Izzy? wiz? Oz?

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first entire book I read on my own.  I was  seven at the time, and had gotten sick with rheumatic fever (fortunately a mild case); I had to stay inside all summer, preferably resting, and was getting bored.  I had read plenty of comic books on my own, but hadn’t tried real books outside my school readers. 

L. Frank Baum: Wizard of Wizards

As soon as I started it, I got hooked, totally involved with Dorothy, Toto and their adventures.  I was so bowled over, that I almost cried when Dorothy had to say goodbye to her Oz companions at the end, even though she was going home.  I was so sorry that the book was over!  Though none of the subsequent Oz books had the same appeal—even The Land of Oz, where the hero Tip transgendered into Ozma—my addiction to reading began then, and has never let up.

I didn’t see the Judy Garland movie until several years later—those were the days when you only got to see movies when they were rereleased to theaters.  I loved that too, freaked out at age nine by The Cyclone, not to mention Miss Gooch/the surviving Wicked Witch, but the movie, wonderful as it was, couldn’t quite come up to the novel, and the tremendous world of imagination that it

evoked. I think it was that solutions to weird situations were always matter of fact, and acceptance of the fact that all those Ozians spoke English. The Oz of my imagination was a world apart from the Denslow illustrations in the book, too; for even childish me could see that they were quaint and old fashioned by the time I got there, though I thought that the Wizard/Humbug was spot on.

Over the years, of course, once it was released to television, everyone, me included, has seen the movie countless times.  The last time I caught it was last weekend, and maybe this is the first time since I saw it in a theater that I really watched it.  Watching it inspired me to go reread the book.  This time it was in an IPad, a Kindle edition with no pictures at all.

Denslow's Wonderful Wizard 4 friends + Toto

I loved them both, though maybe for different reasons.  L. Frank Baum’s book, even in its 70 pages, is a lot more detailed and complicated, with its color-coded landscape, and all of those other details the movie left out, including the China people, scary beasts, two good witches, one a little elderly lady in white, the other a gorgeous redhead.  And the one surviving bad witch didn’t look like green Margaret Hamilton at all.  But the book’s characters are all no-nonsense people or creatures, and as you read along, every solution to each problem is entirely straightforward: all of this makes good logical sense to a kid, and I think, even at seven, I realized that intelligence, feeling emotion and courage were things that the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Lion had all along; they just hadn’t named them.

As many analysts and scholars have recognized, the film took on a somewhat different slant, which is where it succeeded in itself where earlier filmed versions—including the silents produced by Baum himself hadn’t.  Film is a different medium altogether, with telling the story within a reasonable running length and its potential of visual magic demanding a different approach.  I think that MGM did it brilliantly.  Songs were good—and had already been in earlier stage adaptations.  Also, though the vaudevillian turns of the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and particularly Bert Lahr’s hilarious Lion should seem dated, they hold up well, probably because the land of Oz is such a fantasy anyway.

To make it more coherent within a running time less than two hours, modifications and omissions in the original book were made.  To begin with, there was a backstory presented in the Kansas part, with most of the important Oz people personified in farmhands, a snake-oil salesman and a very grouchy neighbor.  Many of the subsidiary Oz incidents were omitted, including whole populations of Quadlings and Winkies, not to mention the China people and assorted nasty beasts, while the winged monkeys were reduced to rather sinister figures, rather than the genies that Baum imagined.

The 1939 classic movie

Then there was the brilliant idea to film the Kansas sequences in monochromatic sepia, and the Oz portion in Technicolor (which is why Dorothy’s silver shoes in the original morph into brilliant ruby slippers in the movie). Technicolor always looked surreal in its over-ripe colors anyway, and the film took advantage of this by making the entire Land of Oz over the top in its artificially brilliantly colored, oversized flowers, fruits and landscape features.  After all, who can forget the wonderfully art-deco Emerald city, soaring in the distance with a Busby-Berkeley sound track chorus?  And Glinda the Good—not just a conflation of the two good witches of the novel, but any five-year-old’s Fairy Princess, in bouffant pink and that high crown, fluttering and ditzy as played by Billie Burke? 

Then there was Margaret Hamilton’s green-faced Wicked Witch and her green Winkie soldiers, and midget Munchkins.  The main protagonists were just as wonderful, and so much has been written about Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr and Jack Haley, not to mention the multiple Frank Morgan characters, I’m not going there.

The whole picture has a zany coherence—amazing with four directors—finalized by Glinda’s explaining that Dorothy could have gone home at any time, but needed to learn things before she had the wisdom to understand the charm in the Ruby Slippers—the moral, which doesn’t seem offensive.

Numerous scholars have produced a large body of critical analysis of both the book and movie over the years, dissecting every possibility from the color theory of Baum, political messages within the text, to Freudian analyses of each of the characters and their relationships to each other.  In Baum’s time and even beyond, Oz became a franchise, with many sequels, not only by the creator (he wrote 14) but by an officially sanctioned successor, Ruth Plumly Thomson (19) and other authors after that.  None recaptured the magic, at least for me—not even the ultimate Oz sequal—Wicked.

Wicked: The Musical

The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Aldrich and its sequels.

The Wizard of Oz has also been produced numerous times since the 1939 film, mostly for television.  Can anyone remember any of them?  I refer the reader to IMDB.com for a massive list.  Much more memorable are two musicals, The Wiz, really the only really inventive later retelling of the original story, and Wicked, based on the Aldrich novels.  In both cases, the Baum novel (the crazy wicked witch and Dorothy’s silver shoes in the Wiz)) and the 1939 movie (the green Ephebia of Wicked), serve as departure points for new riffs appropriate for their times.

The Wiz: The Movie

Oz itself and its characters are so embedded in American culture now that references to them are continually reused in many different ways, often far far away from their  origins—though not completely so..  Here are just three examples: Oz the Television series (2002-2006), where a prison is named OZ, and a special unit of it is called the Emerald City.  The 1974 pop song Tin Man, to whom the Wizard gave nothing to that he didn’t already have, which was sung by the group America. And there’s the cartoon the Wizard of Id, and it’s still going on, even if the only association is the two letter place.  So many really funny cartoons with Oz characters have come out, maybe most notably those by Dan Piraro in his Bizarro comic strip, that they fill a folder in my file cabinet.  This form uses the characters to make really funny commentaries on so many far more nonsensical things in our culture.

 

Piraro's Bizarro

In the end, though, I think it’s the stylized world of Oz created first in 1900, with its straight forward tale-telling and also the film in 1939, that still resonate, replete with vaudeville turns and art deco details, more than a three quarters of a century later, because it’s a parable and a fairy tale in the grand tradition, but a quintessentially American one, however much L Frank Baum thought he was creating a break from the old traditional ones.  It’s part of all of us.

            

_______________________________________________________

Two Interesting Articles For Scholarly OZ Fans:

Charles Evan Swartz, Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum's the Wonderful Wizard on Sage and Screen to 1939, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002

Carol Billman, "I've Seen the Movie: Oz Revisited.' Literature/Film quarterly, 1981, pp. 241-50.

Thanks to Christy Higgins and Dan Piraro for letting me use Dan's fabulous cartoons!