Warning: Spoilers ahead for major Wicked plot points.
Today, Universal’s marketing team bucked current trends and released a new Wicked teaser trailer that features actual singing in it! This teaser gives fans of the Broadway musical and curious newcomers alike everything they could’ve ever hoped for: Ariana Grande as Galinda doing comedically clumsy choreo in “Popular”! A new Cynthia Erivo–as–Elphaba riff in “The Wizard and I”! Jonathan Bailey as Fiyero hamming it up on “Dancing Through Life”! A rat playing the drums! Jeff Goldbl— heyyyyyyyy, wait a second. A rat playing the drums?
Pause at the 11-second mark, and you can see her clear as day: a one-second insert shot of a bug-eyed rodent wearing a little multicolor ascot absolutely wailing on a tiny drum kit. I’m using “rat” as a catchall, but she looks more like a sugar glider, the rat’s whimsical marsupial airborne sister. Later on in the trailer, you get a wider shot of the rest of the band, which is all made up of CGI animals: a bird of prey on wind chimes, a monkey on strings, a giraffe on harmonica, and oh my God, Is the rodent drummer riding the harmonica-playing giraffe?
If you zoom in closer, you can see that it says “Ozdust” on our little diva’s drum kit — as in the Ozdust Ballroom, a.k.a. “the most swankified place in town,” a.k.a. the nightclub where Elphaba and Galinda and Fiyero and Boq and Nessarose and presumably Bowen Yang’s character “slough off” their schoolwork and go dancing. If you don’t know Wicked, or you know the cast recording but tend to skip track five for obvious reasons (it’s bad), then you might not have the proper context for this animal band. In Wicked, the animals are sentient but persecuted citizens of Oz, and this plot takes up way more of the story than you probably remember. By that logic, and with a CGI animal band, the Ozdust Ballroom might be like this movie’s Kit Kat Klub, which spells possible peril for this fabulous little creature. By the end of the film, expect this country-bear jamboree to be replaced with an all-human group doing the Ozian version of “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”
But today belongs to Drum Rat. She’s got real star quality. We celebrate and elevate our little indigenous marsupial to Australia pop icon. Could an original credits song by the Ozdust Ballroom Sugar Glider be Wicked’s path to an Oscar? Anything is possumble!
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