see The Wizard
of Oz and Metamorrable manage the fear that the people have of
the animals. They make them very terrified of
(27:59):
the animals. So you see when, for instance,
the animals come into the wedding, there's panic and
pandemonium by all the people because they're so afraid of
animals at this point in the film through manipulation.
And then we see that goodness coming to counter the fear and
(28:25):
the way that Glinda, who is known as this good person, the
ultimate good person, she comes in and she's able to comfort the
crowd after the wizard leaves. Because at this point, they're
just freaking out about what's happening.
They don't understand what's happening to Oz.
(28:46):
Why is the great and powerful wizard leaving?
Why was there a tornado? Why are the animals coming at
us? What what's going on here?
It's very terrifying for the Aussians.
Yeah, absolutely. They were also using posters to
scare them. Just want to.
Yeah, that was an interesting detail.
(29:07):
That's from the very beginning, you know, back to the original
too, but. Yeah, posters.
They're throwing Flyers. There was the machine that just
cranked out Flyers and rained them down on the city, the
Emerald City. Imagine if they had technology
and we're getting status updates, what they would have
(29:27):
been being told just like what we get.
Yeah. Posts about fear.
What to fear? Right.
We see public figures come out and make addresses and speeches
telling us to be afraid of different people because they're
different than us. And we're actually seeing public
(29:49):
figures use the word witch to oppress, to scare, to label.
And they're not talking about fictional witches when they say
it. They are portraying that there
is a witch to fear. Yes, it's.
That's what we're seeing, right?Now, but we're seeing an uptick
(30:11):
in this accusations of people being witches just for speaking
out and, you know, opposing these other public figures.
You get called a witch, especially if you're a woman.
It's like the go to play for a lot of these men is to call
(30:34):
women witches. You don't have to look hard to
see what we're talking about. It's right there for you.
No, just Google witch and look at the news tab and see what
comes up. There's going to be accusations
of people being witches who are not.
One of the pieces of the story that I love are the unexpected
(30:57):
heroes. It's full of unexpected heroes.
Fiero is an unexpected hero. Oh yeah, Fiero, definitely,
because he's so shout, especially in the first film
he's portrayed as. You know, he does his whole
Dancing Through Life song, whichis his big moment.
(31:19):
He takes him to the Ozdes Ballroom, where they're not
really supposed to be going on aschool night.
Alphabet is a huge, unexpected hero, especially with I call it
the betrayal, the Glenda. And I know that it's more than
that, but I can't help but be bothered that Glenda doesn't
know that she's not alone, You know, that Alphaba is really
(31:43):
there somewhere. But Alphaba is a huge hero.
I mean, we see her trying to be a hero.
You know, her heroism does unfold in the story.
And the other hero that I love is Chesteri.
He's a huge hero. And these are victims coming
back as heroes, too. He was a victim.
(32:04):
Alphaba was a victim. And they still choose to be
heroes for others. Right.
Alphaba we know as the Wicked Witch of the West, cackling
witch from The MGM movie in the 30s.
That's what we know her as this villain, just she's 1 sided in
(32:25):
that film and as the villain, she's a villain in the books.
So people have grown up knowing her as a villain and suddenly
she's doing good deeds. This.
Story and film is very much a fairy tale.
You have the wedding of Glinda the Good and Prince Fiera.
(32:48):
Remember, he's a Prince. So it's almost a, it is like a
Princess and Prince Hale that you get and a fairy, fairy
story. And there's just so much magic
in the telling of the story. And castles.
Oh yes, castles. You've got Wizards and witches
(33:13):
and talking animals. It is like.
Mystical Forest. It is.
It's America's great, greatest fairy tale.
Indeed it. Really is.
Yeah, These characters, as theirstories unfolding, they're
grappling with belief, secrets. I think those two do kind of go
(33:37):
hand in hand, you know, what do they believe?
What have they been told to believe?
What do they know? What don't others know?
There's a lot swirling around there.
