We begin our story, of course, in Kansas. Right off the bat we discover the first example of the movie's adherence to the original books. Now, we all remember that MGM's The Wizard of Oz begins in black and white (or sepia tones, depending on what version you are watching), then later switches to full Technicolor as soon as Dorothy opens the door of her house and steps into the land of the Munchkins. On rereading the book, I was surprised to discover just how perfectly this matches up with the original text:
When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.
This is just the second paragraph of the book, and already we have an incredibly vivid idea of what Dorothy's home looks like. Baum doesn't even bother to tell us what color the house had once been painted, as no trace of color apparently remains. The next two paragraphs go on to describe how Aunt Em and Uncle Henry have been worn by time and sun to be as gray as their surroundings, and only Dorothy has escaped losing her natural life and color by the playfulness and joy of her dog, Toto.
The movie, as I mentioned, began in black and white originally, although many television airings of the show changed this to sepia. It could easily be argued that the original black and white was much more in line with Baum's original vision, because rather than the sense of nostalgia that sepia tones usually invoke for us nowadays, the black and white shows the colorlessness of the "real" world as compared to Oz.
Getting back to Toto - it's funny that so many think of him as a Scottie dog when in fact, the dog in the original movie was actually a Cairn Terrier. To those not aware of the difference, Cairns are similar to Scotties in appearance and are closely related breeds, but Cairns are not usually pure black as most Scotties are. The book describes Toto as a small, black dog with long, silky hair, not mentioning a specific breed, so there's definitely room for interpretation there.
I'm going to try not to focus too much on the little differences, as there are so many tiny ones that don't matter too much to the story as a whole! However, we have a pretty major break from the book straight off - the movie spends a lot more time building up the characters in Kansas, including the three farm hands, Miss Gulch, and Professor Marvel, none of whom appeared in the book. This serves well as a way to "bookend" the story with Dorothy's return home only to find that the whole journey was just a dream - but as we'll see when we get deeper into the series, Baum never intended for his stories to be looked at in such a way, and he did his best to maintain the realism, even in the fantastic setting he created. In fact, many of his forewords refer to his conversations with Dorothy as she tells him of her adventures. Of course, as a child I was so in love with the land of Oz that I strongly disliked the "it was a just a dream" ending. Even though I think it works reasonably well in the movie, I don't believe it really fits with Baum's vision, not to mention the number of times this ending has been used badly in other stories. The Wizard of Oz movie did a very good job in fleshing out the real world versions of the characters, though, and we found ourselves really liking the farmhands and Aunt Em and Uncle Henry.
An interesting fact I discovered - apparently an early idea for the movie was to create a special bond between Dorothy and the farmhand Hunk, who also played the Scarecrow. You can still see that Dorothy seems closer to the Scarecrow than the Tin Woodman or the Cowardly Lion. I believe they intended to suggest that eventually Dorothy and Hank would fall in love when she grew older - something that could have been believable, given that Judy Garland was seventeen when the movie was released. However, I think they made a very good choice in keeping the illusion of her youth intact, and although obviously older than Dorothy really should have been, Judy Garland played the part of a little girl rather well. Besides which, Baum generally objected to using romance as a part of children's stories, mainly because he believed romance was immaterial to a child's experience and was often quite boring to them, appealing more to their parents than the children themselves. Throughout Baum's fourteen Oz books, Dorothy never falls in love and always remains a playful child. We could probably talk for ages on the concept of eternal youth in Baum's stories, but let's move on - we're not even in Oz yet!
Since Dorothy does not get frustrated with her home and worried for Toto's safety, she does not run away in the book. Instead, the cyclone hits on page three, with barely any leadup to it. Dorothy is already in the house when it happens and grabs Toto to run for the cellar, but she isn't fast enough and trips and falls, leaving her in the house when it flies into the air seconds later. She doesn't see any visions through the window, and in fact the house's flight lasts for many hours, so that Dorothy falls asleep on the bed. She's awakened by the house falling, as in the movie, however.
Our first introduction to Oz comes before she even opens the door, because "the bright sunshine came in at the window, flooding the little room." As soon as she leaves the house, she sees a beautiful land of lush greenery, flowers, brightly colored birds, and "a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to the little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairies." This is definitely Oz, and the movie did a great job of portraying it well - the only difference being that Dorothy doesn't actually land in the Munchkin city in the book, but the Munchkins do arrive to greet her right away. (I also think this quote is a good example of how Baum does really wonderful descriptions.)
A note about Munchkins - they've now become nearly synonymous with little people in our culture, something I find vaguely bothersome. It's true that they are smaller than normal:
They were not as grown as the grown folk she had always been used to; but neither were they very small. In fact, they seemed about as tall as Dorothy, who was a well-grown child for her age, although they were, so far as looks go, many years older.
Rereading this eased some of my disgruntlement, but as a child I always associated Munchkins far more with their style of dress than with their height. Baum describes their clothing in great detail, particularly their round, pointed hats with bells hanging from the brim and the way they only wear blue. This is something the movie overlooks, that the land of Oz is divided into four parts, and each part has its signature color - the land of the Munchkins in the east being colored blue. In fact, Baum later describes the landscape itself as looking rather blue, although in this first book it's just an ordinary but beautiful countryside.
