The Wizard of Oz

This essay seeks to understand the startling image of Carl Fredricksen launching his house into the air using children’s helium balloons in Pixar’s animated feature, Up (2009). The film interrogates successful adulthood via the figure of the road, both in its literary manifestation in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and cinematically, via The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939). Paradise Falls itself, like Oz before it, is a letdown just like the “sad paradise” of On the Road. Carl loses faith not only in his boyhood movie hero, the travelogue adventurer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), but the cinema itself.

Judy Garland’s Technicolor journey down the Yellow Brick Road is arguably one of the best loved and most watched films in cinema history, and _The Wizard of Oz_ has been remade and adapted, its characters and tropes incorporated into other stories, many of which repeat the patriarchal ideologies of the MGM film. Sci Fi Channel mini-series _Tin Man_ presents a darker, futuristic ‘Oz’ story, that illustrates how a text can subvert the ideologies of its intertext without mocking or deriding it. As this paper will show, Tin Man does not simply transport Dorothy into a more modern setting, but subverts the patriarchal ideologies underpinning the perennially screened 1939 MGM film.Tin Man challenges patriarchal assumptions about gender, portraying a female hero who is strong, brave and assertive, but also embraces a more ‘feminine’ style of leadership, rather than performing as a male hero ‘in drag’. While stories celebrating ‘brother bonds’ abound, it is far more likely for sisters – literal and figurative – to be pitted against one another, frequently in competition for a man, if they are present at all.  Tin Man also subverts this trend, emphasising the empowering nature of sisterhood: the main drive of the narrative is for the protagonist to rediscover her superpowers by remembering her past, reconnecting with her long-lost sister and joining together to defeat the true ‘big bad’ of the ‘O.Z.’. Through its relationship with The Wizard of Oz and other narratives, Tin Man exposes and subverts their patriarchal underpinnings, while arguable avoiding alienating fans of the MGM film.

The re-telling and even more so the re-writing of myths is prevalent in contemporary literature and the prominence of novels spanning various genres and styles is a testament to the sticking power of re-worked myths. Gregory Maguire’s novels show an enthusiastic and determined commitment to the re-writing, revision and appropriation of mythic narratives for a contemporary audience. Maguire’s writings are more than simply evidence for the popularisation of existing myth in contemporary culture. Rather, through the reconfiguration of familiar narratives, Maguire is in fact creating myth. The critically responsive act of revision employed by Maguire so reconstructs a myth as to make it a new myth. This process of creating new myth is most notable in Maguire’s reworking of the myth of Oz in his The Wicked Years series of contemporary fantasy novels.

Which version of the world of Oz one is most familiar with can be seen as a generational marker. The original story has undergone the process of adaptation and appropriation through various different mediums, and with each transformation the story takes on a different cultural resonance in society. With each of these transformations the perception of the ‘true’ Oz changes, for each transformation focuses on a different aspect of the Oz narratives.

Examining the evolution of the myth of Oz from L. Frank Baum’s children’s stories, through the iconic MGM musical, Maguire’s novels all the way to the Broadway musical adaptation reveals a great deal about the way myths function in contemporary culture. This paper proposes to explore the adaptation and appropriation of the existing Oz myths into Maguire’s new Oz myth by close reference to the changes that the different narratives perform through this evolution.

Composed under the direction of Herbert Stothart, the orchestral score to MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) is laden with musical quotations ranging from Kodály to Schumann. While the inclusion of outside musical sources in a film score is not unusual, Stothart elevates this practice to a high level of sophistication. In particular, he incorporates melodies previously associated with silent film musical accompaniment, reinforcing Oz’s nostalgic character by hearkening to an earlier era of film exhibition. In this article I analyze the various implications of this musical nostalgia as they intersect with earlier cinematic practices, the film’s narrative, and Herbert Stothart’s musical aesthetics. In addition to bringing a retrospective quality to the Oz score, Stothart’s quotations interact musically and semantically with the film’s songs, further unifying orchestral background score and vocal material.