Oh, definitely. They, you know, like a lot of
people today, there is a strong belief in evil witchcraft, a
(33:57):
strong belief in what's called maleficium, which is just
harmful magic. We've done an episode on here
about the percentage of people in the world that believe in
this harmful witchcraft, and it's 40%, according to economist
Boris Gershman's work on this, believe that there are curses
(34:22):
and the evil eye and spells thatcan harm people.
And so you see the same kind of belief in the movie as you get
in real life. And in the movie, although using
the spellbook does cause unintended consequences, who did
(34:44):
we see using the spellbook to harm somebody close to them?
Nobody. There is a character, Madame
Marble, who is using her craft to cause general chaos and havoc
and, you know, specifically targeted.
That's imaginary. That's fairy tale.
(35:06):
Madame Marble can't read the Grimmery.
She doesn't know how to read it.And the Wizard of Oz, who has
tricked everybody into thinking that he can read it, but his
secret is that he can't read a word of it.
He just knows some words that aren't Ozian.
You see in the first movie when they go to the Emerald City and
(35:30):
there's that production that talks about the Wizard of Oz
with Kristin Chenoweth and IdinaMizell come in and there's in
the song, there's the Wizard just repeating the word Omaha
Omaha. And so it sounds magical because
(35:53):
it's a foreign word and he's just using these non Ozian words
to pretend to read the book and he's not doing anything.
He's it's all sleight of hand and that kind of thing with the
wizard. I would say the manipulation
from the person who is harming Oz was because she could count
on them responding to fear. But did anybody actually?
(36:17):
Well, Dorothy gets told that this is a wicked witch and she
goes on a mission to get the broom.
She goes on a witch hunt, Yeah. She goes on a witch hunt with
the other 3 characters. So Dorothy is told that this is
a evil witch that you've got to fear.
(36:37):
This is the Wicked Witch of the West.
She's terrible and terrifying. And so Dorothy goes on this
witch hunt in the movie, and it's like in real life, we're
always trying to differentiate between people's right to
(36:58):
believe what they believe versusthe wrong that it is to use that
belief to do harm to others. So it's OK to believe in
witchcraft. That's your right to believe
that there's harmful witchcraft.But it's not your right to go
(37:19):
out and hurt another person because you think that they're a
witch. That's not OK.
Her hunt for alphabet also demonstrates this equation we
see in real life where it's the sum 0.
She wants to get home so she hasto harm the witch she to get
(37:39):
what she wants which is her safety is what will make her
whole. She has to stop this evil witch
who others have portrayed as harmful, even those in her close
circle. The Tin Man and the Lion have
grievances against Ababa, so then she must be the witch.
(38:04):
I think that really demonstratesscenarios that we have
experienced here on Earth, past and present.
If somebody's doing really good that's harming me, or if I can't
get a leg up, why is that? Yeah, somebody else took that
(38:25):
leg from you. Got it up there.
Yeah, that's that whole belief. And that really plays into
witchcraft accusations because people say that guy is really
successful and has a good job and a good income, but I'm
struggling here and that's not right.
(38:46):
It means that he took something from me.
We should be equal, but we're not, so he must have used
witchcraft to achieve his success at my expense.
That's a false belief. People find success for real,
literal reasons. Sometimes they have a skill
(39:07):
that's better than everybody else.
Other times they've got it in somebody else doesn't have.
Or they have the money it takes to make something happen that
another person might not have. But it's not a curse that is
giving individual success. Right, Yeah.
We see a lot of atrocities we'vetalked about on this show
(39:30):
before, ritual attacks where people actually will take other
people's body parts to use in rituals to gain wealth and power
and influence. And that's not the way that
things work. It's not OK to take somebody
else's body part. It is a lie that is wrong.
(39:52):
One of the fun things that propels the characters forward
are their collective hopes of a better future.
Some people, some characters in the story, of course, have very
selfish hopes, but there's a lotof unselfish hopes for the
future and what it's going to take to have a better future.
(40:13):
At the beginning of Wicked, Nessa's there for a better
future. She's had a rough start.
You know you've got Glenda has her bright future ahead.
She's just prancing onto the stage of her life.
