The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (25 page)

Baum’s original story made a notable return to the Broadway stage in 1975 as
The Wiz
. The disco-infused musical comedy, which featured an all-black cast, won seven Tony Awards and ran for four years. The successful film version directed by Sidney Lumet, which appeared in 1978, starred Diana Ross as Dorothy, Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow, Lena Horne as Glinda the Good, and Richard Pryor as the eponymous Wiz.

A quarter century later, Oz made a splash on Broadway once again. Based on Gregory Maguire’s best-selling novel
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
(1995), the musical
Wicked
opened in 2003 and won three Tony Awards. The intelligent, multilayered novel tells the life story of the Wicked Witch of the West, one of the most notorious villains in literature. Maguire’s story humanizes the witch, whom he names Elphaba, by describing her difficult childhood as the only green-skinned girl at school. Raised by an alcoholic mother and plagued by her room-mate Glinda, a shallow girl interested only in clothes and popularity, the studious Elphaba eventually sets out to overthrow the corrupt Wizard who has overtaken Oz.
Wicked
has the same ending as Baum’s original tale, but in the retelling Maguire paints a vivid and sympathetic portrait of a well-developed character who is both fiery and appealing.

In the last century, more than one hundred feature and television films have been made based on Baum’s Oz novels. Many of the earliest of these were spearheaded by Baum himself. Pursuing his interest in filmmaking, Baum co-produced
The Patchwork Girl of Oz
(1914), which was based on a popular Oz sequel and was made by Baum’s Oz Film Manufacturing Company. The company was also responsible for
The Magic Cloak of Oz
(1914; released in 1917) and
His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz
(1914). In 1925 Baum’s son Frank Joslyn Baum co-wrote the screenplay with director Leon Lee for
The Wizard of Oz
, a film that features Oliver Hardy as the Tin Woodman.

But the release of the 1939 film
The Wizard of Oz
—a work that has in many ways eclipsed Baum’s novel in the cultural consciousness—changed everything. It has been said that more people have seen
The Wizard of Oz
than any other movie. Its magnificence and impact are even more surprising given the difficulty of producing the film. Nominally directed by Victor Fleming,
Wizard
required a clutch of directors to save it from disaster. The original director, Richard Thorpe, was fired after twelve days of shooting, and the legendary George Cukor did not last a week. Though Fleming shot the bulk of the picture, King Vidor took over near the end of the process to film the Kansas sequences, including the famous “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” scene, which was nearly cut from the film. Salmon Rushdie, in his seminal study of the film, writes “Who, then, is the
auteur
of
The Wizard of Oz
? No single writer can claim that honour, not even the author of the original book.” Indeed, the screenplay was penned by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, as well as a host of un-credited writers.

Serendipitously, however,
The Wizard of Oz
is near perfect, in part due to sixteen-year-old Judy Garland’s star-making turn as Dorothy Gale, the ebullient score, which features “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” “Follow the Yellow Brick Road,” and “We’re Off to See the Wizard,” and a wonderfully creative adaptation of Baum’s original ideas. For example, in the film Oz is a dream place to which Dorothy travels while unconscious. The Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion all correlate to farmhands employed by Auntie Em, and the Wizard himself is an alchemized Professor Marvel, whom Dorothy had met on his travels through Kansas. And, in a stroke of cinematic genius, it was decided to shoot the Kansas scenes that frame the film in black and white—actually in a drab, sepia tint—and the Oz sequences in brilliant Technicolor. At the time of the film’s production, nearly all films were still shot in black and white, so this shift to color as Dorothy enters the enchanted realm of Oz would have had an extraordinary impact on audiences.

Called the greatest year in American cinema, 1939 saw the appearance of a host of films now considered classics, including
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
,
Stagecoach
,
Wuthering Heights
, and
Gone with the Wind
, which was also directed by Fleming and which dominated the Academy Awards that year. But
Wizard
won two Oscars in the musical categories: Original Score and Best Song for “Over the Rainbow,” with music by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E. Y. Harburg. Additionally, Judy Garland picked up a special Oscar “for her outstanding performance as a screen juvenile during the past year.”

The Wizard of Oz
has become one of America’s most important contributions to cinema, as well as an exemplar to which filmmak ers consistently allude. For instance, when adapting Barry Gifford’s novel
Wild at Heart
for his film of the same name (1990), David Lynch imposed a
Wizard of Oz
structure—replete with a cackling witch and a snakeskin jacket standing in for the Silver Shoes/Ruby Slippers—to give the story a happy ending. This same fidelity of audiences to 1939’s
Wizard
has doomed all subsequent attempts at Oz sequels.