Drawing on L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a case study – a children’s fairytale novel published in 1900 – this article aims to explore concepts and manifestations of intertextuality around the turn of the twentieth century. Through which industry mechanisms could intertextuality manifest at this time – and in what ways could authors such as Baum construct children’s fiction as intertextual tapestries, creating sprawling worlds across media?

Much as the musical is touted as an American art form, L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900) has been called the American fairy tale. Since its publication, the book has been eclipsed in popularity by a series of musical–theatrical adaptations, which are also among the most popular shows in the canon of musicals, suggesting an affinity between musicals and Oz. Close analysis of four Oz musicals, the Broadway extravaganza of 1903, the MGM film of 1939, The Wiz (1975) and Wicked (2003) shows how the conventions of musical theatre translate the already powerful symbolic national mythology of Baum’s book into participatory expressions of American identity through embodied performance. In return, Oz gives the musical a signal national text which, through adaptation, allows the musical to reassert its own American pedigree while rearticulating the meaning of American identity at significant moments in the history of the genre.

L. Frank Baum’s classic fairytale, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written in 1900, may be one of
the most beloved children’s stories of the modern era. It may also, in fact, be an allegory of the
mystic’s journey, using classic alchemical symbols and operations as Dorothy sojourns along the
golden path toward reintegration and the discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone. The Emerald City
at the center of Oz, for example, is a likely allusion to the Emerald Tablet of Hermes
Trismegistus. But either by extreme coincidence or hidden intent, Oz closely parallels the seven
operations of Azoth alchemy, which Baum would have been familiar with as a Theosophist and
student of occultist Madame Blavatsky. This paper offers both the student of alchemy and
general Oz enthusiast an entirely new way to read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

The 1939 family classic film, The Wizard of Oz, based on the beloved children’s tale by L. Frank Baum, represents a modern example of mythologist Joseph Campbell’s model of the hero quest myth.  This two-part study begins with a theoretical overview contextualizing The Wizard of Oz, as mythopoeic literature, and Campbell’s hero quest paradigm, informed by Carl G. Jung’s theories and methods as well as other key sources.  The second part of the study applies Campbell’s model to the text of Baum’s Oz narrative in both its cinematic and literary forms, examining Baum’s tale for archetypal features described in Campbell’s model of the initial stage of the “leitmotif of the monomyth.”  This comparative analysis emphasizes the myth-motif of the threshold passage accompanied by sequentially interconnected, recurring myth-motifs identified by Campbell and associated with the initial stage of Dorothy Gale’s transformational journey, i.e., separation from ordinary reality.  This narrative interpretation demonstrates key symbolic features of mythico-ritual (initiatory) structure in the initial stage of Baum’s modern fairy tale.  Screenshots from the movie visually illustrate that Dorothy’s journey in the other world of Oz closely follows the archetypal, symbolic structure of Campbell’s classic quest myth of the hero. 

Keywords: archetype, Arnold van Gennep, Carl G. Jung, hero quest, initiation, Jean Houston, Joseph Campbell, J. R. R. Tolkien, L. Frank Baum, Mircea Eliade, monomyth, myth-motif, mythic orphan, mythology, mythopoeic, narrative, night sea journey, primordial image, rites of passage, ritual, shaman, threshold passage, Wizard of Oz

In order to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary literary, comic book, film, or TV series references to "Alice," "The Wizard of Oz" and 'Peter Pan" (...), the enduring fame of these works, and the role they have played in the past and continue to play today, it is essential to refer both to the content of the originals and to other, often overlooked in professional reflection, manifestations of their presence in our imagination. The main goal of the book is to describe how the classics of children's literature (...) have functioned and still function in the cultural imaginarium (...). The study of this imaginarium – miraculous, but to some extent also real – can be carried out by studying the fate of sense-making figures and significant texts in order to determine the ways in which ideas about them circulate in the collective consciousness (...). Therefore, the studies contained in the monograph concern not only literary works understood as finished stories closed between the pages of books, but also the "long life" of Carroll's duology, Baum's cycle, and Barrie's works in various cultural media, registers, and genres (...). The important questions are what the individual stories said and still say about human fears and dreams; what childhood and adulthood, children's and adult literature, reality and fantasy used to be and what they are today for the Western world; what we culturally remember about Carroll, Baum, and Barrie and what we have forgotten. (from the "Introduction", trans. by the author of the book – MS).