Alpha Bob wants a better future for Oz, for the oppressed.
(40:34):
What did it take for a better future?
Well, for a better future, it took removing the Wizard and
Matamorabel, who were the ones oppressing Oz and keeping it
from having a bright future. They were turned Oz, which is
this colorful, vivid place, especially the flower fields,
(40:57):
and it's just so vividly colorful.
But they've turned it into this,you know, metaphorically very
dark place where very sinister things are being done to the
animals and they have to be removed before the sun can shine
(41:18):
through again. And when the animals were under
control, captured, hidden, they moved on to the Munchkins.
They did. They stopped allowing the
Munchkins to leave Munchkin Landso Bach couldn't go to that
wedding and nobody else could gowhere they needed to go.
(41:41):
And part of this dynamic with the Wizard and Madame Warble and
the wicked witches, the good witches, has to do with this
patriarchy. Because the man has all the
power, even though he's just a hollow, empty vessel.
He's nothing. He's pathetic, but he wields
(42:05):
this huge amount of power to be able to order people to round up
the animals and lock them up in cages and dark rooms.
That takes like a lot of power. People believe that he's so
powerful, they're so invested inthat, but he's not that good of
(42:25):
a leader. He's pretty terrible at almost
everything except doing slight hand tricks and propaganda, but
he's the man. He's leading this place, but he
relies on the power of Madame Morable.
He relies upon a woman, even though he doesn't allow her to
(42:49):
lead. He relies upon her magic, her
actual abilities to be able to do anything.
And so there's this very feminist aspect to The Wizard of
Oz in the 1st place, but especially Wicked, with the
women having the real power and authority and abilities in the
(43:10):
movie. And they have the key roles.
They get the most words in the songs.
They're the center of the film. It's women.
Wicked is a musical, but on the stage, and now it's a film
that's a musical. It is, and the songs really
(43:31):
carry the movie because there's a lot of exposition in the
songs. We learn a lot of the details
about what's going on through the words that the people
saying. There's a couple of songs in
there that stood out to me. There's this really powerful
song that opens it. It's everyday more wicked and it
(43:54):
has some elements of from the previous movie of the nobody
mourns the wicked come into thismovie as well.
And so all this song about Wicked really just gets me into
the film. It was a good way to to open it.
And really the instrumentation in it is so just bold and
(44:19):
powerful. I really love the use of the
bass trombones. I'm a former trombone artist or
trombonist, and I just really thought really speaks to me.
But then later there's a song they actually sing a song called
No Place Like Ohm. So throughout the this movie and
(44:40):
the first one, they're evoking all of the Wizard of Oz themes
and songs and phrases that we know by heart.
There's no place like home. There's no place like home.
There's no place like home. There's a whole song about that
in Wicked for Good. And then at the end they're
singing a song called For Good. So you start the movie with the
(45:02):
wicked and you end with the good.
It shows the whole like story arc.
You can trace just through the progression of the songs and the
themes that they're singing about.
I also feel like with this musical specifically, and maybe
not uniquely, but specifically, these duets and vocal
(45:27):
collaborations are a way that bring these characters together
at another level. You know, there's these tides
from the story pushing them apart, pushing them together,
pushing them apart. But when you're enjoying the
parts of the story that are being sung, they're so together,
(45:48):
and I really found that so powerful.
Their voices are so different and yet when they come together,
it's so very powerful. It really just gives you
goosebumps at times. The way that they sound
together, the emotion in the songs, the passion of the songs.
(46:11):
You really feel. What if you're meant to feel?
The music really helps to guide you emotionally through the
story. The language is also used to
bring that Oz feel, so you always are remembering.
Even in the old's like intense moments, there's words used as
(46:36):
fun. The ASEAN language is riddled
with melapropisms, which basically are it sounds mostly
like a word, but one of the, youknow, the suffix or the prefix
will be altered to change the sound of the word.
But it still has the same meaning in the film.
(46:59):
Like instead of saying that's horrendous, they might say
that's horrendable, but we know what they're talking about, even
though the word sounds a little funny.
