Every home needs a copy of The Wizard of Oz.

Note: I have no commercial relationship to Apple’s iTunes store except to trash them are various times because iTunes software is only moderately reliable.

For the next few days, iTunes is selling the HD version of one of the five best movies ever made for $4.99. I’ve never seen a price like that for this movie before.

When I was a child I was TERRIFIED of the flying monkeys. Then I discovered coffee as a teenager and discovered that the Wicked Witch was actually a coffee salesperson in disguise (or vice versa). So the terror subsided at least unit I discovered the flying monkeys that work for the IRS.

Somewhere over the rainbow… there’s no place like home.

Historical note: When I was a child in the 1950s/60s, the Wizard of Oz was aired on TV only one time per year on Thanksgiving Weekend. Every year my peer group informally competed to be the first to be able to watch the whole terrifying movie. The flaming ball “wizard” got me every year until I was about 11 or so, and the damn flying monkeys used to get me right up into my early teens. Also, I never experienced the movie turn into color until about 1980s because I had always seen it on a black and white TV.

If you love the Wizard of Oz and have not seen the TV miniseries Tinman, you will probably be enchanted by the revisionist version. It is usually playing on Netflix or Hulu Plus. Spoiler alerts: The flying monkeys are even nastier in Tinman and I still close my eyes. The Scarecrow side story is much more interesting, although it was clearly pilfered from an early Star Trek episode featuring Mr Spock. And Dorothy and the Wicked Witch are much sexier in Tinman.