Oz Revisited: The Case for a Classic
What is it about The Wizard of Oz that is so enduring? How come a 1939 movie, derived from the L. Frank Baum book written in 1900, is still relevant? I have often wondered what it is about this movie that I love so much. I count it among my top five favorite films of all time. I can still recall the first time I saw it as a young child, on CBS broadcast television before cable, before 
VHS and DVD and way before HD-TV. I can still bring back the feeling of magical wonderment I experienced as Dorothy walks out of the black and white existence of her little farmhouse in Kansas, into the surreal, colorful, fantastical world of Munchkinland on the outskirts of the Emerald City in the Land of Oz.
More so than being simply amazed by the deep hues and pigmentation of early film Technicolor, Oz created an imaginative world of exciting hyperbole and surrealism that allowed you to become immersed in, and wrapped in, the story. What made it unique was the tale’s capacity to lend a kind of believability to its impossible storyline and a sense of factual reality to its well-developed characters. A viewer could suspend disbelief as the life of a simple and potentially real young farm girl in Kansas is woven seamlessly into an unlikely land of caricatures with baseline human characteristics and mannerisms, which quickly made you forget they were not human.
Instead, Oz made it plausible - to the generations who have enjoyed it and those who will in the future – for there to exist a place where all sorts of magic can occur, without anyone batting an eye. But where the human psyche is still only seeking the simplest foundation of life’s gifts and qualities.
The imagery of Oz is unchallenged in its beauty and Crayola-like simplicity. Yet it is still a survivor, rising above hundreds of other celluloid messes and masterpieces that have gone to the wayside of memory. Still Oz remains, year after year, decade after decade, much beloved and continuously embraced.
Even today, people continue to marvel at the film’s many hidden and not so hidden lessons. Folks continue to use lines, phrases and a belief system from it to convey certain feelings. The famous last line of the picture, “There’s no place like home,” appears on home décor pieces, on invitations, cards, notepads, T-shirts, pajamas and mugs. Yet it also materializes in conversations because of its truthful meaning for many people: There is no place like home. Other phrases from the film also permeate our lives in subtle and not so subtle ways. When someone is disoriented at a new place, or with new people different from whom they’re used to, they might utter the line; “I’m not in Kansas anymore.” If you’re joking about getting someone back for something, you might just add in “and your little dog, too,” to place emphasis on your meaning. If you’re lost or trying to find your way, you might say that you’re trying to “follow the yellow brick road”. And at the start of the 1939 MGM classic, a short phrase opens the film and establishes the foundation of the storyline. It states:
So begins one of the all-time favorite films ever made. It starts at an already pinnacle stage in the humdrum life of Dorothy Gale. The Kansas farm girl seeks more than what is outside her bedroom window. She wants to know what is over the rainbow because, surely, it must be better than what she has right now. It leads to a song and an image so painfully beautiful that you are drawn into both with the first note Dorothy (played by Judy Garland) sings.
The lyrics lay more of the brickwork that will pave the way (in yellow bricks) for the telling of the tale. We have all been young and hopeful and we have all been desperate and disappointed, too. We relate and then we settle in to watch.
How does the possibly real Dorothy go from a plain farm girl, to a girl trying to escape from a dog-hating town woman, to one running from a common Kansas tornado, to one who believes a mysterious drifter with a crystal ball, to finally, being surrounded in Munchkinland by swarms of tiny people with visibly evident personalities, purposes and characteristics (Lullaby League, Lollipop Guild) who praise her for dropping a house on a “bad” witch and introduce her to a “good” witch who will then bring her to the starting point of a yellow brick road that begins her impossible journey and ultimately brings her full-circle back to her farm, her home, her room and her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry.
I remain astonished by the human mind’s capacity to leave fact and plausibility at the threshold and embrace fiction and fantasy in accepting The Wizard of Oz’s many story threads. It is only when we allow ourselves to have faith in the impossible that we are then able to revert back to childhood and both believe in and enjoy the story.
How else can we explain a green woman who flies on a broom spreading misery with her flying monkeys, or a princess-like woman floating in a bubble waving a wand of joy and happiness? How can we explain the heel tapping of ruby slippers becoming the vehicle with which a girl transports herself and Toto, too back to her black-and-white home and life following the dreadful tornado and her magical trip through Oz? How else do we accept a horse of a different color changing colors before our eyes and how can we watch a land of colorful, tiny people and see it as normal? How can 
we watch Dorothy and the Scarecrow fight with talking trees, then dodge apples being thrown at them? How can we watch a witch's physical form "melt" from a bucket of water? How can we see that the characters of Oz being the same ones who reside in Kansas and accept that all are interchangeable and as real as their counterparts? Simply said, we must suspend all of our pre-conceived ideas and notions and open ourselves up to the unrealistic becoming not just likely, but completely possible.