And I just, it brings the fun right from the gate, 'cause
there's plenty in there. There's not just a few of those.
It's like a prop or a character too.
Words as themes are also a part that I like.
(47:21):
They use the word wonderful so poignantly, on purpose of
course, and you enjoy it. You love seeing that play on the
word. Wonderful.
They do with the language of Oz because the wonderful Wizard of
Oz goes right back to the beginning of the story with L
Frank Baum, who by the way, Alphaba is named after his
(47:43):
initials, LFB Alphaba. But they use these wonderful,
the wonderful, they use this funphrase a clock tick instead of
like wait a moment, they're likejust wait a clock tick.
I love that aspect to it. I've been saying that myself.
It's just. It's so fun.
And doesn't that also, like, go back to Gregory Mcguire's device
(48:11):
that's part of the opening of that story, the clock?
Yeah, the what is it? The Time Dragon clock.
Yeah, the Time Dragon, the. Clock of the Time Dragon.
Yeah, yeah. And that clock, if you go to the
musical, especially at the Broadway production, the clock
is a big part of the staging. It's part of the set.
(48:33):
And so this just using that word, that phrase evokes, it's a
Broadway edition. And what about Dorothy?
I mean, going back to the original Oz film where she's
been dreaming, She's had this whole adventure and her family
and friends are just beside her bed waiting.
(48:56):
And how long has it been? We don't really know.
We don't, but I found it really interesting with Dorothy how we
never really got a direct look at her.
It was just glimpses of the gingham dress that she wears and
glimpses of the shoes. The in this movie, they're the
(49:18):
silver sparkly, I don't know what you call them shoes.
They're just glitter shoes. And we see them walking along,
and we know that's Dorothy. This story that Wicked is
telling can't be told from Dorothy's lens.
She is a secondary character. She has to be.
(49:43):
You can't have another main character at the point that she
comes into the movie. It's you know, she's, it's late
in the game that she enters the picture.
Yeah, I also think the words areso powerful, and I mean the
regular words, they're statements.
(50:03):
Single words in this story can be statements, obviously wicked.
There's so much with that word, the word witch.
Those words carry so much meaning beyond just the initial
definition. There's so much to wickedness,
(50:25):
there's so much to what a witch is.
There's so many layers of that. Then on on the flip side, they
start using in this movie words like love and good.
And you see that there's still people who want those good
things in the world and they want good for other people and
for animals as well. So people who are different from
(50:48):
them or even encompassed in thislove and this wishing for good
things for others. It shows us that we here need to
look past the labels to discoverwhat makes the people around us,
our neighbors, our loved ones, look past the label that you
(51:09):
might perceive them as. Interact with people who are
different than you. You can talk to your neighbor
even though they might look different or they have a
different feeling about an issue, you talk to them.
It's good to mingle with other people so that you get a sense
(51:31):
that we're just all in this thing together.
We're all humans, we're the sameexcept for very superficial
differences. With hopes for a better future.
Everybody has hopes for a betterfuture.
Your neighbor that you don't like has similar hopes to you.
They want a better future. They're striving towards some
(51:54):
level of prosperity and comfort.I got to talk about the props
before we finish this out because there's so many fun
props in this story. We've talked about the mirrors,
I've talked about it a lot, but take the mirror imagery out of
the story. It's a whole different story.
(52:15):
These props are just really key images for the storytelling.
The hat of this hat, it's, there's so many layers, there's
so many different feelings that you have towards the hat during
the course of these two films. At first it's given to her as a
(52:37):
joke. It's supposed to be there so she
can be ridiculed, but by the end, it has so much power to it.
That's a symbol of the Wicked Witch.
It's a symbol of alpha. Her costume represents an
element of an aspect of her persona and tells us much about
(53:03):
her. When she's almost fearless,
she's brave. We know that because she wears
that hat to the Oz's ballroom inthe first movie, and she's out
in public wearing that hat. She use it as a prop in the
dance that she does. And I believe Glenda takes it at
(53:23):
the end of the story. She it's in the possession of
Linda again after all this. It's important at the end
because it's part of what gives the illusion that Elphaba is
dead, that her cloak and her hatare left behind.
