Forty years after its original release, no film has uniquely defined black culture and shaped the framework of a musical genre quite like "The Wiz."
An adaptation of the groundbreaking Broadway musical _ itself a retelling of L. Frank Baum's classic 1900 children's fantasy "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" that became the beloved Judy Garland movie _ the Sidney Lumet-directed film had a rapturous soundtrack produced by Quincy Jones, a cast that included Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Lena Horne, Nipsey Russell, Mabel King and Richard Pryor and an aesthetic firmly rooted in black culture.
For a generation of black Americans, this was the first time they saw people who spoke, sung and moved the way they did in a Broadway production and, later, a big-screen musical, and it has become a kind of rite of passage for the black community.
Everyone remembers their first time experiencing "The Wiz." If it's the stage production, that likely came from performing it in high school or seeing a touring troupe tackle it, but the film is the most accessible entry into the all-black retelling of "The Wizard of Oz." Many of us recall watching it with family during the holidays, huddled around the TV and singing the tunes.
What was revolutionary about it, first in the original Broadway production and then amplified by Jones' work on the splashy film version, was its songbook.
"Grease" had arrived to big screens months earlier, as did "Thank God It's Friday" (which, like "The Wiz," was a Motown production), but both pulled from the world of disco and were tailored toward white audiences.
"The Wiz," however, weaved together gospel, blues, soul and R&B _ genres that are unequivocally black creations _ and were narratives of the black experience, an especially bold move given Hollywood's monochromatic palette.
It bombed upon its release on Oct. 24, 1978 (it cost more than it earned, and critics dismissed it as a saccharine imitation of its stage predecessor), but that didn't matter to audience members who were seeing themselves reflected on screen in ways they hadn't before.
