ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Wicked changed the colour of Dorothy’s magical ruby slippers.

It may seem like sacrilege, but Wicked director Jon M Chu is actually being faithful to L Frank Baum’s original Oz novel by opting for silver crystal shoes instead of red. The colour was changed in the 1939 MGM movie so that Dorothy’s heels could be a pop of vivid scarlet as the creators took advantage of the glorious new three-strip Technicolour film.

Another, rather less artistically profound reason for Chu to avoid painting the town (or least the shoes) red is a copyright issue. MGM reportedly owns the rights to that version of the shoes, but Wicked is distributed by rival Universal Pictures. As Chu explained to Variety in 2024: “We had boundaries of what we could reference or not. We never use the ruby slippers.” He added that the distinctive spiral shape of the Yellow Brick Road is also copywritten, so Wicked “had to do a circle that continues to show it’s not where the road ends”.

Related: The Critical Drinker asks and answers: Wicked For Good — Is It Actually Good, Though?