And Linda lifts the hat and finds the green bottle
(53:46):
underneath it, the green bottle that tells us that Elphaba is
the wizard's daughter. And that's a huge moment in the
film. When she confronts the wizard
with that bottle, which is another prop.
I have a list here of what Josh like, like maybe only 25, and
that's probably only 1/4 of the important props.
(54:09):
So when you're watching this film, really think about the
props and what they're telling you about the characters or the
environment or the context. Yeah, pay attention to the shoes
and the broom, how it gets used and the wands, how they're
different from each other and what the facts they have.
(54:33):
And then the bubble thing that Glenda flies around in, which is
one of my favorite props in the movie.
I just, I loved it when it came in in the first film.
I love seeing it introduced to her in Wicked for good.
It's a very fun prop. Yeah, the cages, the forest, the
(54:55):
trains, they're all very important.
Even the darker props are so important.
We've talked about how the characters are transformed
through the movie and through their personal growth, but
there's some real literal transformations in the movie,
too. There's characters that actually
(55:16):
change their whole form. We talked about Bach becoming
the Tin Man, but what happens toFiero?
He becomes the straw man becausehe's being beaten up and pulled
apart while he's physically tiedto a post in the field.
(55:38):
And he's. Getting it and he has to be
saved by being turned into a straw man that they can't break.
And it's interesting because he seems to have embraced his
change. It brought him back to the love
of his life and enables him to continue his work for good.
(55:59):
The tragedy of Bach is his transformation took him further
from everybody. It isolates him.
It radicalized him. He became a dedicated witch
hunter after that where before he was friends with Alphabet.
But he gets changed and it just doesn't go down well.
(56:25):
The animals are transforming back to their selves at the end
of the. Animals.
They're getting their speech back at the end of the film.
They're getting their jobs back.Doctor Dillamond, I love seeing
him back in the classroom. It's amazing.
I was very interested and beyondOz from the first film 'cause I
(56:48):
remember when Alpha BA runs out from Shaz and is going out to
the beautiful valley, all the colors, and she goes and goes
and goes. And it really struck me in that
film when she reaches the edge, how it's just beige or white.
(57:08):
And that really means something more.
In Wicked for Good the Beyond Odds, because we know that's
where the oppressed animals werehiding.
For them, it became a place of refuge.
For Elphaba, it's a self banishment.
It's a place of refuge. And unfortunately, that is
(57:31):
something that women and children and other vulnerable
individuals in our world, for a variety of horrible reasons, are
experiencing banishment right now.
Millions of people around the world specifically accused
witches, experience management and never get to come back.
(57:56):
Accused witches, they are thrownout of their communities.
They're left to either wonder for the rest of their lives,
from community to community, trying to find one that'll
accept them, or they have to go to a place of refuge.
They have to go to one of these places.
Like in Ghana, there are these places called witch camps, and
(58:22):
they're places where women who've been banished from their
communities have gathered to have the safety with each other.
They're terrible places to live,but they're safer than being in
a community where everybody wants to kill you.
They. Can't go back.
(58:42):
They can't go back. They need to go somewhere.
They should be reintegrated intosociety as long as they can do
that safely. But they might not be able to go
back to their own village ever. They might not see their
families again because of the banishment.
And often these accusations comefrom your own family.
(59:06):
AB children accusing their own mother or grandmother of
witchcraft and kicking her out of the village and out of their
lives. We've talked a lot about the
characters in a little bit aboutthe actual actors, but we need
to specifically highlight something amazing.
(59:28):
The star of the show, Elphaba, Cynthia Areevo has made a video
where she talks about the witch camps in Ghana and the need for
legislation that's currently before the parliament to be
passed and signed by the president of the country to go
into effect to outlaw witchcraftaccusations and put in place
(59:53):
mechanisms to help the women transition to new homes,
cleaner, better homes. With more opportunities.
It brings awareness to their situation in their current
villages, their refugee villages.