Выявляется структурная аналогия между архетипами основных персонажей сказки «Волшебник Изумрудного города» и основными логико-философскими сюжетами Античности, Средневековья и Нового Времени. Мы попытались посмотреть на произведение А.М. Волкова как на модернистский текст, смысл которого в большей степени зависит от эффекта прочтения, чем от замысла автора, что позволяет провести совершенно неожиданные структурные аналогии. В свою очередь, этот текст является своеобразным – «волковским» прочтением оригинальной версии сказки Л.Ф. Баума.

Полная версия статьи доступна по ссылке: http://journals.tsu.ru/vestnik/&journal_page=archive&id=1981&article_id=44660

The devil is not what he used to be. The mythic villain of the Christian tradition has become a cartoon version of his former terrifying self. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the visual arts. Fearsome images of the devil and his minions once adorned church walls, altars, and holy books. He was the very real in-carnation of evil and his image was a lesson in the wages of sin. Today, however, when words like " sin " and " evil " have lost their theological if not cultural resonance , the arts have all but abandoned sincere representations of the devil, trading instead on his image as logo or slur. To image the devil after evil is to reimagine the very idea of evil. The artist Fred Stonehouse has accomplished precisely this. In the year 447 the Council of Toledo set out the first official description of the devil. At the council the devil was described as " a large, black, monstrous apparition with horns on his head, cloven hoofs, or one cloven hoof—ass's ears, hair, claws, fiery eyes, terrible teeth, an immense phallus, and a sulphurous smell " (Hughes 104). Since then the devil has morphed into a caricature of this fierce beast of Christian mythology. More recently the devil has made appearances as the logo for Underwood Deviled Ham and as a regular character on South Park. The reason the devil has ceased to function in the cultural imaginary as the per-sonification of evil is because evil itself has become something of a superstitious relic. As Peter Stanford observes in his book, The Devil: A Biography, " Greater knowledge, less dependency on the idea of a figure of evil, and more on the nega

Ten years before he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum produced two editorials calling for the death of all Native American people. These editorials have affected how both Baum’s novel and its 1939 MGM adaptation are interpreted. For some, the tale is a utopian vision that vindicates its author, while for others it clearly embodies Baum’s genocidal impulses. This essay explores this hermeneutical issue, arguing that The Wizard of Oz—like “religion” itself—can support opposing interpretations because the world it depicts is complex and contradictory.

This article will serve to provide a historicised examination of the configuration that have come to be known as transmedia storytelling, offering two interrelated examples of how transmedia storytelling was exploited in the 1920s and 1930s via the production practices of board games and jigsaw puzzles. The study will examine media practices developing during the early twentieth century, practices that were encouraged at this time by the increased commodification and branding of media texts and consumer products. The article’s first example, The Wonderful Game of Oz, a board game released in 1921, demonstrates how transmedia storytelling became an industrialised means of branding consumer products across media during the early 1920s. The article’s second example, a Tarzan jigsaw puzzle released in the 1930s to promote a Tarzan radio serial, will serve similarly to reveal how author Edgar Rice Burroughs exploited transmedia storytelling, expanding the fictional storyworld whilst continuing the fictional stories of its characters – as a model of commodification. Both branding and commodification accelerated practices of transmedia storytelling as a means of sustaining and reinforcing the commodity circulations of early twentieth-century consumer culture.

Resumo O presente artigo tem por objetivo expor e comentar algumas questões e possíveis soluções para os desafios encontrados durante a tradução dos três primeiros volumes da série Mundo de Oz

Abstract: This paper aims to expose certain translation issues and possible solutions concerning the translation challenges in the first three volumes of Mundo de Oz series − The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz −, by L. Frank Baum, released in 2014 by Vermelho Marinho Brazilian press.

Publicado originalmente em https://seer.ufrgs.br/translatio/article/view/51665/32682

Over the Rainbow, the American song from the soundtrack of the immensely successful and important film The Wizard of Oz, is also the soundtrack of the final and best novel by the Italian writer Beppe Fenoglio (1922-1963), Una questione privata. The article, written for Quaderni Proustiani, Napoli 2011, draws a comparison between the novel and the song, and most important between the novel and the film.

