The Wizard of Oz is more than just a classic film—it’s a gateway into a glorious constellation of books, musicals and other ephemera that can be passed from generation to generation without losing any of its wondrous allure.
No child today has ever lived in a world without Muggles . But nobody alive has known a world without munchkins, not after L. Frank Baum went from entertaining neighbourhood children with his flights of fancy to landing those flights on paper in the best-selling children’s book of 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
As much as Harry Potter may define modern kid-lit, Baum set the yellow-brick standard and Oz remains as ubiquitous as ever. The 1939 film adaptation is estimated to have been watched by more people than any other motion-picture in history and earlier this year was turned into an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical in London’s West End. Webber was no doubt inspired by the success of revisionist Oz musical Wicked —Out of Oz released last month—but Baum had staged his own Broadway smash in 1902, which was the Cats of its day.
The Wizard of Oz is also currently onstage in Toronto, in Ross Petty pantomime form, and next year movie theatres will be screening the 3D computer-animated Dorothy of Oz , starring Glee’s Lea Michele as the titular Kansan, and Oz: The Great and Powerful , a prequel starring James Franco about how that wily carnival barker wound up as the wizard.
I’m an avowed Ozophile, with Baum stories peppering my toddler Emile’s bookshelf, including thrift store pop-up books, a gorgeously illustrated edition by Charles Santore and an Eisner Award-winning Marvel Comics graphic novel, still in plastic-wrap, that I bought the week E was born to be his first comic book.
The prize of the pack is the 1909 and 1916 editions of sequels The Marvelous Land of Oz and Scarecrow of Oz given to me by my father upon becoming a father myself. They were pulled from his own collection, which includes all 14 of Baum’s Oz books, along with most of the posthumous entries by other authors making up the 40 canonical stories.
I have the soundtrack on CD, a wind-up music box that plays “Over the Rainbow,” a vintage wallpaper lion decorating the nursery and, yes, I shelled out for the 70th anniversary ultimate edition Blu-ray boxset (the only Blu-ray video I own, actually) which not only includes the best-ever restoration of the 1939 musical but also the half-dozen silent Oz movies which preceded it and hours of documentaries on the film and phenom.
But this isn’t just another geeky obsession. Or at least, not only. The Oz books were my dad’s favourite growing up. My sister was born while he, then a high-school acting teacher, was directing the play. My mom went into labour with me while watching it on TV a few years later. And three years after that, again during the Oz ‘s annual television screening, we got a call that my cousin had been born. In grade seven, I even played the wizard in our school play.
So Oz has been a part of my life forever, and is a tradition I’m proudly passing on. But while the movie has been a part of our entire society’s shared experience since it became a TV staple in the mid-1950s—its unforgettable songs, unparalleled art direction, heart-warming scarecrow and bloodcurdling witch are now parts of modern folklore—there is so much more to Baum’s world.
The book Wizard , for one, doesn’t pretend that it was all a dream and certainly doesn’t argue there’s no place like home—not when grey, economically depressed Kansas is home and a fairytale land like Oz awaits. A subsequent book even sees Aunt ‘Em and Uncle Henry moving to Oz after their farm is foreclosed.
The series has been banned repeatedly throughout the years, for reasons ranging from its suffrage-era feminist bent—not just in reference to Dorothy and the various witches, but also the series’ monarch, Ozma—to promoting paganism and witchcraft. The latter charge was leveled by Jerry Fallwell and Pat Robertson as recently as 2004 to get the movie off TV. The books were also blacklisted as Communist for a time because there was a strident lack of money in Oz. According to the Tin-Man in The Road to Oz , “We have no rich, and no poor; for what one wishes the others all try to give him, in order to make him happy, and no one in all Oz cares to have more than he can use.” (Others claim the book is an allegory for the turn-of-the-century Populist crusade to add silver to the gold standard, a theory based largely on the yellow brick road and Dorothy’s silver slippers, which only became ruby in the film because red looked better in Technicolor.)
Despite being over a century old, Baum’s writing remains perfectly pitched to young kids, alternating elaborate descriptions with economical prose. The storytelling remains buoyant throughout, even in Baum’s final, posthumous book Glinda of Oz —
Baum wanted to modernize the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales by maintaining the magic and wonder but eliminating the “heartaches and nightmares” intended to frighten children into moral behaviour. There’s certainly a place for darkness in children’s literature—and the Oz books have their share of tension and conflict, not to mention a stirringly moral centre—but mostly Baum’s wildly imaginative books invoke the same in their young readers.
“So I believe that dreams—day dreams, you know, with your eyes wide open and your brain machinery whizzing—are likely to lead to the betterment of the world,” Baum wrote in the intro to The Lost Princess of Oz, explaining his motivation. “The imaginative child will become the imaginative man or woman most apt to create, to invent, and therefore to foster civilization.”
In other words, what we really need to give our kids is not at the end of the rainbow, but over it.
The best Oz ephemera
The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People
Published prior to The Wizard, Baum’s fantastical episodic novel is set in the land of Mo, one of many nations across the deadly desert from Oz, and is notable for its candy trees, ice-cream cows and root beer rivers. It’s basically kid-topia.
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Israel Kamakawiwo’ole
The late Hawaiian singer released a moving ukulele mash-up of “Over the Rainbow” and “What a Wonderful World” that is a staple on the islands, hit the pop charts in 2005 after an American Idol cover and is pretty much perfect.
You can't win – Michael Jackson – The wiz by xBillieJean
The Wiz
This urban reimagining of Oz boasts darkly spectacular art direction that transposes Baum’s fantasy land to the decaying yet creative boroughs of late-’70s New York City. The box-office bomb isn’t a good movie, per se, but it’s nonetheless fascinating. Also, you can’t argue with “Ease on Down the Road” and Michael Jackson’s pre-superstar turn as a Scarecrow crooning his soulfully cynical “You Can’t Win” to a bunch of blackbirds.
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Return to Oz
This underrated 1985 film starring Fairuza Balk doesn’t capture the ebullience of the 1939 MGM classic, but this story based on the second and third Oz books is wonderfully sinister. Dorothy’s insistence on Oz’s existence lands her in an asylum. She escapes and winds up back in Oz, but the yellow brick road is destroyed, the Emerald City in ruins and her former companions turned to stone after an invasion by armies of the Nome King, the witch Mobi and nightmarish creatures called Wheelers. With the help of the clock-work Tik-Tok Man, talking chicken Belina and Jack Pumpkinhead, Dorothy saves Oz and restores its rightful ruler Ozma.
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Though better known as a musical, the novel is a fascinating Rashomon -inspired tale of Oz from the perspective of Elphaba, the witch of the west and Wizard’s illegitimate daughter, who joins a rebellion against his corrupt rule before being assassinated by a girl from Kansas wearing her sister’s ruby slippers.
Polychrome , the Rainbow’s Daughter
The Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman and Cowardly Lion are a permanent part of popular culture, but I was always partial to Polychrome, the daughter of the rainbow who eats dewdrops, mist-cakes and cloud-buns, wears woven cobwebs and never stops dancing to stay warm.
