Theater
Inspired by the commercial success of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum quickly adapted his novel for the stage. The 1902 musical comedy The Wizard of Oz, which replaced Toto with Imogene the cow, was a popular success; it opened in Chicago, moved to Broadway, where it played for more than a year, and toured until 1911. A ten-minute silent film version of the play appeared in 1910; it was one of three films based on Baum’s books to appear that year. The other two films were based on a combination of The Marvelous Land of Oz and Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz and the non-Oz story John Dough and the Cherub. Baum also wrote scripts and songs for two other Oz musicals. The Woggle-Bug, Baum’s dramatization of The Marvelous Land of Oz, premiered in Chicago in 1905, soon after the novel’s publication. The play, named after a giant professorial insect who roams Oz, ran for less than a month. It was followed in 1913 by the musical The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, which features Tik-Tok, Betsy Bobbin, and others from the books Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz and The Road to Oz, and plot elements Baum reused in the book Tik-Tok of Oz.
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.
Film
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.
Comments
NEW YORK TIMES
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 nov
elty. 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
BOSTON REVIEW
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)
EDWARD WAGENKNECHT
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)
HENRY M. LITTLEFIELD
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)
MARTIN GARDNER
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)
GORE VIDAL
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)
SALMAN RUSHDIE
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)
JOHN UPDIKE
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)
Questions
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 Oz Series
BY L. FRANK BAUM
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.
BY RUTH PLUMLY THOMPSON, ALL ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN R. NEILL
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.
Grampa in Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1924.
The Lost King of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1925.
The Hungry Tiger of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1926.
The Gnome King of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1927.
The Giant Horse of Oz. Chicago and New York: Reilly and Lee, 1928.
Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz. Chicago and New York: Reilly and Lee, 1929.
The Yellow Knight of Oz. Chicago and New York: Reilly and Lee, 1930.
Pirates in Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1931.
The Purple Prince of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1932.
Ojo in Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1933.
Speedy in Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1934.
The Wishing Horse of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1935.
Captain Salt in Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1936.
Handy Mandy in Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1937.
The Silver Princess in Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1938.
Ozoplaning with the Wizard of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1939.
BY FRANK JOSLYN BAUM
The Laughing Dragon of Oz. Illustrated by Milt Younger. Racine, WI: Whitman Publishing, 1934.
WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED BY JOHN R. NEILL
The Wonder City of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1940.
The Scalawagons of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1941.
Lucky Bucky in Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1942.
BY JACK SNOW
The Magical Mimics in Oz. Illustrated by Frank Kramer. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1946.
The Shaggy Man of Oz. Illustrated by Frank Kramer. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1949.
BY RACHEL R. COSGROVE
The Hidden Valley of Oz. Illustrated by Dirk [Dirk Gringhuis]. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1951.
BY ELOISE JARVIS MCGRAW AND LAUREN MCGRAW WAGER
Merry Go Round in Oz. Illustrated by Dick Martin. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1963.
An Oz Bibliography
Baum, Frank Joslyn, and Russell P. MacFall. To Please a Child: A Biography of L. Frank Baum, Royal Historian of Oz. Chicago: Reilly and Lee, 1961.
Baum, L. Frank. The Wizard of Oz. Pictures by W. W. Denslow. Edited by Michael Patrick Hearn. New York: Schocken Books, 1983.
Cashdan, Sheldo
n. The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape Our Lives. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
Dighe, Ranjit S., ed. The Historian’s Wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum’s Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory. Westport, CT, and London: Praeger, 2002.
Gardner, Martin, and Russel B. Nye. The Wizard of Oz and Who He Was. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1957.
Hanff, Peter E., and Douglas G. Greene. Bibliographia Oziana: A Concise Bibliographical Checklist of the Oz Books by L. Frank Baum and His Successors. Kinderhook, IL: International Wizard of Oz Club, 1976.
Harmetz, Aljean. The Making of “The Wizard of Oz.” Introduction by Margaret Hamilton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977.
Hearn, Michael Patrick, ed. The Annotated Wizard of Oz : The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Pictures by W. W. Denslow. Introduction, notes, and bibliography by Michael Patrick Hearn. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1973. Revised edition, with a preface by Martin Gardner. New York: Norton, 2000.
Huebel, Harry Russell, compiler. Things in the Driver’s Seat: Readings in Popular Culture. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972. Contains Henry M. Littlefield’s essay “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism.”
Langley, Noel, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf. The Wizard of Oz: The Screenplay. Edited and with an introduction by Michael Patrick Hearn. New York: Delta Books, 1989.
Nathanson, Paul. Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.
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