The Wizard of Oz

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Jessy Randall

The 1939 Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) film The Wizard of Oz, based on L. Frank Baum's 1900 book, was hugely influential. Its simple message--that there is no place like home, and that you have the power to achieve what you most desire--had a general appeal to the American public. Starting in 1956, a new generation of American children was annually entranced by the television showing of Dorothy's journey down the Yellow Brick Road.

In the film, after a cyclone carries her to Oz, Dorothy meets the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion, and they set off together for the Emerald City in search of what they most desire: for Dorothy, a home; for the Scarecrow, a brain; for the Tin Woodman, a heart; and for the Cowardly Lion, courage. When they kill the Wicked Witch of the West and go to the Wizard for their promised reward, they discover he is nothing but a humbug. Nevertheless, he supplies them with the symbols of what they already possess--a degree for the Scarecrow, a ticking heart-shaped clock for the Tin Woodman, and a medal for the Cowardly Lion. Glinda the Good Witch helps Dorothy use the magic in the ruby slippers she has been wearing all along to whisk her back to Kansas.

The film was made during the heyday of the studio system and the golden era of MGM. Directed by Victor Fleming (among others), it starred Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Frank Morgan, and Margaret Hamilton. From the beginning, it was a production beset by trouble: cast changes, director changes, injuries, and script rewrites kept cast and crew busy for 23 weeks, the longest shoot in MGM history.

The opening and closing Kansas scenes were filmed in black-and-white, while the Oz scenes were done in sumptuous (and expensive) Technicolor. Dorothy's amazement at entering the world of color mirrored audiences' feelings about the new technology. The importance of wonder did not stop there: Jack Haley (the Tin Woodman) created the breathless, slightly stilted way he and Ray Bolger (as the Scarecrow) would speak to Dorothy. Haley told Victor Fleming, "I want to talk the way I talk when I'm telling a story to my five-year-old son," and Bolger agreed, saying later "I tried to get a sound in my voice that was complete wonderment." Haley, Bolger, and Lahr (the Cowardly Lion) came out of the vaudeville tradition and filled the movie with the kind of jokes and physical humor with which stage audiences were already familiar.

Frank Morgan, as the Wizard, perfectly embodied the harmless-trickster aspects of his character. Margaret Hamilton, as the Wicked Witch of the West, scared many youngsters with her bright green skin and high-pitched cackle. L. Frank Baum, the original author of the story, had wanted to create a fairy tale that eliminated "all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents" of fairy tales, one that "aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heart-aches and nightmares are left out." The Wicked Witch, however, terrorized children in the audience--the scene where Dorothy watches Aunt Em in the crystal ball dissolve into the Witch has been interpreted by psychologists to symbolize the unpleasant fusion of good and bad mother figures.

The film was released in 1939 to receptive audiences, but was overshadowed by the epic Gone with the Wind and did not start to turn a real profit until CBS bought it for television in 1956. From then on, it was shown annually, and by the year 2000 held seven of the places in a list of the top 25 highest-rated movies on network television (no other film held more than one spot.) The aggregate audience from 1956 until the year 2000 was more than one billion people. In 1998, The Wizard of Oz was re-released on the big-screen.

The songs, by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg, were hugely popular from the start. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"--Judy Garland's plaintive song of a place where "the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true"--became a jazz standard in the United States and an anthem of hope in England during World War II. Garland's version remains the most famous, but pop artists as diverse as Willie Nelson, Tori Amos, and Stevie Ray Vaughan recorded covers. After gay icon Garland's death, the rainbow in her song became a gay coat-of-arms.

The Wizard of Oz spawned numerous remakes and sequels, including animated cartoons, a Broadway show, "Oz on Ice," and The Wiz, an all-black, urban revision of the original film, starring Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael Jackson as the Scarecrow. Many films, including Star Wars, David Lynch's Wild at Heart, and John Boorman's Zardoz, contain major allusions to The Wizard of Oz--minor references to it are pervasive in American movies. In literature, dark revisionist fantasies, including Geoff Ryman's Was, a bleak Oz story that incorporates AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), child abuse, and Judy Garland's childhood, and Gregory Maguire's Wicked, an Oz prequel written from the witch's point of view, owe great debts to the film. It was also influential in popular music--Elton John titled an album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Ozzie Osbourne titled one Blizzard of Oz, and Electric Light Orchestra's Eldorado album cover showed a pair of green hands reaching for Dorothy's ruby slippers, with no explanation required.