Nos livros de L. Frank Baum cuja ação se desenvolve na Terra de Oz, as personagens femininas aparecem nas mais diversas funções, de protagonista a vilã, de fada a bruxa, de princesa a general, entre outras, sejam elas humanas, feéricas ou animais, desdobrando-se em diversos papéis e, desse modo, reproduzindo alguns estereótipos e quebrando outros. Diante desse campo fértil, o presente trabalho investiga as formas de representação do feminino empregadas na série, cuja primeira e mais conhecida obra é O Maravilhoso Mágico de Oz. Para tanto, a principal teoria a ser utilizada será a semiótica de linha francesa, com o suporte dos estudos comparatistas e dos estudos de gênero. Averiguamos se os livros da série de Oz trazem inovação na forma de representar o feminino. Como na própria introdução do primeiro livro o autor declarava escrever um conto de fadas moderno, investigou-se ainda a aparente diversidade na forma de manifestar o feminino em relação a outros contos de fada, como os de Charles Perrault e os dos irmãos Grimm.

A Philosophical exploration of certain ideas about temporality and life spurred by Gregory Maguire's third volume in The Wicked Years, entitled A Lion among Men. Maguire is a very philosophical writer and I trace some of his ideas in and through the philosophy of Henri Bergson. This was for a collection of scholarly studies in the Wizard of Oz universe.

Robert Ingpen has written and/or illustrated over 100 books, including newly illustrated editions of classics such as "A Christmas Carol", "The Wind in the Willows", "Peter Pan and Wendy", and "The Jungle Book". In 1986 he was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for Illustration, for having “made a lasting contribution to children’s literature”. Robert studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and had an early career as an artist with CSIRO. He later began illustrating books, and his illustrations for Colin Thiele’s "Storm Boy" won the first Visual Arts Board award for children’s book illustration.

This interview was conducted shortly after the publication of Ingpen's illustrated edition of "The Wizard of Oz".

Tracing the industrial emergence of transmedia storytelling—typically branded a product of contemporary media convergence—this article provides a historicized intervention on the configuration of transmedia storytelling in U.S. culture at the turn of the 20th century. I draw on L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz storyworld and its multiple texts and promotional tie-ins as a case study for revealing how the industrial rise of transmedia storytelling can be re-contextualized as a cultural product of early-20th-century modern advertising. The article maps the ways in which Baum engineered Oz stories transmedially at this time according to broader slippages between content and promotion across platforms.

Drawing on game theory and interviews that were personally conducted with pinball pioneers-from CEOs of independent and corporate pinball companies to notable designers and historians-this essay argues that pinball machines are not solely collector's items but complex games that contain original narratives. The narratives in the pinball games are not direct adaptations from the urtext, but rather narratives that arise through gameplay-the player's use of the pinball to hit the various lights, toys, and ramps that represent the game's narrative.

This article will serve to provide a historicised intervention on the configuration of what have come to be known as cross-media characters, fictional story-worlds, and indeed media branding at the turn of 20th-century America. The study will examine a number of innovative cross-media practices that emerged during the first decade of the 20th century, practices encouraged by the slippage of commercial logos, fictional characters, and brands across platforms, which altogether occurred through the broader rise of modern advertising and the industrialisation of consumer culture. I offer two examples of what can be termed respectively as cross-textual self-promotion and cross-media branding during this historical period, grounded in such cultural factors as turn-of-the-century immigration, new forms of mass media – such as, most notably, newspapers, comic strips and magazines – and consumerism and related textual activities.

This article seeks to provide an overview and analysis of the 2011
Australian film, Red Dog as a popular cultural product from Western Australia.  Set in a working class mining community in the 1970s, I argue that it provides a new outback legend in the form of Red Dog. This article stems from a review of Red Dog as Film of the Year written for the forthcoming Directory of World Cinema: Australian and New Zealand Second Edition from Intellect Books.