Much has been written, studied, made up, imagined, created, spelled out, argued and discussed with regard to The Wizard of Oz. Years ago, even a 1973 Pink Floyd album, “Dark Side of the Moon” was said to have some sort of psychedelic connection to it, where you could basically
follow along with the film in eerie songs-to-images similarities. Someone with too much time on his hands noticed that if you start the film and CD of Dark Side of the Moon just as the MGM lion roars the third time, many coincidences occur as the music matches the film in amusing ways. Silly, yes, but also a testament to Oz’s ongoing fascination for young (and old) alike.
In essence, we ALL want to take apart and, like Humpty Dumpty, put back together a story that has come to symbolize different things to different people throughout its existence. I once read a book entitled, The Zen of Oz, Ten Spiritual Lessons from Over the Rainbow by Joey Green. Zen
was not a fictional story. It was not the re-telling of the classic. It was a psychological and sociological study of the lessons in the film and how they pertain to many of humanity’s social and spiritual needs and desires. It was about how we connect on different levels to all that surrounds us in ways similar to the connections found among the cast of characters, in spite of all of them seeking completely different outcomes to their desires and wishes.
A brain, a heart, a home and courage are not foreign to anyone. As human beings, at some point we may all crave these things to make us feel human and make us whole. A difficult test makes you feel like you’ve suddenly lost your brain. A harsh break-up makes you feel like you don’t have a heart and a fight you walked away from may make you feel like you’ve proven yourself a coward. While a long vacation, or relocation makes you homesick and leaves you feeling like you want to go home. The witch wanting to seek revenge for the murder of her sister is a human emotion we know exists. Even the determination to reach a goal – in this case arriving at Emerald City no matter what obstacles cross their path – is characteristic of human beings and their need to achieve what they set out to do. Perhaps it explains some of why Oz never goes out of style.
Even today new takes on the old story have come to fruition – some more successful than others. Elton John had a hit with his song, “Good-bye, Yellow Brick Road,” and HBO had a hit series with the prison drama titled Oz.
Of most recent note, is Gregory Maguire’s 1995 book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. He is a genius writer who, like most fans of the original, wanted to know more 
about the lives of the characters in Oz. Who were these people? What made them become the people they are when Dorothy lands in their midst? What good human qualities can we take from them and what human actions can we condemn them for? Prideful trees who are insulted when their fruit is called rotten and retaliate, a lion who doesn’t pick on someone his own size, a girl who failed to see how good she had it back home. Lessons abound in the merry old land of Oz.
Unlike most Oz re-visitors, Maguire has taken his love of all things Oz and really delved into it, creating another world before Dorothy, where the citizens of Oz co-exist and where good and evil must battle every day for survival. Where childhood traumas explain present-day behaviors and where old rivalries once shared deep friendships. Maguire’s imaginative storytelling became the base for the hugely successful Broadway play entitled simply Wicked. His take on the subject of Oz, like the original, is so out there, yet still we believe. Defying gravity to fly on a broom is just a given, not unlike it is in the film. A witch wanting to be "Popular" among her peers is just like any girl in America right now. Being born green is suddenly an absolute truth, not a scientific improbability.
Is it just human nature to want to believe that allows us to enjoy these otherworldly tales? Would it explain the successes of the film E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial or the TV show The Twilight Zone? Well, what makes good studies is just continuing to find out more, to research and to learn. So Maguire went ahead and wrote Son of a Witch and A Lion Among Men. The 
former is a study of what becomes of someone being born of the Wicked Witch. What kind of stigma is attached to such a person? How does such a person live up to, or down from it? The latter was to get into the mind of the Cowardly Lion, an oxymoronic character who begs for explanation, if just to quench of desire to know why the King of the Forest was such chicken shit.
Still other studies claim that the film had countless symbolic elements that hinted of the battles of their times and that each character or place was a mouthpiece of the Oz puzzle meant to represent such goings-on as de-humanized factory workers, Washington, D.C. upheavals, the fight between North and South, the Democratic, Populist and Republican tugs of war and on and on. I am sure some of that may be true and some grossly exaggerated.
Yet none of the studies, or claims or other unkind fascination impedes my enjoyment of this film over and over again. I still cherish this lasting musical for what its original intention was: to bring good and happy feelings to all who see it and to make you cherish the life you have before you go running to seek the life you think you want.
