YMMV / The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

See also:

• The Wizard of Oz (the movie)
• Land of Oz (the book sequels)

The original book

• Adaptation Displacement:
  • The MGM movie adaptation is much better known than the Oz books. Some of the more recent sequels to The Wizard of Oz — such as Wicked^note though it contains a lot of book references and features some book characters and Oz the Great and Powerful — are based on the movie and not the book version.
  • The book itself was also overshadowed by the 1902 stage production, which was the longest running show on Broadway for decades until A Chorus Line overtook it.
• Applicability: The book is a case of confusing applicability with allegory, going hand in hand with Epileptic Trees and Faux Symbolism. The connection between The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and the then-contemporary American political landscape was not even raised until 1963, when summer school teacher Henry Littlefield, while trying to teach the 1896 Presidential election and the turn-of-the-century Populist movement to bored history students, stumbled upon the idea of using the characters and events of The Wizard of Oz as metaphors to teach the concepts. He and his students made a number of connections — the Scarecrow represented the farmers, the Tin Woodman the factory workers, the Wizard was President Grover Cleveland or Republican presidential candidate William McKinley, the Cowardly Lion was Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, the silver shoes were the silver standard, the yellow brick road the gold standard, and so on — and Littlefield eventually wrote an article, "The Wizard of Oz: A Parable on Populism", which was published in the magazine American Quarterly in 1964. Unfortunately, this was eventually taken to mean that L. Frank Baum wrote the book as an allegory for the political landscape at the turn of the century, despite the fact that Littlefield believed Baum had no political agenda when he wrote the book.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: "The Dainty China Country" chapter in the original book features Dorothy and her companions finding a town where the houses, animals, and citizens are all made out of china. Some, such as the accident-prone clown, Mr. Joker, have been broken and mended several times. Nothing of any relevance to the story happens here — the china citizens neither help nor hinder the protagonists — and after Dorothy and her friends leave, it's never mentioned again. It's more or less accepted that it only exists to lengthen the journey from point A to point B. It would make you wonder why they bothered to go over the wall instead of around it, if not for the fact they have no way of telling how far the wall stretches in each direction. This chapter became something of a Franchise Original Sin for future Oz books, some of which are completely loaded with pointless Wacky Wayside Tribes.
• Draco in Leather Pants: The Wicked Witch of the West, to some of the fandom. Margaret Hamilton's unforgettable Large Ham/Love to Hate performance in the movie really helped this; fans who think of Wicked as canonical take it up to Eleven.
• Epileptic Trees: Allegedly, the whole "Wizard of Oz is a Populist tract about the gold standard" thing was made up by a history teacher trying to get his kids to pay attention. It just fit so well, it stuck.
• Fandom Rivalry: The fandom is largely split between fans of the books and fans of the MGM movie. And that's not counting residents of the former Soviet Union, whose experience comes mostly from Volkov's adaptation, Tales of the Magic Land.
• Faux Symbolism: So much. There's a reason some historians see it as a Farmer's Movie. To name a few for the history buffs, Dorothy has silver shoes and walks on a yellow brick road to get to the Emerald City, Dorothy ends up missing the Scarecrow the most... Though it's all highly debated, and not everyone believes it. See Epileptic Trees.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The fact that there's a character named "Woot" might be funny to some modern readers.
  • The narration repeatedly describes the Tin Woodman, Lion, and Scarecrow to be Dorothy's "comrades". It's hard to take seriously now that "comrade" has become almost exclusively associated with communism and the Soviet Union, even comically so.
• It Was His Sled:
  • The Wizard is really a con artist who used clever sleight of hand to appear differently when meeting with different people.
  • The Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion already have the brains, heart, and courage they seek.
  • Dorothy could have used the Silver Shoes to go home the second she got them, had she known how to use them.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The Windham Classics text adventure version from 1985 is not only a wonderfully faithful adaptation of the first book, it incorporates about two thirds of the second book and a Shout-Out to the third in the form of Tik-Tok being a last-minute party member. About the only part that isn't faithful is that the game doesn't play the Gender Bender angle of Tip, instead keeping Tip as a boy but still crowning them monarch of Oz Sprinkled through the game are Genius Bonus bits of classical music that are appropriate to the situation, such as the William Tell Overture (aka the Lone Ranger theme) when you recruit the Sawhorse
• Older Than They Think: Movie fans are often surprised to learn that The Wizard of Oz is based on a book that was published in 1900 and the book had sequels published over the span of 50 years.
• Sequelitis: Baum wrote thirteen more books about Oz. While some were quite good, a lot just got very formulaic. Baum did want to write other, non-Oz books but none of them were very successful, so he was stuck writing Oz books to please the public. And then after he died, other people churned even more, with the last of the "Famous Forty" being published in 1949.

The anime series

• Awesome Music: Both the Japanese and English openings.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The visit to the land of the Cuttenclips that takes up most of episode 44 and has no effect whatever on the rest of the plot. (It's a holdover from the book that section is based on, The Emerald City of Oz, which includes an extended sequence of Dorothy visiting various strange lands in and around Oz.)
• Ho Yay: If you've got your goggles strapped down tight, Scarecrow and Tin Man definitely apply. At one point, Tin Man princess carries him. They are prone to touching and generally standing close together.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The Italian opening to this series sounds very similar to the Italian opening to the Pollyanna anime produced by the World Masterpiece Theater, especially the opening riff.

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