I guess I was in an Oz mood lately, since I watched Wicked: For Good a few weeks ago, then found Oz the Great and Powerful last weekend. Now I want to go back to the original books.

I’m in the generation that grew up with the 1939 movie being on TV around Easter every year. We didn’t get a color TV until I was seven, so you can imagine the shock the first time I watched it on a color TV when Dorothy arrived in Oz and everything turned Technicolor. I hadn’t realized that the whole movie wasn’t black-and-white until then. My main memory of watching the movie as a very small child was being afraid of the tornado. I don’t recall being afraid of the witch, but I’d hide during the tornado scene, probably because I’d experienced real tornadoes (though, fortunately, not enough to have been close to more damage than our backyard fence getting clipped while the house remained unharmed).

I started reading the books in elementary school and was surprised and delighted to find that in the books it wasn’t just a dream. Oz was a real place, Dorothy really went there, and she went back, then eventually moved there with her family permanently. This was my first real experience with portal fantasy — though it’s vague as to whether Oz exists in some other realm or if it’s a place on our world that’s hidden and that has its own rules. It does seem to require some magic to get in and out, though it’s also possible to get blown there by winds.

After reading the books, I was less enchanted by the movie, in part because they changed the timeline (the movie made it contemporary while the books were contemporary for the time they were written, in the early 1900s) and largely because of the “it was just a dream” ending, which turned the story into Fake Fantasy, which I hate.

Oddly, I didn’t like Wicked the first time I saw the musical on stage. I tend to dislike stories that make the villain into the real victim and the good guys into the real bad guys. In the Oz stories, the witch really did bad things that hurt people. I read the book and disliked it enough that I sold my copy to a used bookstore. When the musical came back through town, I almost didn’t go (I had season tickets to the musical touring shows series) but went and ended up loving it. I’m not sure what changed my perspective, though it’s possible the cast helped. I recall that Glinda pretty much stopped the show a few times from being so hilarious. I don’t still have that Playbill to see who it was, but I’ve looked up who was in the touring cast at that time, and there’s a good chance that Megan Hilty was playing Glinda then, which would explain it. I ended up buying the cast recording. I treat the musical as being in its own universe and disconnect it from the other versions of the story and then it becomes more about how those who are different get treated like villains and less of a “the villain is the real victim” story. I enjoyed both movies and plan to get them on Blu-Ray if I can find a place that still sells physical media.

As for Oz the Great and Powerful, this is a prequel/origin story that’s entirely different from Wicked’s take, and I’m not sure it entirely works. This one centers the wizard, showing how a carnival conman ended up becoming the Wizard of Oz and also how the Wicked Witch of the West became what she was. The witch part was less successful than the rest of the story, since it boils down to jealousy over a man (ugh).

The other thing that doesn’t really work is the way it doesn’t appear to take place in the 1939 movie universe — which would be difficult because Oz was a dream there, and it would be weird to give a backstory for events that were a dream, plus there’s no indication that the wizard’s adventures are a dream in this movie — and incorporates some elements from the books, but it also contains a lot of nods to the 1939 movie. It does the Kansas in sepia, Oz in color thing, and it has the same actors playing roles in both Kansas and Oz.

That’s the part that broke my brain. The dual roles in the 1939 movie were because of the “it was just a dream” narrative — the “you were there, and you and you.” The idea was that Dorothy put the people from her life into the dream. But if it’s not a dream, there’s no reason for the same people to be in different guises in both Kansas and Oz. The Oz characters represent Kansas characters the wizard let down, and he essentially gets a do-over once he gets to Oz, but they’re different people played by the same actors. With two of them, it’s just the voices with CGI characters, but then there’s the woman who loves him whom he rejects because he doesn’t want to be tied down (there’s a hint that she’ll end up being Dorothy’s mother) who is also Glinda, and he even comments on the resemblance, asking if she’s ever been to Kansas. It’s one of those things that’s a way of winking at the 1939 movie without doing anything that would get into a copyright/trademark issue with that movie (the concept of Oz is fair game because the books are public domain, but anything created specifically for the 1939 is still protected, so no ruby slippers because they were silver in the book and changed for the movie to take advantage of color film). It was something purely for viewers that doesn’t track within the story.

For a totally different take on the Oz story, there was a one-season TV series (now available on Peacock) called Emerald City, which is a modern, rather freaky, somewhat steampunky take on the story. Dorothy is a nurse in modern Kansas (played by Adria Arjona from Andor), Toto is a German shepherd police dog who gets sent to Oz with her because a cop is with her with the tornado hits, the scarecrow is a badly injured amnesiac soldier, and the wizard is trying to control all magic in the realm. It incorporates a lot of book elements, including some from later books, and it can be a bit on the disturbing side of things, but if you’re an Oz completist and like weird fiction, it’s worth a look.