Although I have heard their praises sung all my long life, I have never read Frank L. Baum's OZ books. For whatever reason I just never got around to it. I grew up in a family that didn't read much, though they endured my passion for comics and science fiction and such, so stories of that kind were not part of my early childhood. And sadly, I never made them a part of the early life of my daughters either. I shared stories with them by the likes of Tolkien, Dahl, Lewis and others, but somehow never Baum. Well I'm using this year to mend that gap in my mind. And I've started by reading The Wonderful Wizard of OZ.
Like most any American my age, OZ was a part of my childhood, but not by way of Baum's books, but rather by way of Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, the movie powerhouse of the first half of the 20th Century and by CBS, the television station that acquired the rights to the movie and began annual showings of the classic musical for many decades. In old timey days when TV offered not one but three whole stations, such events had great charm. But that said, knowing the Judy Garland movie is not knowing the book.
I read the Sea Wolf Press edition which attempts to recreate the effect of the first publications and offers up the tale with the W.W. Denslow artwork intact. It's amazing work which weaves its way through the book and is not limited to the full-page art plates. It's a lovely book and as it turns out a bit of a page turner. Dorothy leaves the ubiquitous gray of Kansas and plops down in OZ within a few pages. Minus the musical numbers the story speeds right along.
The movie went out of its way to offer up a rational explanation for OZ, with the it's all a dream ending. We are introduced to dopplegangers for many of the people in OZ, but in the novel no such shenanigans. The lunacy of the existence of the Scarecrow with his body of straw which is dispersed making one wonder where his identity resides. Is it in the clothes, the particular straw, or the belief of his friends that he's real. The Tin Man's origin is ghastly, one limb getting chopped until he was no more. Where did his essence exist.
But in the end Dorothy does get home, though not in quite the same way we've come to know from the movie. And the story stops. Baum never planned a sequel. He never wanted to write a sequel. But four years later he did.
More on that next time when I read The Marvelous Land of OZ.
Rip Off
I've got a handsome big book called 'The Annotated World Of Oz', but I've never read it. I remember being slightly disappointed when I finally got around to reading Peter Pan (in my 40s or 50s) because it was just a tad too whimsical for me. 'The Wind In The Willows' is another matter - a total classic. Incidentally, John Buscema drew the DC/Marvel Oz Treasury Edition from memory.
ReplyDeleteLove Wind in the Willows. I didn't know that about Buscema. Wow!
DeleteOf the "Big Three" of children's fantasies-- which is what I call WIZARD, ALICE and PETER because they've begot the most media adaptations-- I never read any of them as a kid, except that I had some kids' anthology that reprinted the conclusion of WIZARD. (The bit where the Wiz gives the Scarecrow "bran" for "brains" did not knock my young socks off.) I read them all in adulthood, and recently re-read WIZARD again. I thought it was interesting that half of the book consists of Dorothy "repaying" her three male friends for helping her kill the Witch by making sure all three of them get set up with their own kingdoms. You didn't see MGM Dorothy worrying about what became of her staunch allies once she was back home!
ReplyDeleteThe movie turns OZ into a whimsical product of Dorothy's imagination, a sprawling dream filled with familiar avatars of people who populated her reality. The books are completely different and lean into the fantasy of OZ as a real if very unusual place.
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