Sam Raimi showed up at Comic-Con today with the trailer for his big-budget Oz, the Great and Powerful, which serves as a prequel to The Wizard of Oz … sort of. (It’s a lawyer thing.) The glitzy, promising footage follows the wizard (James Franco) on his hero’s journey from adulterer illusionist in Kansas to powerful flim-flam man in the Emerald City, but don’t expect the witches (played by Mila Kunis and Rachel Weisz) to be green — at least, not initially — or for anyone to don ruby slippers. Those famous shoes are “imagery unique to the [1939] MGM film, so no, they don’t make an appearance in this one,” Raimi told the crowd at the panel for Disney, which is distributing Oz, the Great and Powerful. Still, there’s at least one cross-studio similarity Raimi was able to retain: The Kansas scenes are filmed in black and white, but things go super-saturated color when Franco gets to Oz. (All of it is presented in 3-D, however.)