VHS and DVD and way before HD-TV. I can still bring back the feeling of magical wonderment I experienced as Dorothy walks out of the black and white existence of her little farmhouse in Kansas, into the surreal, colorful, fantastical world of Munchkinland on the outskirts of the Emerald City in the Land of Oz.More so than being simply amazed by the deep hues and pigmentation of early film Technicolor, Oz created an imaginative world of exciting hyperbole and surrealism that allowed you to become immersed in, and wrapped in, the story. What made it unique was the tale’s capacity to lend a kind of believability to its impossible storyline and a sense of factual reality to its well-developed characters. A viewer could suspend disbelief as the life of a simple and potentially real young farm girl in Kansas is woven seamlessly into an unlikely land of caricatures with baseline human characteristics and mannerisms, which quickly made you forget they were not human.
Instead, Oz made it plausible - to the generations who have enjoyed it and those who will in the future – for there to exist a place where all sorts of magic can occur, without anyone batting an eye. But where the human psyche is still only seeking the simplest foundation of life’s gifts and qualities.
The imagery of Oz is unchallenged in its beauty and Crayola-like simplicity. Yet it is still a survivor, rising above hundreds of other celluloid messes and masterpieces that have gone to the wayside of memory. Still Oz remains, year after year, decade after decade, much beloved and continuously embraced.
Even today, people continue to marvel at the film’s many hidden and not so hidden lessons. Folks continue to use lines, phrases and a belief system from it to convey certain feelings. The famous last line of the picture, “There’s no place like home,” appears on home décor pieces, on invitations, cards, notepads, T-shirts, pajamas and mugs. Yet it also materializes in conversations because of its truthful meaning for many people: There is no place like home. Other phrases from the film also permeate our lives in subtle and not so subtle ways. When someone is disoriented at a new place, or with new people different from whom they’re used to, they might utter the line; “I’m not in Kansas anymore.” If you’re joking about getting someone back for something, you might just add in “and your little dog, too,” to place emphasis on your meaning. If you’re lost or trying to find your way, you might say that you’re trying to “follow the yellow brick road”. And at the start of the 1939 MGM classic, a short phrase opens the film and establishes the foundation of the storyline. It states:
“For nearly forty years this story has given faithful service to the Young in Heart; and Time has been powerless to put its kindly philosophy out of fashion. To those of you who have been faithful to it in return...and to the Young in Heart...we dedicate this picture.”
So begins one of the all-time favorite films ever made. It starts at an already pinnacle stage in the humdrum life of Dorothy Gale. The Kansas farm girl seeks more than what is outside her bedroom window. She wants to know what is over the rainbow because, surely, it must be better than what she has right now. It leads to a song and an image so painfully beautiful that you are drawn into both with the first note Dorothy (played by Judy Garland) sings.
Somewhere, over the rainbow, way up high.
There's a land that I heard of Once in a lullaby.
Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blue.
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true…
There's a land that I heard of Once in a lullaby.
Somewhere, over the rainbow, skies are blue.
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true…
The lyrics lay more of the brickwork that will pave the way (in yellow bricks) for the telling of the tale. We have all been young and hopeful and we have all been desperate and disappointed, too. We relate and then we settle in to watch.
How does the possibly real Dorothy go from a plain farm girl, to a girl trying to escape from a dog-hating town woman, to one running from a common Kansas tornado, to one who believes a mysterious drifter with a crystal ball, to finally, being surrounded in Munchkinland by swarms of tiny people with visibly evident personalities, purposes and characteristics (Lullaby League, Lollipop Guild) who praise her for dropping a house on a “bad” witch and introduce her to a “good” witch who will then bring her to the starting point of a yellow brick road that begins her impossible journey and ultimately brings her full-circle back to her farm, her home, her room and her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry.
I remain astonished by the human mind’s capacity to leave fact and plausibility at the threshold and embrace fiction and fantasy in accepting The Wizard of Oz’s many story threads. It is only when we allow ourselves to have faith in the impossible that we are then able to revert back to childhood and both believe in and enjoy the story.
