The Genre Book Club’s topic for September was “banned classics.” As I didn’t feel like reading anything heavy, I went with THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ because yes, it has been banned occasionally — most notably in the 1950s, on the grounds Ozma making sure no-one in her country goes hungry was communist propaganda! And I love the Oz series, so why not?
I’m guessing nobody reading this needs me to explain the story. Suffice to say, the book remains charming, both Baum’s story and W.W. Denslow’s delightful art (below) — though disagreements with Baum led to John R. Neill taking over as illustrator of Oz for most of the series.
What’s most remarkable is that Baum makes me believe in Oz. There’s no world-building, no magic system, yet everything works. When Dorothy and her friends wander into a country of living China dolls late in the book, there’s no set up, nothing that explains why this exists in Oz, but I don’t doubt that it does. That is way harder than it looks.
As a fan of the series as a whole, it’s also interesting to see how the beginning differed from what followed. The implication here is that Oz is an isolated area in the American wilderness, something not implausible in 1900 (Ozma of Oz establishes Oz is its own continent). The deadly desert that surrounds Oz is simply a desert here; later books establish it’s lethal to touch it. Oz appears to be the name of the wizard, not the country. But regardless of such Oz-nerdery, this is a wonderful book.
THE WIZARD OF OZ CATALOG: L. Frank Baum’s Novel, It’s Sequels, and Their Adaptations for Stage, Television, Movies, Radios, Music Videos, Comic Books, Commercials and More was my second book for McFarland (it’s still available) and my best seller: as I guessed when I proposed it, interest in Oz drew a lot of attention.
Rereading it now, it suffers from the fact so many of the adaptations have the same basic plot (something I handled better in Watching Jekyll and Hyde, I think). However it’s still an impressive, exhaustive job. And it’s fascinating to be reminded of the Oz legend’s global reach with Australian, English, Turkish, Russian, Brazilian and Japanese adaptations and spinoffs; of the nerdy enthusiasm of fanfic authors for giving even the most obscure characters their own stories; and the many strange takes out there such as Ken Kesey’s Twister, described as “the single weirdest production in this book, and that’s saying something.”
It’s also amazing how flexible the Oz story is. Take one person who’s stupid (or thinks they are), one person who’s heartless and a third whose cowardly and people know what’s going down. I’ve seen that adapted to sales videos, How To Use The Library training films, and a Fantasy Island episode.
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