Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story
Finding Oz by Evan I. Schwartz is a new book that tells the story behind the story of The Wizard of Oz and its creator L. Frank Baum. Smithsonian magazine gives a taste of the tale in a brief profile of Baum, who wrote his masterpiece in 1898, at the age of 40. Apparently, Baum was so convinced of his manuscript's magic that he framed the pencil he had used to write it. From Smithsonian:
With his skepticism toward God—or men posing as gods--Baum affirmed the idea of human fallibility, but also the idea of human divinity. The Wizard may be a huckster—a short bald man born in Omaha rather than an all-powerful being—but meek and mild Dorothy, also a mere mortal, has the power within herself to carry out her desires. The story, says Schwartz, is less a “coming-of-age story … and more a transformation of consciousness story.” With The Wizard of Oz, the power of self-reliance was colorfully illustrated.Frank Baum, the Man Behind the Curtain (Smithsonian)
It seems appropriate that a story with such mythical dimensions has inspired its own legends—the most enduring, perhaps, being that The Wizard of Oz was a parable for populism. In the 1960s, searching for a way to engage his students, a high-school teacher named Harry Littlefield, connected The Wizard of Oz to the late-19th-century political movement, with the Yellow Brick Road representing the gold standard—a false path to prosperity—and the book's silver slippers standing in for the introduction of silver—an alternate means to the desired destination. Years later, Littlefield would admit that he devised the theory to teach his students, and that there was no evidence that Baum was a populist, but the theory still sticks.
Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story (Amazon)
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So Oz is something like a parable story for atheism?? It just needs a little baby being born in a crib and atheism will be a full blown religion!
What, no mention of the "Wizard of Oz" as part of the Illuminati Mind Control? It's one of my favorite mythos.
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/oz.htm
TAKASHI_OMOTO @2, Great link! I had no idea. Thanks!
There was a movie to this effect starring John Ritter if I recall. Here it is :The Dreamer of Oz http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099464/
Too bad Baum was a racist idiot who advocated genocide:
http://www.dickshovel.com/roeschbaum.html
@Takashi Thanks for posting that link I had forgotten about this. :-)
I've been re-reading some of the books lately for an Oz animation I've been working on and I've been blown away by the amount of violence in the books. You can definitely tell that these were written awhile back.
They are really imaginative and fun reads though. I read the 14 original Oz books when I was a kid. I think the illustrations by John R Neill are great and really bring the stories to life.
The Wizard Of Oz has had a bigger impact on my life than any other story. Long before people had recorded videos in their home, the movie was televised once a year, and it was a big event in our home. It was probably the first scary movie I ever saw.
In the fifth grade I tried to check out the book from the school library, but they didn't have it- they had all the other 13, and one by one I read them all. It was my first real reading experience, and that made a reader of me.
It was just a few years ago that I finally read the first book, and I was quite taken by Baum's foreword- he said he didn't want to impart any deep messages for children; he just wanted to write a book for pure entertainment. Funny how much meaning gets implicated into artwork.
'Racist idiot / genocide advocate'? Maybe (by today's standards). Maybe some close friends of his had been butchered by Sioux. I don't know, but I do know that the good works done by a man are not eradicated by dumb things he does.
How long until Tim Burton remakes this with evil munchkins?
I've done readings of two of the Oz books that are available at the Internet Archive. I've also read a non-Oz novel and a number of his short stories. I'm sure he was aware that a parent would be reading these stories to a child so he added in comments to entertain parents.
http://www.archive.org/details/marvoz
http://www.archive.org/details/Ozma_Oz
http://www.archive.org/details/Sea_Fairies
http://www.archive.org/details/BoxOfRobbers
http://www.archive.org/details/GirlWhoOwnedABear
http://www.archive.org/details/CaptureOfFatherTime
http://www.archive.org/details/QueenOfQuok
It seems to inspire re-tellings.
I had this vague screenplay idea years ago of a young woman going cross country in a VW bus, picking up people along the way, all hoping for an audience and a reading with TV psychic Miss Cleo.
only all the munchkins will be played by Deep Roy.
now, WTF was he doing in Transformers ROTFL, anyway?
He was in Star Trek, too.
Here is a novel (yes novel), called Was about the "real" girl Dorothy was based on and the origins of the Wizard of Oz:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoff_Ryman
It's very moving.
Munchkins come in handy. I swiped a few for a music parody in 2004, casting them as lobbyists in a place called Lobbyland, where a hapless tornado victim, Dorothy, begins the search for her lost Rainbowland...
(ALL): We’re the guys from
the Lobbyland League, the Lobbyland League,
and in the name of the Lobbyland League:
we welcome you to Lobbyland.
1: A Congressman here,
a Senator there,
a lot of laws to foil...
2: that’s how our money works for us
in the shadowy land of oil.
3: It’s not about seas,
It’s not about air,
it’s not about virgin soil...
(ALL): it’s all about our SUVs
in the marvelous land of oil.
1: We buy a vote here,
we grease a palm there,
all day we’re at our toil...
2: that’s how we spend
and bribe our way
in the slippery land of oil.
3: We turn a screw here,
we call a tune there,
we turn it up to boil...
(ALL): that’s the way we get things done
in the underworld land of oil...
@13 -- yeah, but at least his character made sense in Star Trek. And was there for more than one scene, instead of a lets-put-deep-roy-into-this-scene-driveby
And lets be honest, Michael Bay didn't say "let's get Deep Roy" for this scene when he thought it up.
----
Okay, back to the Munchkins et al.
Meinhardt Raabe has a great biography.
The "Wizard of Oz" "museum" and store in Indiana (near the Illinoise border on I-80) is now closed. I liked stopping there.