In truth, Wicked’s allusions to European fascism, or for that matter segregationist Jim Crow laws throughout the American South, were part and parcel for 2000s era children’s stories. Just as Elphaba and Galinda’s Shiz University resembles Hogwarts in look and function, so too does its politics match the autocratic rise and institutional corruption of Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, meanwhile, came a little later but still tapped into the same zeitgeist in a more direct way with its dystopian vision of North America’s future being ruled by a literal dictator who controls the population through fear and entertainment.

Meanwhile on the geekier side of culture, the X-Men movies of that decade, like the comic books of the previous 20 years, were deeply rooted in drawing parallels between its fictional persecuted underclass of mutants and the still-living memory of the Holocaust, right down to making the films’ sympathetic antagonist a Holocaust survivor who remains wary of men in authority who wish to divide folks between “us and them.”

In this pop culture landscape, Wicked’s politics were as common as they were unremarkable. Of course the thing to fear remains a strongman who would scapegoat a literal goat. The idea of it actually occurring in your everyday life might seem so foreign as to snark about those ‘60s dissidents who overdid the good fight—you know, at least if you ignore how even back then the Republican administration in the White House was launching a successful reelection campaign built around stirring up fear of gay people marrying in swing states like Ohio.

Which brings us to November 2024, and the strikingly more urgent context which Jon M. Chu’s Wicked movie finds itself opening in. When Universal Pictures dated its lavish adaptation of Broadway’s most popular musical for this Thanksgiving, we imagine executives were not thinking too hard about its proximity to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. However, for any viewer even vaguely aware of the news cycle these days, the parallels between Wicked’s Oz and the tone and tenor of emerging American policy for the New Year are eerily linked.

The shifty deviousness of the musical’s Wizard of Oz was of course in the original 2003 production as well, just as the basic concept of the Wizard being a fraudulent conman from the heartland is rooted in The Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum’s satire of American populism. Yet in the original stage production of Wicked, Broadway royalty Joel Grey plays the Wizard as a huckster who got in over his head; he is something of a useful idiot who allows those around him, like the flamboyant Madame Morrible, to drag his vision to a more hateful place.

Yet when the charismatic Jeff Goldblum plays the Wizard, there is a more pointed and knowing menace when he says these lines to Elphaba: “When I first got here, there was discord and discontent. And where I come from, everyone knows the best way to bring folks together is to… give them a real good enemy.” Grey’s Wizard says the same horrifying thing, but back then he came off as an oblivious Harold Hill: a showtune grifter who never pauses to consider the implications of the lies he spreads.