It would take another two-hundred seventy years, post-Molière, before the fiery green Wicked Witch of the West would explode into L Frank Baum’s 1939’s superlative imaginative literature, and onto the floor of Oz’s Munchkin Village, and amid copious amounts of powerful orange smoke and a blaze of fire. However, the Witch, on this day, would not be given a woman’s voice.

To approach religious faith from the experience of film viewing might be seen as a transgressive endeavor. The reasons for choosing this approach for “Perfect in Weakness” include the author’s close relationship with the film medium—besides being a priest in the Church of England, Colin Heber-Percy is a screenwriter and an enthusiastic film viewer—but also the very essence of the oeuvre he explores through the pages of this book: Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”, released in the Soviet Union in 1979. Anyone having watched this film will agree in considering the experience it elicits as unsettling at the very least. “Stalker” is an invitation for the viewer to wrestle with deeply human (and troubling) questions, among which the issue of faith is certainly salient.

Ten years before he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum produced two editorials calling for the death of all Native American people. These editorials have affected how both Baum’s novel and its 1939 MGM adaptation are interpreted. For some, the tale is a utopian vision that vindicates its author, while for others it clearly embodies Baum’s genocidal impulses. This essay explores this hermeneutical issue, arguing that The Wizard of Oz—like “religion” itself—can support opposing interpretations because the world it depicts is complex and contradictory.

It would take another two-hundred seventy years, post-Molière, before the fiery green Wicked Witch of the West would explode into L Frank Baum’s 1939’s superlative imaginative literature, and onto the floor of Oz’s Munchkin Village, and amid copious amounts of powerful orange smoke and a blaze of fire.

In the first part of this article, the author reflects on her experience of making film-making workshops with young people in Australia, China and the UK an integral component of a research project on the representation of child migrants and refugees in world cinema. She then sets her approach to these workshops in the context of Alain Bergala's ideas about film education, of which she had initially been unaware. In discussing a couple of further workshops that she ran in the UK and Australia as part of the 'Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse' programme, she focuses particularly on the benign or obstructive role of institutional gatekeepers, who act as intermediaries or agents determining the terms of access to children and young people for film educators, researchers and practitioners. The legal, protective and ethical dimensions of the relationship between educator, gatekeeper and participating students are discussed. The article cites cases in which the interaction worked well, and others in which it proved problematic. The functions, responsibilities and potential drawbacks of gatekeepers are compared with Bergala's conception of the pedagogic role of the passeur-a figure who also holds power in relation to young people's access to film and film-making, but one that connotes positive, even magical, properties.