The Good Witch of the North accompanies the Munchkins to greet Dorothy, but this is not Glinda - she is small, like the Munchkins, and dresses all in white, besides also being wrinkled and white-haired. She comes from the land of the Gillikins to the north but came to investigate. This scene is much like the movie - she tells Dorothy where she is and advises her to seek the Wizard in the Emerald City for help in getting home. As in the movie, Dorothy's house has landed on the Wicked Witch of the East and killed her, but she wore silver shoes instead of ruby slippers. This is one of the changes I particularly like in the movie, because such a bright and striking color made good use of the new Technicolor technology of the time, and silver would have been wasted in that brightly colored landscape. It's interesting that one of the most iconic features of the Wizard of Oz movie is actually not a Baum creation at all. After giving her a kiss of protection, the good witch sends Dorothy off on the yellow brick road.
Dorothy doesn't meet the Scarecrow right away - instead, she walks down the road for a day and is invited by some Munchkins to stay at their house for the night. Here we get some of the dialogue that was later moved to the meeting with the good witch in the movie - the Munchkins are very kind to her and are convinced that she must be a sorceress, because she has the silver shoes, she killed the wicked witch, and because she wears a blue and white checked dress (huge props to the movie's costumers for getting that detail right). They say white is the color of magic-users, and blue shows good will towards the Munchkins.
The next day brings a meeting with the Scarecrow, which plays out almost exactly as it does in the movie - but without the singing and dancing, which wouldn't mean as much in the book, of course. Baum actually did write musicals, however, so making the movie into a musical was an extremely appropriate choice. In fact, Baum wrote a musical stage play of The Wizard of Oz, and although the plot was extremely different from both the book and the movie, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman were a very popular comedic and musical duo. You can still see this influence in the way the 1939 movie was made.
We know in the movie that the Scarecrow isn't very good at scaring away crows. In fact, the crows talk to him, laughing at him and calling him foolish, which is the reason he wants a brain in the first place, so he won't feel like such a failure. He also tells Dorothy of how he was created by the Munchkin farmer who put him in the field. We never get an explanation of just why he's alive though - we just assume, "Oh, it's Oz, anything can happen."
The journey takes much longer in the book than it does in the movie, and Dorothy and the Scarecrow stop for the night in an abandoned cottage, although the Scarecrow doesn't sleep and just stands patiently in a corner all night. This is typical of many Baum characters who aren't human, and they never seem bored at all in spite of it. The next day they meet the Tin Woodman, rusted in the forest, exactly as it happens in the movie - and once they've rescued him, they find out that it was his cottage they stayed at. One thing we learn that we don't in the movie is how the Tin Woodman was made - he was once an ordinary man named Nick Chopper (although his name is not revealed in this first book) who loved a Munchkin girl and wanted to marry her, but the old woman the girl lived with didn't want her to marry and leave her to do her chores alone. The old woman asked the Wicked Witch of the East for help, and due to a series of magically caused "accidents", the Tin Woodman's ax chopped off parts of his body one at a time, and a local tinsmith replaced each part with tin until he was made entirely of tin. This story would be extremely disturbing if it weren't for the light-hearted way the Tin Woodman tells it (a common theme in Baum's stories). He says that he has no heart in his new tin body, so he doesn't love the Munchkin girl anymore. This is when the other two convince him to join them and ask the Wizard for a heart.
In the movie, the Wicked Witch of the West comes to threaten Dorothy when she first lands in Oz, wanting revenge for her sister's death, and she later attacks the group before they meet the Cowardly Lion. In the book, no mention has been made of this particular witch yet. When they meet the Cowardly Lion in the woods, however, the scene is very much the same in the book and the movie (minus the "lions, tigers, and bears line). After they continue on their journey, we get an interesting scene where the Tin Woodman is distraught and cries because he accidentally stepped on a beetle. As the book explains:
The Tin Woodman knew very well he had no heart, and therefore he took great care never to be cruel or unkind to anything.
"You people with hearts," he said, "have something to guide you, and need never do wrong; but I have no heart, and so I must be very careful. When Oz gives me a heart of course I needn't mind so much."
This argument is odd but amusing. I've never been entirely sure whether this means he either has a heart already or doesn't need one, because he is already kind and compassionate, but you can definitely see the parallels with the movie, where the Wizard insists that none of them need the things they are asking for.
We're about a quarter of the way through the book, but about halfway through the movie, which shows how much more there is that the movie left out! We'll keep going in a future entry, but I've come to realize that I am so familiar with the Oz books, I tend to go into much more detail with them than just a quick review. My next post might be the next section of The Wizard of Oz, although I am working on a more modern book review as well, so it depends on how quickly I finish the book to talk about it! You can expect another entry in a few days, at the very least, though. See you next time!
The link at the top is the paperback version with the original illustrations (which I'm not particularly fond of, actually). Following is a hardback version, and the version from the series edition that I own, which is now out of print but can be found used if you're interested:
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