Gulch part at the beginning was a creation of the movie.
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The four characters form much more of an ensemble cast in the novel, while the movie is more certainly the Dorothy Gale story, and the Mrs. The book spends a lot more time showing that the Tin Woodman is actually kind, and that the Scarecrow is actually coming up with ideas, and that the Lion is facing his fears, but telling us that they are heartless, brainless and cowardly respectively. The first is some of the character development and the irony. The tornado, the magic slippers, the good witch, the munchkins, the yellow brick road, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly lion, the Wicked Witch and the humbug Wizard, the flying monkeys and the final balloon mishap all come from the book.īut the movie cut out some fun stuff. All of the fantastic world-building found in the movie was in the book first. Librivox has several versions of each novel, so feel free to give a quick listen to each version to pick the volunteer reader you like best before downloading.įrom our vantage point in 2020, it’s hard to separate what a ground-breaking novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was, in part because we’ve had the movie for 80 years.
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If you’d like to read along, many of the books are in the public domain, so ebooks are available for free download at The Gutenberg Index, or in audio at Librivox. I read Ozma of Oz and was charmed with the creativity, the tone, the promise of many more adventures, and began picking up other books as I encountered them. I hadn’t known that the movie was based off of books, nor that there was a vast narrative mythology in prose form. I’d of course seen the movie as a child and received the third Oz book ( Ozma of Oz) from a classmate in grade six. Then the publisher hired Ruth Plumley Thompson to write another 21, and some other writers came later. Baum wasn’t keen on sequels, but the fan mail from kids proved to be a powerful pressure and he ended up writing 14 Oz books before his death in 1919. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, sold 3 million copies by 1956, when it entered the public domain. Canvas for impactful movie villains and the Wicked Witch of the West tops most people’s lists. The movie is so pervasive in culture that we can forget the source novels, though. The 1939 MGM The Wizard of Oz movie is an indelible part of world culture.
Frank Baum’s influence looms large in the pre-Tolkien era. If we were to look at the roots of American fantasy, or even world fantasy, the writer L.