One Wizard Of Oz Movie Decision Changed The Book's Entire Story
by Devin Meenan · /Film"The Wizard of Oz" was one of the first classic movies I ever saw. "Oz" is one of my mother's favorite childhood movies, and she insisted we watch a TV airing of it when I was about six years old. I still remember being initially incensed that I was missing "Power Rangers," only to be swept up and drawn in by the tale of Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland), especially once she got to the colorful land of Oz. In 2023, I got to repay my mom for that memory by taking her to a theatrical screening of the film.
"The Wizard of Oz" will turn 100 before too long, and it will have spent a century as one of the most famous and beloved films in existence. How ironic to know that, when "Oz" was being made, MGM wasn't sure audiences wouldn't buy into the movie's fantasy world. "Oz" was already a popular book series by Frank L. Baum, but reading and seeing are two very different things.
As documented by the Oz museum (appropriately located in Wamego, Kansas), MGM was especially worried about how its movie would look next to Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." That one captivated audiences (even President Franklin D. Roosevelt) with its animated fairy tale world.
MGM worried if "audiences of all ages (not just children) [would] believe in and buy tickets to such a story, featuring actors as opposed to animations?" as the Oz Museum put it. Their compromise, rather than toning down the land of Oz itself, was to suggest that the whole adventure was only Dorothy's dream. No such insinuation was present in Baum's book, where Oz is as real as Kansas.
The Wizard Of Oz movie changes Oz into a dream land
In Frank L. Baum's first "Oz" book, 1900's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," Dorothy still returns home when Glinda the Good Witch prompts her to use her magic shoes (Silver Shoes in the book, rather than Ruby Slippers like in the movie). But rather than waking up in bed, with the famous "and you were there!" dialogue as she looks at the faces surrounding her, Dorothy finds herself in the middle of a prairie and she runs home.
Baked into the "just a dream" conceit is the fact that Dorothy's Kansas home is filled with doppelgangers of the people she meets in Oz. The Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton), for instance, stands in for how Dorothy views Miss Gulch. In "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," there are no such characters.
Moreover, in the books (Baum wrote 14 of them before his death in 1919), Dorothy goes back to Oz many times. There have been a handful of "The Wizard of Oz" movies made since, but no true sequel with the original cast and Judy Garland's Dorothy returning to Oz. Considering MGM wasn't sure if the first one would hit, it makes sense they weren't considering sequels.
This hesitance is similar to that seen in another 1930s Hollywood classic — "Frankenstein." That one opens with a man stepping onto stage, warning audiences that the picture they're about to see is "one of the strangest tales ever told," as if they couldn't accept a dead man coming to life otherwise.
Even today in Hollywood, there's always corporate pressure to not get too strange and potentially lose the audience. Consider, in turn, that this attitude could've cost us "Frankenstein" and "The Wizard of Oz."