Studii fantastice OLIVIU CRÂZNIC Fantasticul delimitat (3): Fantasticul feeric Defineam, cu alt prilej [NOTE, 1], fantasticul artistic drept "crearea deliberată a unei realități artistice, structural și semnificativ diferite de realitatea obiectivă, opera rezultată în urma procesului de creație nemaicorespunzând, astfel, acestei din urmă realități", precizând că termenul desemnează, în primul rând, o categorie estetică (atunci când este utilizat în sens larg) și, în al doilea rând, o specie literară tematică (primară) (atunci când este utilizat în sens restrâns)-și delimitându-l, totodată, de termeni sinonimici precum "absurdul", "alegoricul", "fictivul", "supranaturalul". Tot atunci, enumeram patru mari subspecii literare tematice aparținând speciei literare tematice a fantasticului, și anume: fantasticul histrionic, fantasticul feeric, fantasticul eroic și fantasticul întunecat. După ce ne-am ocupat, pe larg, de fantasticul histrionic [NOTE, 2], credem că a sosit timpul să ne oprim, succint (se va vedea mai jos din ce motiv doar în mod succint), asupra fantasticului feeric. Subspecia literară tematică a fantasticului feeric ("fee": "zână", spirit al naturii care are puterea de a schimba destinele oamenilor; fiction") aparține speciei literare tematice (primare) a fantasticului și, prin aceasta, categoriei estetice a fantasticului, subcategoriei estetice a "feericului" (specializare a actului de creaţie menită a produce destinatarului respectivului act emoţii artistice precum încântarea; să ne amintim, cu acest prilej, faptul că sensul propriu, originar, al verbului "a încânta"-lat. "incantare"-era "a plasa sub puterea unei formule religioase", implicând, deci, o emoție nu doar pozitivă, ci și izvorâtă din suprafiresc), și avându-și originile în: credințele animiste; literatura populară (EG basme din care lipsește macabrul, precum Prințesa și broscoiul în unele variante-în alte variante, cum ar fi aceea așternută pe hârtie de către faimoșii Frați Grimm, prințesa nu săruta broasca, ci o izbea, în mod nu tocmai feeric, "din toate puterile", de un zid...); baletul regal renascentist și succesoarea acestui tip de spectacol cu tematică mitologică-feeria dramatică. O altă posibilă denumire a acestei subspecii literare tematice este "fantastic magic" (în măsura în care se conștientizează, pe de o parte, diferența dintre "magie"-presupusă știință care permite controlul elementelor naturii-și "vrăjitorie"-presupus "împrumut" al unor puteri diavolești, în urma unui pact cu necuratul-, pe de altă parte, sensul figurat al cuvântului "magic": "încântător"). În ceea ce ne privește, însă, am decis [NOTE, 1] utilizarea unui criteriu literar în vederea delimitării subspeciilor literare tematice ale fantasticului, fiind, astfel, "obligați" să ne raportăm la noțiuni specifice teoriei literare. Or, magia este o noțiune specifică doctrinelor ezoterice. Din motive similare, nu recomandăm (nici nu blamăm) utilizarea altor termeni (corecți "per se"), precum "fantastic animistic" ori "fantastic paranatural". Având în vedere natura pur optimistă, "roz", a fantasticului feeric, operele care aparțin acestei subspecii literare tematice sunt destinate, ca regulă, cititorilor aflați la o vârstă fragedă (o persoană matură nu poate să considere altfel decât "naivă" o creație care evită cu grijă aspectele tragice apărute, inevitabil, în viața fiecărui individ). Cum literatura pentru copii nu face obiectul studiului nostru, nu vom zăbovi în compania fantasticului feeric, mulțumindu-ne să ne oprim asupra unui singur exemplu reprezentativ-suficient, credem noi, pentru ca această subspecie

Entry in Salvador Jimenez Murguia (ed.), Encyclopedia of Racism in American Films, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018, pp. 647-650.
Race has always been a central issue in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from the historical and the metaphorical point of view. The first publication of L. Frank Baum’s novel in 1900 occurred just a few years after his well-known articles supporting for the genocide of Native-Americans in Dakota’s Territory.

""""During the making of The Wizard of Oz, MGM and manager Leo Singer belittled hypopituitary Munchkin interpreters and blatantly discriminated against other types of dwarfism, while perpetrating racial discrimination against black little people. In fact, ‘midgets’ – as they were commonly called at the time – were deemed to be more socially accepted than other dwarfs and the audience went along with this normative fallacy.
While some of the proportional little actors had prior experience in movie making, the film left them uncredited - labelling them as 'Singer's Midgets', thus endorsing their impairment and dependence on a patron to shepherd their careers in show-business.
The purpose of my paper is to demonstrate that, although the movie's narrative and working conditions enhanced social archetypes related to the Otherness of short-statured people, the film may have ignited the process of self-acceptance among the hypopituitary little folks that would take another 20 years to crystallize.
In 1957, a number of vertically challenged entertainers organized themselves into 'Little People of America', thereby assuming control over their common destiny across various types of dwarfism and setting in motion an identification process leading to self-worth and the valuation of difference in the outside world. They may have been helped in this with the emergence of Munchkin fandom.
Allegations that the ‘midgets’ were ‘little drunks’ and ‘fun-loving little troublemakers' led to the making of "Under the Rainbow" (1981), a parody highlighting their alleged misbehavior surrounding the making of the classic MGM film.
Personal memoirs of Munchkin interpreters show that the frustration about the lack of respect in the making of The Wizard of Oz was deeply rooted and not without reason. The 2007 recognition on Hollywood's Walk of Fame could be interpreted as a belated apologetic gesture from society trying to make up for the historical wrongdoings, though even then the star, being labelled 'The Munchkins', was intrinsically stigmatizing.""""