8 Movies That Were Secretly Remakes Of Remakes

3. The Wiz

The Original: The Wizard Of Oz (1925)

The Remake: The Wizard Of Oz (1939)

The Remake Remake: The Wiz (1978)

So much of our popular view of Oz doesn't actually come from L. Frank Baum's original books, but instead the eternally-beloved musical adaptation. That film was responsible for creating much of the series' integral iconography (from character design to red slippers), meaning that, despite the novels being in the public domain, due to the rights to all of these belonging to MGM it's a very hard film to remake. That's why most moderns takes are sequels (Return To Oz) or prequels (Oz The Great And Powerful) that riff on the ideas without directly going into it.

In that regard, the closest we have to a straight up remake is either The Wiz or The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, which each have a unique enough a slant to be the same but different.

But, as you've no doubt come to expect by this point, that original is really a remake itself. There'd been several versions of Baum's world made in the silent era, but the film of five directors was mainly influenced by a 1925 release, which focused on the Scarecrow but still introduced many key elements that were eventually built on.