History Headscratchers / TheWonderfulWizardOfOz

* If water is the only thing that can kill a witch, why did that first witch die from having a house fall on her?
** Having a house dropped on you is NOT going to leave you in good shape, no matter what else your weakness.
** Weaksauce Weakness. They never said it had to be pure water or liquid water for that matter. Even if the house itself is disconnected from the water supply, Dorothy herself being in the house at the time could have been enough. Or more realistically, Dorothy's house lands on witch, causes injury to witch's lungs, and complicated stuff ensues which leads to the wicked witch essentially drowning in her own bodily fluids.
** Tornadoes also come with nasty rainstorms in tow, if I recall right. Caught in the rain probably didn't help matters.
** Where is it said water is the only thing that can kill a witch?
*** To my knowledge, only in the "How It Should Have Ended" animation for ''The Wizard of Oz''.
*** In one of the books, an early one, it says the wicked witches had been dried out as the result of being wicked for so long, making them vulnerable to water. Sort of like living mummies. So you'd expect them to get powdered pretty well by falling farm-houses, too. Now you just have to figure out why evil has a dehydrating effect.
*** It was the first one - and only said of the Wicked Witch of the West, not Witches or Wicked Witches in general.

* If the witch melts with water, how does that dirty woman take a bath?
** Dry cleaning.
** She doesn't. It's why she turned green.
*** Actually, that's more or less what ''Literature/{{Wicked}}'' said; she rubs oils into her skin.

* If there is No Death in Oz what does Munchkinland need with a coroner?
** Well, that's one more Munchkin who escapes unemployment -- possibly the fact that his job is essentially pointless is less important than the fact that he ''has'' a job. There are a lot of "jobs" like this in Oz canon; they're of no practical use to anyone except to let people feel they actually have something to do.
** My recollection is that "No Death in Oz" is only true in the books, and the coroner only appears in the film, so there's no contradiction.
*** More specifically, the "no death" rule was only introduced in the later books. There are actually quite a lot of deaths in ''Wonderful Wizard'', including both Wicked Witches and many animals encountered by Dorothy's company in their journeys.
** My recollection was that the "No Death" rule only came into play when Ozma (or the rightful heir) was placed in power. Presumably, this makes the wicked witches even more evil by taking over Oz.
** As the sixth book clarifies, the rule that no one dies in Oz only extends to death from natural causes. You can't grow old and die, and you (maybe) can't get sick and die. But any other thing that could kill you will still kill you.
* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=munbt8qpCiQ This video]] asks why the question: if witches can be killed by the impact of a falling house, why not [[CombatPragmatist the impact of bullets]]?
** This is the page for the original book, not the film. In the book there is no mention of any guns.
* Why is there a yellow, brick road in blue Munchkinland? For that matter, why is there a ruby palace in purple Gillikin? Rubies are, by definition, red sapphires[[note]]Except they're not CALLED "sapphires," but still.[[/note]]. They can't BE any other color.
** The books never said that everything in the Land of the Munchkins was blue, just that things like fences, clothes, and houses tended to be. And we know that the yellow brick road appears elsewhere in Oz -- if I remember, Tip came across it while traveling from the Land of the Gillikins to the Emerald City -- so it's not supposed to match the color scheme of any one of the five lands.

* Was the house carried off by a tornado or a cyclone? It is referred to in the book as a cyclone, but is described more like a tornado.
** Is there that big a difference?

* When Dorothy first arrives in Oz, she goes outside immediately after her house lands. Soon after, we learn that one of the Munchkins sent for the Good Witch of the North after the house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East. If that's the case, how was it that they got back greet Dorothy so quickly? According to a map of Oz, her house landed smack in the middle of the Land of the Munchkins, a pretty fair distance from the Gillikin Country where the good witch lives, and even if she can teleport, it would've taken time for the messenger to have delivered the news to her in the first place.

* When Dorothy first arrives in Oz, she goes outside immediately after her house lands. Soon after, we learn that one of the Munchkins sent for the Good Witch of the North after the house landed on the Wicked Witch of the East. If that's the case, how was it that they got back greet Dorothy so quickly? According to a map of Oz, her house landed smack in the middle of the Land of the Munchkins, a pretty fair distance from the north country where the good witch lives.