{"id":87,"date":"2005-08-15T22:03:00","date_gmt":"2005-08-15T22:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookblog.salticid.com\/?p=87"},"modified":"2025-06-26T07:35:50","modified_gmt":"2025-06-26T11:35:50","slug":"oz-kick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2005\/08\/oz-kick\/","title":{"rendered":"Oz kick!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Attempting to read <i>Wicked<\/i> got me off on an Oz spree (one of my favorite things in life, following my &#8216;satiable curiosity&#8212;to borrow from Kipling&#8212;wherever it leads):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i>The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History<\/i> &#8211; John Fricke, Jay Scarfone and William Stillman, 1989<\/li>\n<li><i>The Wizard of Oz<\/i> &#8211; L. Frank Baum, 1900<\/li>\n<li><i>The Land of Oz<\/i> &#8211; L. Frank Baum, 1904<\/li>\n<li><i>Ozma of Oz<\/i> &#8211; L. Frank Baum, 1907<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I knew that the movie differed from the book, but I didn&#8217;t remember the specifics. (I was one of those who only saw TWOO on a black-and-white TV when growing up, so I missed the transition to color once Dorothy gets to Oz. Watching the movie now, I enjoyed the effect of the B&amp;W to color transition, but thanks to the fertile imagination of childhood, I don&#8217;t think I missed out on anything back then&#8212;my mind supplied plenty of color! As kids my brother and I got to go to the short-lived Oz amusement park in the North Carolina mountains, which was pretty cool (you entered the house, then it actually spun around in the &#8220;tornado&#8221; and you exited onto the Yellow Brick Road).)<\/p>\n<p>When you think about how the movie terrified so many children, it&#8217;s ironic to find out that Baum specifically wanted to get away from fairy-tale scariness (&#8220;It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out&#8221;). The book is indeed lower-key than the movie and the witch is nowhere near as prominent. On the other hand, Oz specifically instructs Dorothy to go and <b>kill<\/b> the witch. And the Tin Woodman sees a wildcat chasing a field mouse: &#8220;&#8230;although he had no heart he knew it was wrong for the wildcat to try to kill such a pretty, harmless creature.&#8221; So of course, he chops the wildcat&#8217;s head off without a second&#8217;s hesitation!<\/p>\n<p>I had thought I&#8217;d probably get rid of my Oz books after this re-read&#8212;and I didn&#8217;t get past these four&#8211;but I do enjoy Baum&#8217;s limitless inventiveness so for now I&#8217;m keeping them. Favorites: the Gump (a creature assembled from two sofas and a stuffed quasi-elk head, brought to life with magic powder); the Princess Langwidere, who keeps dozens of heads to wear and therefore doesn&#8217;t need to vary her outfits; and the Hungry Tiger, who craves fat babies but whose conscience won&#8217;t let him eat any (he doesn&#8217;t deny how yummy they would be, so as a vegetarian who still craves meat I very much identify with him!).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Attempting to read Wicked got me off on an Oz spree (one of my favorite things in life, following my &#8216;satiable curiosity&#8212;to borrow from Kipling&#8212;wherever it leads): The Wizard of Oz: The Official 50th Anniversary Pictorial History &#8211; John Fricke, Jay Scarfone and William Stillman, 1989 The Wizard of Oz &#8211; L. Frank Baum, 1900 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4714,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions\/4714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}