Against All Oz: A short history of O.Z. Diggs, the Wizard of Oz

While I won’t review Oz the Great and Powerful until the weekend, after seeing it yesterday with TYG I decided to take a blog post to discuss the Wizard’s rather contradictory history in the Baum books. After all, I did write the book on Oz.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is told when she arrives in the Munchkin country that she needs to seek the wizard Oz—despite the title, he’s always referred to as “Oz,” not the Wizard of Oz. Indeed, “land of Oz” seems less a name than a description (the land belonging to Oz the great and powerful).
Eventually, of course, Dorothy learns the Wizard landed in Oz from the US. He was embraced as a wonder-worker (enough of one that the witches feared to attack him) and became the king of the people. He then built the Emerald City which isn’t really green—everyone in it wears green spectacles to make it look like emeralds. Rather than fix Dorothy’s friends with the diploma, testimonial and medal as in the movie, he fakes magical cures for them, knowing that even after exposing him, they want their wishes so badly they’ll believe him anyway.
This would probably have been it for Oz (land and wizard both) except that it’s success in print led to a blockbuster, phenomenally successful musical stage adaptation (Mark Evan Swartz’s Oz Before the Rainbow is an excellent guide to the show’s history). Baum loved the theater and hoped this would attract interest in his other playscripts; when that didn’t work, he hit on the idea of writing a second Oz book that would become a second hit musical (alas, the musical, The Wogglebug, “failed to woggle” in one critic’s words). The Marvelous Land of Oz has Tip, the servant of the old sorceress Mombi, runs away, gets involved in a war against the Scarecrow’s rule of Oz and finally learns that he’s Ozma, the rightful heir to Pastoria, the king the wizard overthrew. To secure his reign, he then gave Ozma to Mombi, which she did by the sex-change trick.
This was the first hint there’d been someone on the throne before the Wizard. It also punches holes in the idea of the Wizard as “a good man but a bad wizard”—not only usurping a throne but giving a baby into an old sorceress’s control? It’s awkward enough that the Marvel adaptation of the book threw in that Oz had made Mombi promises not to harm Ozma.
In Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, the Wizard returns to Oz, now under Ozma’s benevolent rule. When he finally meets her at the end of the book, we get a lot of backstory, rewritten to avoid any ugly “So, do you feel bad about selling me to Mombi?” moments. We get the Wizard’s origin (including that his full initials are O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D.—hence his preference for “OZ” as a nickname) in more detail. Then Ozma reveals that long before arrived, the Wicked Witches had overthrown her grandfather and given him to Mombi as a prisoner. Her father and she then grew up in the same doleful straits, so the Wizard no longer has any guilt in this version (there’s no explanation why the witches allowed the royals to keep reproducing, or if Pastoria got sex-changed too). He even stays as Ozma’s court wizard, on the grounds a wizard with no real magic is the safest kind.
In Emerald City of Oz, however, the Wizard now practices real magic, Ozma deciding anything less is beneath her court. That one would have wrapped up the series, but fan demand for Oz (and lowered interest in other works) made it natural for Baum to keep going. OZ Diggs would return, though he remained a supporting character in almost all the later volumes.
So now you know. Oztraordinary, isn’t it?