The Wizard of Oz film came out back in 1939 so
while this one is technically a movie tie-in, we feel
the statute of limitations ran out on this one since
nobody reading this was even alive when the film
was out. And that's ignoring the fact that video
games didn't even exist back in the days where the
most important thing happening was The
University of Oregon defeating Ohio State
University to win the championship of the first
NCAA men's basketball tournament. Oh, and
probably that whole Nazi Germany kicking off
World War II thing too.
But in 1993 The Wizard of Oz was a strange title to
bring to the Super Nintendo, a console that
probably didn't have a plethora of hardcore fans of
the film. The strange thing is that I can't find any
solid information that this game even existed.
Clearly it did, as you can find it out in the wild, but
I'm talking about information on the game
seemingly being scrubbed from the internet and
the people at Turner. As a game and traditional
platformer, The Wizard of Oz fails on all counts. Hit
detection is what we call in the industry "poor" and
attacks are almost laughable, with the Tin Man
being the only character of any value.
Each character has their own unique abilities and
traits, but these almost never really come into play.
What's odd that I didn't know when playing initially
was that many of the stages later in the game
come from the 1990 Wizard of Oz animated series
from DIC, that I never knew existed. So what we
have is a terrible idea for a game, based on a movie
the predated video games, incorporating stuff for a
animated series nobody watched.