The following is a written essay about The Wizard of Oz (1939), it’s original text, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and Thomas Leitch’s Between Adaptation and Allusion. This essay is about the practise of adaptation itself and the modes used in adapting works between media.
To those who have been faithful
Jake Kenner
The 1939 classic, “The Wizard of Oz” is celebrated the world over as a cinematic classic for the generations. To this day it is still regarded as a cinematic masterpiece for it’s archetypal characters and classic form. The original text, L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” is neither as widely celebrated or regarded in a similar esteem as the film at least from a modern audience’s perspective. Many audience members watching the film today would not even know of the original text’s existence were it not for the opening titles of the film. Yet, the text, when reconstructed for the post-depression audience on the brink of World War, completely changes, not only the dialog and written action but the message of the text itself. The film opens with it’s own 15 second heartfelt homage to the book and dedicates itself “To those of [us] who have been faithful to it in return”[1]. Though the film is hardly even close to faithful with many characters, we, the modern audience, would say are intrinsic to the plot of the film, reduced to a mere few chapters. Within Thomas Leitch’s modes of adaptation, the film is most certainly a significant adjustment, having not only added several elements, but also taken away other elements. The reason the original text and the movie combined have lasted the test of over a century is due to the fact that the filmmakers were so successful in creating an adaptation that transcends the original and is more societally relevant.
On the brink of the Second World War, America, and subsequently the world, was in a state of depression and the world was bracing itself for Germany’s next move. Even many of Hollywood’s stars and figures including Bert Lahr (The Cowardly Lion) had migrated from Germany to escape persecution. The landscape of the time influenced the story in probably the most provocative way. Thomas Leitch suggests that when a text is rewritten to fit within a different dominant social value system or a different social discourse around which the film must be adapted to exist within, the text is updated[2], though I am hesitant to place The Wizard of Oz within the update model because the changes made to the story do not simply make its implications more relevant for that audience but completely change the meaning of the story itself. Arguably, due to the impending sense of oncoming conflict and the fact that most people alive during the film’s creation had already experienced one war and the recent recession, the land of Oz is explained away as merely a dream with the addition of the “no place like home” message and the blatantly discordant “it’s that – if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own back yard.” In Baum’s book the land of Oz was a very real, literal place Dorothy is transported to and this land is not a negative place from which Dorothy wants to escape from, in fact she never even wanted to leave Kansas at all in the original text. The movie’s adjustment suggests to the children of the Second World War that their dreams of a life beyond the poverty stricken landscape of the late thirties, to perhaps “A place where there isn’t any trouble,” is merely a fantasy, and not only that, but everything they wanted is right where they already are. The adjustment isn’t merely a subtle update, it is a complete reworking of the text’s meaning and thus is a substantial adjustment.
That being said, I would also not place the text within the imitation mode, because so many of the characters do retain their identities from the original text, specifically the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion; characters that are very much an important part of the film. A key difference here is that the backstories of the characters are almost completely absent from the film and the characters are more literally as their names suggest (the lion on all fours that carries Dorothy on his back through the book that becomes the upright, vaudevillian Bert Lahr in the film).[3] Similarly, a substantial adjustment to the original text was the famous ruby slippers, which were in fact silver in the original text. According to the National Museum of American History the reason for the change was that the shoes of course played better on camera against the background Yellow Brick Road. [4] After watching the film, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz does begin to seem quite bizarre. In the book, the quartet of travellers must wear special green-tinted glasses before entering the Emerald City, the city is in fact only green because of the glasses. After reading the original text, it becomes increasingly apparent that the filmmakers significantly tampered with the original text, though it is important to keep in mind that at the time the film was created, over seven decades ago, the book was already forty years old.
Similarly, the film is not merely a revision of the original text, with the various bizarre events of the book including a Little Old Witch of the North and The Queen of the Field Mice simply omitted. The film adds other elements to the book and does not represent a streamlined original but a re-written whole. The characters of Zeke, Hunk and Hickory that appear at the beginning of the film, and later as the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Lion. The characters and even the quintessential “Somewhere over the Rainbow” are all additions to the book written for the screen. The film does not transpose elements of the original text through a child-proof filter either, though the explicit violence of the original book (The Wizard asks Dorothy to “Kill” the witch as opposed to just bringing him her broomstick) doesn’t quite exist in the film, the books Wicked Witch of the West and Winkie Guard minions are not nearly as intimidating and scary as they end up being in the film adaptation. The original poppy fields of the book are also similarly not set as a trap by the Witch but in fact just a characteristic of the poppy field itself.
The characters in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, though substantially simplified, are still reminiscent of the original text, and as many of them are created for the screen version they are not strictly revisions or updates but adjustments of the original novel. As L. Frank Baum wrote the text in a vastly different time period, the meaning of the film itself and it’s over-arching message changes substantially between the original adaptation, and thus, the themes, dialog and even genre are adjusted to match. Throughout the film, it becomes extremely clear that the filmmakers themselves are anything but faithful despite their worship of the original text.
[1] “The Wizard of Oz” (1939) – Metro Goldwin Meyer
[2] “Between Adaptation and Allusion” (Chapter Five) – Thomas Leitch
[3] “No ruby slippers? No Miss Gulch? How ‘Wizard of Oz’ movie differs from book” – The Kansas City Star (August 24th, 2014)
[4] “8 Differences Between the Wizard of OZ Movie and Book” – HubPages (http://hubpages.com/literature/8-Differences-Between-the-Wizard-of-OZ-Movie-and-Book)