Comic dork-cum-action figure king Todd McFarlane seems to think its still 1992 and that someone out there still gives a shit. Not that I blame Todd. The early 1990’s were my glory years too. I still had all my hair, I didn’t have to slip a five dollar bill down a woman’s g-string to get her attention, heroin was cheap and readily available, and I couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing some new hot new single from my beloved Spin Doctors (see what I did there, Jake?). Ahh, The Spin Doctors; your candle burned out before your legend ever did.

But there’s a difference between wistful and delusional. Sure I might slip on the flannel shirt and Doc Martens on occasion, but I’m not sitting around waiting for the new Candlebox record to drop like it’s some grunge-era Godot. Cobain is dead, Twin Peaks is off the air, and no one gives a shit about Todd McFarlane’s “dark and twisted” vision of anything that isn’t a Kiss action figure. You had your chance, Todd; it was called Image Comics, and it nearly caused the demise of funny books (not that that was necessarily a bad thing). So shut up about your supposed Wizard of Oz remake/reboot/sequel. And whatever you do, DON’T speak to Empire Magazine about… shit…. too late. Some excerpts:

“They’re on their second iteration (of the script) right now, trying to get it into a zone that makes sense. Josh Olsen (sic) wrote a draft that didn’t quite strike Warners fancy… they wanted it more sexy!”

“I think my ‘Twisted’ version is a little scary for Warners to embrace… It was big, it was bold and it wasn’t a very pretty place. It was badass! There’s no Baum in it at all… what’s going to get a new generation to go look at Oz is if you reinvent it on some level. Not every single level, but some of them have to be new. Shut down your preconceived notions. For me, you should be looking at an isolated movie that, oh, by the way, happens to be Oz. To get the new audience you’re going to have to put some edges on this thing. My version would rock!”

The complete interview can be found here. But let’s cut to the chase. There was a time when you could Marilyn Manson up a beloved classic and people would swallow it; but all that was wiped away by the Y2K Virus and eight years of Admiral George W. Chucklefuck steering the Good Ship America into a flotsam-and-feces-riddled whirlpool. We don’t need “edgy.” We need GOOD. And while I’m not saying there isn’t an audience for Dorothy in nipple clamps and the Tin Man with a cock-ring, that audience is comparatively small, and likely already has its own poorly-drawn hentai-pr0n website. It certainly isn’t large enough to justify spending of millions of dollars nor defiling one the most successful and revered movies of all time, just to placate their fetish for seeing The Straw Man in a PVC bustier getting pegged by a spiked-strap-on wielding Wicked Witch of the West. Sexy? Isn’t Dakota Fanning supposed to star in this thing? Even I’m not perverse enough to use the words “sexy” and “Dakota Fanning” in the same sentence (although I just did), and I’ve been on To Catch A Predator so many times it earned me a SAG card.

So enough about the Fetish Ball version of The Wiz, Todd. Besides, rumor has it your creative input on this project is less that of “visionary” and more akin to the crazy aunt at the Thanksgiving table whose ramblings about UFOs and secret government weather machines are begrudgingly tolerated until the twelve extra shots of brandy in her egg-nog put her out for the night. Don’t you have some Slipknot action figures to work on?

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