I believe that will hopefully bring them better
(01:00:15):
acknowledgement and resources and safety there as well.
Partnering with Amnesty International like that is very
powerful and important. And if I'm wrong on this, reach
out and tell me. But I believe that Cynthia is
the first celebrity to make a statement acknowledging and
(01:00:39):
asking for support of victims ofwitchcraft accusations.
If there's another celebrity whohas done this, thank you.
But I am pretty sure that it wasa very historic clip that is out
there on Instagram. Check it out.
You can find out how to sign a petition to support the
(01:01:02):
legislation. It's all right there on Amnesty
International's Instagram page. Yeah, you can even see it.
We've got it embedded on one of our websites of our nonprofit
organization in Witch hunts. You can go to intwitchhunts.org
and see the Instagram post from Cynthia right there.
(01:01:23):
It's so amazing to have someone who's so widely recognized as
her to come out and say something about it.
And Cynthia's parents come from West Africa, from Nigeria, and
that can resonate with people inWest Africa as well as gain
attention from people around therest of the world.
(01:01:47):
Share her clip. Thank you, Cynthia.
Thank you so much, Cynthia. Another thing that happens with
banishment, entire families willbe implicated in witchcraft
accusations and have to live together.
We know there is a village in India that is made-up of accused
(01:02:08):
families that have found each other and are now living
together from different cultures.
But what they have in common isn't necessarily their local
history, heritage and culture, but they are identifying as
accused witches and finding a life together.
When we look at the witch trial history in the US, there was
(01:02:31):
case after case of banishment. We know Dorothy Good never
settled down. She was wandering the rest of
her life, essentially. She was warned out of town after
town because she had this reputation from when she was a
four or five year old child thataccused of witchcraft that
(01:02:55):
stayed with her for her life, staying of the witchcraft
accusation. And we know that witchcraft
accusations aren't the only reason that people get banished.
We can look around in this country right now and there's
this coordinated effort for massdeportations.
That's another form of banishment that's kicking people
(01:03:18):
out of their homes, out of theircountry that they live in, and
forcing them to go off into a country that they've never even
been to. And who knows how they're going
to be treated there and how they're going to make a living
in a foreign land that they didn't want to go to.
(01:03:40):
What does Wicked Wicked for GoodOz tell us about good and evil
and popular culture? What's happening in Oz makes
sense because of our own popularculture, beliefs about people
and witches and magic. We look around at things like
(01:04:02):
television and movies and we seethese portrayals at people as
being either good or evil. They're representing the
extremes that in reality people are in the middle.
But in popular culture, there's a lot of vilification of people
(01:04:22):
as being so wicked that they're actually evil.
And we see that in life, too. People get accused of being evil
all the time. And we can really take a lesson
from Glenda and Alphaba that we can change each other, that we
have choices to make and that can make a better future.
(01:04:47):
So my big question is, does the portrayal of witches and
othering in Wicked in Ounces in other pop culture stories and
films about witches like this? Does it hurt or help oppress
people? Well, it depends really on the
audience reaction, how audiencestake the film.
(01:05:11):
If audiences are seeing the veryclear parallels in the film to
modern life and oppression, thenit can help people because
people can step up and say I want to do something about that.
I want to resist and take some action.
(01:05:32):
That's very true, because there really are others that are
othered and there really are accused witches.
And if you want to do something about it, you may know what to
do. Be brave and do what you know to
do. If you're not sure, reach out to
us. We can plug you in with projects
(01:05:54):
and people that can use your skills and platform.
Wicked. It shows us other ring.
It shows us a dark reality that we tend to want to look away
from. It makes us look at it, at the
oppression of the animals. We have to look at the animals
(01:06:16):
in the cages in that vault. We have to see their suffering
and the harm. And so we need to, as
responsible adult human beings, look at our world with the same
lens and see the oppression and harm going on around us and do
(01:06:36):
something. Speak up, talk to your friends,
your family about it. Get people involved.
Find an organization that's working on the issue that you're
passionate about and get involved.
Have a great today and a wicked good tomorrow.
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