It can't be expected to have a sense of humor, as well – and as for the light touch of fantasy, it weighs like a pound of fruitcake soaking wet." Still, the film placed seventh on "Film Daily"'s year-end nationwide poll of 542 critics naming the best films of 1939. Roger Ebert chose it as one of his Great Films, writing that ""The Wizard of Oz" has a wonderful surface of comedy and music, special effects and excitement, but we still watch it six decades later because its underlying story penetrates straight to the deepest insecurities of childhood, stirs them and then reassures them." In his 2002 critique of the film for the British Film Institute, author Salman Rushdie acknowledged its affect on him, noting ""The Wizard of Oz" was my very first literary influence" . In Step Across This Line, he wrote: "When I first saw "The Wizard of Oz", it made a writer of me." His first short story, written at the age of 10, was titled "Over the Rainbow". In a 2009 retrospective article about the film, "San Francisco Chronicle" film critic and author Mick LaSalle declared that the   “...entire Munchkinland sequence, from Dorothy's arrival in Oz to her departure on the yellow brick road, has to be one of the greatest in cinema history – a masterpiece of set design, costuming, choreography, music, lyrics, storytelling, and sheer imagination." On the film critic aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 98% based on 117 reviews, with an average score of 9.4/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "An absolute masterpiece whose groundbreaking visuals and deft storytelling are still every bit as resonant, "The Wizard of Oz" is a must-see film for young and old." At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film received the maximum score of 100 out of 100, based on 4 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim", which, as of March 2020, is matched only by eight other films. According to MGM records, during the film's initial release, it earned $2,048,000 in the US and Canada and $969,000 in other countries throughout the world, resulting in total earnings of $3,017,000. While these were considerable earnings, the high production cost, in association with various distribution and other costs, meant the movie initially recorded a loss of $1,145,000 for the studio.