Disney’s
Return to Oz
(1985), directed by Oscar-winning editor Walter Murch, is a competent, ambitious rendition of Baum’s novels
The Marvelous Land of Oz
and
Ozma of Oz
.
Return to Oz
features spectacular visuals, which, though invidious comparisons to
Wizard
are inevitably made, bear the stamp of W. W. Denslow’s original book illustrations. Starring Piper Lau rie as Auntie Em and Fairuza Balk in her debut role as Dorothy, Murch’s film parades a slew of characters, including the artfully realized Tik-Tok; the sweet Jack Pumpkinhead; and the hunched-over Wheelers, whose terrifying, squeaking wheels always precede them on screen.

Comments & Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter L. Frank Baum’s
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

It is impossible to conceive of a greater contrast than exists between the children’s books of antiquity that were new publications during the sixteenth century and modern children’s books of which “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” is typical. The crudeness that was characteristic of the old-time publications that were intended for the delectation and amusement of ancestral children would now be enough to cause the modern child to yell with rage and vigor and to instantly reject the offending volume, if not to throw it out of the window. The time when anything was considered good enough for children has long since passed, and the volumes devoted to our youth are based upon the fact that they are the future citizens: that they are the country’s hope, and are thus worthy of the best, not the worst, that art can give. . . . In “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” the fact is clearly recognized that the young as well as their elders love novelty. They are pleased with dashes of color and something new in place of the old, familiar, and winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen.

—September 8, 1900

Under the sweet simplicity of the tale for children is a satiric allegory on modern history for big people. The Scarecrow wears a Russian blouse, the fierce Tin Woodman bears a striking resemblance to Emperor Wilhelm of Germany, the Cowardly Lion with its scarlet beard and tail tip at once suggest Great Britain, and the Flying Monkeys wear a military cap in Spanish colors.

—from a review of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
(September 29, 1900)

 

 

It is in
The Wizard of Oz
that we meet the first distinctive attempt to construct a fairyland out of American materials. Baum’s long series of Oz books represents thus an important pioneering work: they may even be considered an American utopia.

—from
Utopia Americana
(1929)

 

The Wizard of Oz
says so much about so many things that it is hard not to imagine a satisfied and mischievous gleam in Lyman Frank Baum’s eye as he had Dorothy say, “And oh, Aunt Em! I’m so glad to be at home again!”

—from “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism,”
American Quarterly
(Spring 1964)

 

It is entirely possible that 500 years from now citizens of the earth, studying 20th-century children’s literature, will know of Kansas only because Dorothy Gale once lived there.

—from the
New York Times Book Review
(May 2, 1971)

 

I could not stop reading and rereading [
The Emerald City of Oz
]. But “reading” is not the right word. In some mysterious way, I was translating myself to Oz, a place which I was to inhabit for many years while, simultaneously, visiting other fictional worlds as well as maintaining my cover in that dangerous one known as “real.” With
The Emerald City
, I became addicted to reading.

—from the
New York Review of Books
(September 19, 1977)

 

 

The Wizard of Oz
is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults, and how the weakness of grown-ups forces children to take control of their own destinies, and so, ironically, grow up themselves. The journey from Kansas to Oz is a rite of passage from a world in which Dorothy’s parent-substitutes, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, are powerless to help her save her dog Toto from the marauding Miss Gulch, into a world where the people are her own size, and in which she is never, ever treated as a child but as a heroine.

—from
The Wizard of Oz
(1992)

 

Oz
is too unearthly to carry much political punch. It is constructed not of revolutionary intent but of wishful thinking.

—from the
New Yorker
(September 25, 2000)

1. Is
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
the kind of work in which one can legitimately extract psychological or allegorical meanings? Should the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Woodman be understood as three aspects of human personality?

2. J. T. Barberese describes
Oz
as “the first American children’s book.” What is noticeably or even strikingly “American” about it? How would a book like
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
not be “American”?

3.
Oz
has the form of a quest narrative—a hero or heroine sets out to find or do something definitive. Usually the hero or heroine does do or find something that will from that point forward give meaning to his or her life, but that which is found or accomplished is seldom what was expected. Is Dorothy on a quest? Is her quest successful? If so, what was the quest for? What did she, in fact, gain from it in the end?

For Further Reading

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Illustrated by W. W. Denslow. Chicago and New York: George M. Hill, 1900.

The Marvelous Land of Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1904.

Ozma of Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1907.

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1908.

The Road to Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1909.

The Emerald City of Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1910.

The Patchwork Girl of Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1913.

The Little Wizard Series: The Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger, Little Dorothy and Toto, Tiktok and the Nome King, Ozma and the Little Wizard, Jack Pumpkinhead and the Sawhorse,
and
The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman,
1913. Reissued in a single volume,
Little Wizard Stories of Oz
. Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1914.

Tik-Tok of Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1914.

The Scarecrow of Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1915.

Rinkitink in Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1916.

The Lost Princess of Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1917.

The Tin Woodman of Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Britton, 1918.

The Magic of Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1919.

Glinda of Oz.
Illustrated by John R. Neill. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1920.

 

The Royal Book of Oz.
Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1921. Published under Baum’s name but written by Thompson.

Kabumpo in Oz.
Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1922.

The Cowardly Lion of Oz.
Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1923.