The details of this legal balancing act have been documented in quite a few places (I recall at least two articles in "Variety" from this past year), but few have addressed the narrative implications of these restrictions.
When any good filmmaker adapts literary material to the screen, it's inevitable that certain strategic changes will be made that reflect the difference in the way narrative is delivered. Certain story elements might not work on-screen because they're verbal or internal to the characters, rather than visual. Other elements might simply be less effective on-screen. The silver slippers of Baum's book thus became ruby slippers in the MGM movie. Red is much more vibrant and exciting on screen, after all! Many of the changes made in the '39 adaptation are meant to make the most of the cinematic medium. They are visual, like the slippers, or aural, like all the songs.
Coming in to this 2013 adaptation, director Sam Raimi had his hands tied. Some of the best cinematic tools at his disposal were already used by MGM, and therefore, out of his reach. Sure, he could have tried for new songs, but once you're locked out of the elements that define a classic, if you do anything too similar, you're bound to be compared (unfavorably) to the original. Raimi had to deviate, and deviate he did. Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, the result is very wordy, and not nearly as visually-driven as you'd expect of an Oz story or of a Raimi film. I lost count of how many scenes involved characters talking to each other, telling each other what's happening, rather than scenes that demonstrated the story's progress. It's as if, in the fretful avoidance of MGM's innovations, the film forgets the very purpose of those innovations, and neglects to replace them.
