“Totó, I think we’re not in Kansas anymore.” L. Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900. It has since become one of the most widely published children’s books in the world. The 1939 film version starring Judy Garland and directed by Victor Fleming engraved her musical numbers and the Yellow Brick Road that Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion travel in search of the legendary Wizard of Oz to fulfill their various wishes adventures exist.
The Wizard of Oz is the story chosen by Cadena SER to celebrate the tenth anniversary of their already traditional Christmas story, which will air on December 25th at 12pm (it will be available on the SER Podcast below and will be available on December 6th). be reprinted in a special edition of La ventana). Writer Juan José Millás is commissioned to adapt what he considers “a masterpiece”. “It brings together a lot of the things that fascinate me the most, like paradoxical thinking, that erasure that happens between wakefulness and sleep. The fantastic and the real are so intertwined that one cannot unravel it and tell which thread belongs to the fantastic and which to the real. It is one of those works that can be said to have been written in a state of grace,” describes Millás in a telephone conversation.
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The author’s primary concern in adapting the text to the radio format was the orality of the medium. “It wasn’t overly difficult because this novel has a lot of stories from oral tradition,” he explains. The next challenge related to the length of the original text. But here, too, the novel itself made it easy for him: “It has an episodic structure and the episodes are not necessarily related. You can remove some or condense a lot without affecting the overall structure.
Elena Rivera is Dorothy in SER.Pablo Palacios’ “The Wizard of Oz.”
Although 122 years have passed since The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published, its content is still valid and still attracts the attention of children and adults with its imagination. Millás has an explanation for its validity: “The stories that play with the paradox are very popular. Woody Allen plays with the paradox a lot and likes it a lot, for example. And they like it because man is profoundly paradoxical from the moment he is born to die. This is a novel in which all the characters are caught in paradox,” says the author.
Millás justifies his theory with examples. Dorothy believes she is lost at the very moment in her life that she finds herself in this story of initiation into life. The Cowardly Lion shows enduring courage by joining this band of adventurers. The Tin Man regrets not having a heart, though he cries when he steps on a bug. And the scarecrow longs for a brain, when in reality, as Millás points out, the moment he thinks he’s stupid, he’s already proving his intelligence. “There is a permanent misunderstanding that puts an end to the brutal misconception that the Wizard of Oz is actually a poor man, small and bald, who has led an entire town to believe that he is an almighty being. It’s all a misunderstanding in the midst of a story that confuses sleep with being awake.
The voices of Aitana Sánchez Gijón as the Narrator, Elena Rivera as Dorothy, Ernesto Alterio as the Tin Man, Dani Rovira as the Lion, Gabino Diego as the Scarecrow and Ramón Barea as the Wizard of Oz, directed by Ana Alonso, echo form to that written by Millás sound fiction. But the story wouldn’t be complete without the work of Roberto García, a filmmaker who has been responsible for the sound design of SER’s Christmas stories for the past seven years. To explain its function, he compares it to the illustrator who accompanies the text of a book with drawings; He does it with sounds, music and effects. He makes sure that the tornado that transports Dorothy to the Kingdom of Oz rings in our ears, we recognize the scarecrow by its movement and remind us that Totó accompanies it everywhere. He has also given the winged monkey sound, evil monsters at first but not so bad later.
García describes The Wizard of Oz as one of the most technically complex stories he has ever written, due to the many different scenes and settings in which the action takes place and its fantastical component. Although some of the sonic cues were already given by Millás in a text that contained an initial statement in which the writer required the result to be very sonorous, most of the effects and sounds required him to use his imagination. And always try to avoid the obvious: “We have to think that the listener is intelligent and try to surprise him with sounds, to constantly stimulate him.”
Gabino Diego, during the recording of ‘The Wizard of Oz’.Pablo Palacios
The preparations for the beginning of the Christmas story require months of work. Its director remembers that the first meetings were held before the summer that year and that after the summer they already had the first versions of the script written by Millás. Then work begins to bring the cast of voices together, a task handled by producer David Tomillo. This year the basic voice is that of the narrator due to the weight it carries. After securing Aitana Sánchez Gijón for this role, they moved on to the others, taking into account that the voices had to be different enough to be easily identifiable. The first recording was made on November 11th and the last one a few weeks ago. García sent the first “audible” version (with all the components but open to changes) on Sunday December 18th. At the time of this interview, this Tuesday, he had just heard the 10th version he’s done of this year’s story. “Last year, on December 23, we relaunched something else.” Up to the last moment they polish and spoil this gift from SER to their listeners for Christmas.
This tradition, which the station launched in 2013 with the adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Christmas carol, has already featured stories such as Little Women, How Beautiful It Is to Live, The Big Family, Peter Pan, Love in the Time of Cholera and Pinocchio. Roberto García notes that every year it’s a special occasion to put the audience first. “Each time we find more people who see it as a tradition and listen to it as family on Christmas Day. And it also picks up the tradition of sound fiction and radio play, which is very much appreciated by the actors. It’s very nice to see with what respect Ernesto Alterio, Ramón Barea or Aitana Sánchez Gijón are shown in front of the bus, it’s brutal,” he concludes.
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