With the tagline “Let Icons Be Bygones” BLOWN AWAY (The Remix) tears apart a well-known story then spins the pieces into an original compelling REMIX to present a new understanding of – and new experience of -- the classic tale.

 

Starting with the public domain source material of Frank L. Baum’s “Oz” series, the familiar classic is inverted: now its three fantastical characters (Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion) are jettisoned from a war-torn Oz to Earth on a storm.  As they journey through an alien-to-them landscape, they’re pursued from both sides – chased by remixed witches and flying monkeys from Oz, and hunted by Earthlings as enemy alien beings who’ve fallen from the sky. They team up with a teenage runaway, Dorothy, who helps the war refugees journey back to their besieged homeland. 

 

C H A R A C T E R   B R E A K D O W N

 

SCARECROW

           

A disfigured female country singer, a naïve troubadour poet. She sings a haunting acoustic song about how she knows she’ll never be pretty – “I Know That Much” – so she's working on being smarter instead. But she struggles with remembering the lyrics along the way, and her faulty memory can be truly heartbreaking.

 

TIN MAN

           

A post-human, bionic-semi-robotic soldier struggles with severe PTSD. His horrific war experiences have physically and spiritually removed his “heart.”

 

LION

 

A thick-necked macho tough-guy – or gal – with crushing neurotic anxiety, and social paranoia.

 

DOROTHY

 

A modern-day teenage runaway girl of nontraditional ethnicity.

 

 

THE WICKED WITCH

 

A Darth Vader-ish villain with freighteningly aggressive martial art skills and flashy sword/staff/broom Samurai warrior moves. 

 

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THE STORM

 

An allegorical character with a fan blade headdress and innocent fluttering ribbons-on-a-stick. She arcs from a sexy breeze into a terrifying ultra-violent Kali-esque psychotic rage. 

 

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ENSEMBLE / MUNCHKINS / BRICK ROAD, ETC.

 

A shifting Greek chorus with soaring vocals and stunning Bollywood/street dance/flash mob gravity-defying moves. During the opening storm number they platoon and swarm on rollerblades playing xylophones and other percussion instruments strapped to the backs of other members of their troupe.

 

CHARACTERS CAN HAVE MASH-UP POSSIBILITIES

 

Multiple mash-up possibilities can be explored. For example, there may be a “poppy driven” parallel-universe with Star Wars overlay (if agreed to as “Fair Use” satire).

 

• The Scarecrow re-remixed with…Obi Wan Kenobi (speaking wisely, ironically)

• The Tin Man re-remixed with…    Transformer/R2D2/CP3O mash-up   

• The Lion re-remixed with…          Chewbacca

• Dorothy re-remixed with…           Princess Leia/Luke Skywalker mash-up

 

                                                                                                               

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THE EMERGING IMPORTANCE OF THE REMIX

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Cultural prophets Cory Doctorow, Isaac Asimov, Malcolm Gladwell, and Lawrence Lessing have endorsed remixes and mash-ups as the most powerful social tool for sharing new understandings of our shifting cultural identities and evolving consensus reality.

 

The ascendance of remix culture as a vehicle to transform how we feel about ourselves and our history – through recombination, reinterpretation, recontextualization, and re-vision – has already positioned itself to become the 21st century’s most vital and default cultural art form. 

 

As with its central characters, BLOWN AWAY forces us to update our understanding of ourselves (as an audience and as individuals) pushing us beyond our past consensus reality into new familiar-yet-strange territories where we are discovering a new version of who we are and what we want.

 

SPINNING THE REMIX

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A nearly endless list of public domain works are available to create even more unexpected yet meaningful new connections:  e.g., Shakespeare, Dickens (Oliver Twist), Twain (…Huckleberry Finn), A.C. Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), Jules Verne (Journey to The Center of The Earth), Bram Stoker (Dracula), R.L. Stevenson’s (…Jekyll and Hyde), or Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray).

 

Down the road, BLOWN AWAY may license properties such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.