How else can we explain a green woman who flies on a broom spreading misery with her flying monkeys, or a princess-like woman floating in a bubble waving a wand of joy and happiness? How can we explain the heel tapping of ruby slippers becoming the vehicle with which a girl transports herself and Toto, too back to her black-and-white home and life following the dreadful tornado and her magical trip through Oz? How else do we accept a horse of a different color changing colors before our eyes and how can we watch a land of colorful, tiny people and see it as normal? How can 
we watch Dorothy and the Scarecrow fight with talking trees, then dodge apples being thrown at them? How can we watch a witch's physical form "melt" from a bucket of water? How can we see that the characters of Oz being the same ones who reside in Kansas and accept that all are interchangeable and as real as their counterparts? Simply said, we must suspend all of our pre-conceived ideas and notions and open ourselves up to the unrealistic becoming not just likely, but completely possible.Much has been written, studied, made up, imagined, created, spelled out, argued and discussed with regard to The Wizard of Oz. Years ago, even a 1973 Pink Floyd album, “Dark Side of the Moon” was said to have some sort of psychedelic connection to it, where you could basically
follow along with the film in eerie songs-to-images similarities. Someone with too much time on his hands noticed that if you start the film and CD of Dark Side of the Moon just as the MGM lion roars the third time, many coincidences occur as the music matches the film in amusing ways. Silly, yes, but also a testament to Oz’s ongoing fascination for young (and old) alike.In essence, we ALL want to take apart and, like Humpty Dumpty, put back together a story that has come to symbolize different things to different people throughout its existence. I once read a book entitled, The Zen of Oz, Ten Spiritual Lessons from Over the Rainbow by Joey Green. Zen
was not a fictional story. It was not the re-telling of the classic. It was a psychological and sociological study of the lessons in the film and how they pertain to many of humanity’s social and spiritual needs and desires. It was about how we connect on different levels to all that surrounds us in ways similar to the connections found among the cast of characters, in spite of all of them seeking completely different outcomes to their desires and wishes.A brain, a heart, a home and courage are not foreign to anyone. As human beings, at some point we may all crave these things to make us feel human and make us whole. A difficult test makes you feel like you’ve suddenly lost your brain. A harsh break-up makes you feel like you don’t have a heart and a fight you walked away from may make you feel like you’ve proven yourself a coward. While a long vacation, or relocation makes you homesick and leaves you feeling like you want to go home. The witch wanting to seek revenge for the murder of her sister is a human emotion we know exists. Even the determination to reach a goal – in this case arriving at Emerald City no matter what obstacles cross their path – is characteristic of human beings and their need to achieve what they set out to do. Perhaps it explains some of why Oz never goes out of style.
Even today new takes on the old story have come to fruition – some more successful than others. Elton John had a hit with his song, “Good-bye, Yellow Brick Road,” and HBO had a hit series with the prison drama titled Oz.
Of most recent note, is Gregory Maguire’s 1995 book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. He is a genius writer who, like most fans of the original, wanted to know more 
about the lives of the characters in Oz. Who were these people? What made them become the people they are when Dorothy lands in their midst? What good human qualities can we take from them and what human actions can we condemn them for? Prideful trees who are insulted when their fruit is called rotten and retaliate, a lion who doesn’t pick on someone his own size, a girl who failed to see how good she had it back home. Lessons abound in the merry old land of Oz.Unlike most Oz re-visitors, Maguire has taken his love of all things Oz and really delved into it, creating another world before Dorothy, where the citizens of Oz co-exist and where good and evil must battle every day for survival. Where childhood traumas explain present-day behaviors and where old rivalries once shared deep friendships. Maguire’s imaginative storytelling became the base for the hugely successful Broadway play entitled simply Wicked. His take on the subject of Oz, like the original, is so out there, yet still we believe. Defying gravity to fly on a broom is just a given, not unlike it is in the film. A witch wanting to be "Popular" among her peers is just like any girl in America right now. Being born green is suddenly an absolute truth, not a scientific improbability.
Is it just human nature to want to believe that allows us to enjoy these otherworldly tales? Would it explain the successes of the film E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial or the TV show The Twilight Zone? Well, what makes good studies is just continuing to find out more, to research and to learn. So Maguire went ahead and wrote Son of a Witch and A Lion Among Men. The 
former is a study of what becomes of someone being born of the Wicked Witch. What kind of stigma is attached to such a person? How does such a person live up to, or down from it? The latter was to get into the mind of the Cowardly Lion, an oxymoronic character who begs for explanation, if just to quench of desire to know why the King of the Forest was such chicken shit.Still other studies claim that the film had countless symbolic elements that hinted of the battles of their times and that each character or place was a mouthpiece of the Oz puzzle meant to represent such goings-on as de-humanized factory workers, Washington, D.C. upheavals, the fight between North and South, the Democratic, Populist and Republican tugs of war and on and on. I am sure some of that may be true and some grossly exaggerated.
Yet none of the studies, or claims or other unkind fascination impedes my enjoyment of this film over and over again. I still cherish this lasting musical for what its original intention was: to bring good and happy feelings to all who see it and to make you cherish the life you have before you go running to seek the life you think you want.
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