One think I didn't realize until my daughter and I read the book together: in the book there were two good witches, the witch of the North (the first one Dorothy meets after landing on the witch of the East), and the witch of the South (the one that tells her she can use the shoes to get home). The movie combined the two characters. Then they had to come up with a reason why the good witch didn't immediately tell Dorothy to click her heels together and go home. In the book, only the Witch of the South knew this.
Also interesting are the jokes that were removed and added.
The Lion gets his courage from a bottle in the original (the joke being a reference to a common joke at the time that some people get their courage from a bottle of liquor) But 1939 was so close to the prohibition fiasco, it seems the producers did not like this joke.
Likewise, the scene in the field of (presumably opium) poppies that put everyone to sleep was only added in 1939. It's hard to imagine that joke being added in, say, the time of height of the war on drugs: could Bart Simpson play with opium poppies and pass out to audience laughter 1980's?
"The Simpsons" are a bad example for your point, I think. I've been watching episodes again and they often put the kids in morally questionable scenarios (much to my laughter). Lisa got drunk at Duff Land (a theme park devoted to beer), for example.
Funny TV Guide description: “Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
I sometimes wonder if those TV Guide descriptions were intentionally funny and deranged like that because they had such little space to summarize an entire movie. The TV Guide description for the 1985 Cher / Eric Stoltz movie MASK was "A teenage boy has a wild mom and a misshapen face."
I suspect for most of this, they were just trying to be funny or weird rather than intending this symbolism/meaning to come across to the audience.
One of my economics textbooks contained an explanation of the theory that the yellow brick road was a reference to monetary policy (gold standard), but that theory seems to have been heavily challenged (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_T...).
Why would you suspect that, when so many of the metaphors are so very blatant? When people create things, they usually put thought into them and meaning doesn't generally happen by accident.
L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. … [O]ne of the main constituencies for the movement was debtors: particularly, Midwestern farm families such as Dorothy’s, who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1890s. According to the Populist reading, the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers (promoters of and benefactors from the tight money supply), the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman [sic] was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene). The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard presumably speak for themselves. “Oz” is of course the standard abbreviation for “ounce.”
> The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold.
This is more "crackpot theory" than "widely recognized".
> the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman [sic] was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene)
This, on the other hand, doesn't even meet that standard. If you read the book, the joke about those three characters is very clear -- the Scarecrow is the intelligent one, who solves all the problems the group encounters. The Tin Woodman is the empathetic one, who constantly worries about inadvertently harming anything else. And the Cowardly Lion is the brave one, always volunteering to put himself at risk for the benefit of the group. It's a major theme of the novel that they all already have the things they claim to need.
>Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.
> Thomas A. Bailey once suggested that we set up a computer network to keep track of misinformation that has been corrected--sort of a national clearinghouse for discredited myths. Is it time to move Littlefield to the computer trashpile of misinformation? Given the mounting evidence against it--given that Littlefield himself has admitted that it has "no basis in fact"--should we forget the whole notion of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a parable on Populism? That would be a big mistake. Perhaps we can no longer say that Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz "as an allegory of the silver movement," but we can still read it as an allegory of the silver movement--or, as Henry Littlefield noted just two years ago, "we can bring our own symbolism to it." Recent scholarship might have taken away Baum's intent, but the images are still there, vivid as ever.
If anyone hasn't read the book... It seriously is one of the best kids books ever written. It's short. You can read it in like 2 hours or less. It will take you right back to childhood. 100% worth it. Cannot recommend it enough.
If you follow up this claim even very superficially you'll find it's not really 'widely recognized' but rather the oft-mentioned, curious theory of one person.
People then seemed to realize the danger of fiat money, yet The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states -- and it passed on a simple majority of those present vote. The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the US Government) seized control of the US monetary system and their policy of deliberate inflation has eroded purchasing power 97+% (50% reduction since just 1970!). Even though the constitution still describes the value of a dollar as a specific weight of gold, like most other things in that document it is ignored.
Private ownership of gold was decreed to be illegal just 20 years later -- Presidental Executive Order 6102, signed on April 5, 1933, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States" was designed to prevent an internation run on our (drastically less valuable) dollar. Silver was removed from the coin in 1965, completing the transition to fiat money.
President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold Standard. He was assassinated soon after. His Vice President, who assumed the Presidency, wasn't so foolish as to express support for that idea.
Now it seems to be a spending free-for-all, as if there is no concern whatsoever for the peril that debt (national or private) presents.
What a dangerous time we live in. "Ignore that man behind the curtain!" Who, then, was Glenda, the Good Witch meant to represent?
Mocking people in power is a time-honored tradition. It's not even really all that subversive: they were playing with well-worn, easily recognizable tropes. It's all part of the film's pretty conventional message: believe in yourself.
This kind of thing is why I love that JRR Tolkien spent a whole introduction page lambasting people who read too much into symbolism in books and stating explicitly that Lord of the Rings was written as an exercise in long-form storytelling with no hidden meaning.
That just sounds like a (very) elaborate troll. Write a three part book stuffed full of symbolism and then write an essay complaining how people read into the symbolism.
And surely what the reader sees in a work is at least as valid as what the author intended. If I see Mordor as Stalinist Russia, isnt that my prerogative? Its selling the art form short if the only possible interpretation is the authors own. /rant (against a dead guy)
I've heard that the Cowardly Lion was played according to pretty much every gay stereotype of the day. That seems to fit the thesis of this article very well.
I’ve always meant to go through and read the entire Oz series by Baum. I’ve heard that it’s surprisingly enjoyable from start to finish, given the number of books.
I've read them all but it's been years. I want to go back to them. They are great books. Silly, goofy, and weird but very enjoyable. The world of Oz books is surprisingly complicated[1] but I would say the original series penned by Baum is definitely worth checking out.
It also gets pretty macabre in parts. Specifically The Tin-Woodsman of Oz where the title character wonders whatever happened to the girl that was the reason he was cursed. You see, he fell in love with a girl who was enslaved to a witch, so the witch enchanted his axe to chop parts of him off every time he swung it. Eventually, there was nothing left but the tin replacements.
And if that isn't enough, it is established that nothing in Oz ever dies. Including all his chopped off parts...
I love the Oz books growing up. I tried to read the 2nd one The Marvelous Land of Oz to my then young daughter after we'd watched the movie, but Old Mombi turned out to be bit to hard core.
Planning to turn Tip into a statue and the threat of beating him black and blue made it a non-starter.
A detail of history connected to The Wizard of Oz that I particularly like, is that when the US Navy heard about 'Friends of Dorothy', they set up an investigation to try and catch Dorothy, to find out what she knew about gays in the military. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend_of_Dorothy#Military_inv...
I've read the comments and wanted to write another, but then remembered that a smarter man had written a better one already.
> “I don't understand this at all. I don't understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics... culture... history... aren't those natural ingredients in any story, if it's told well? I mean...' [...] 'I mean... can't you guys just let a story be a story?”
One realization I had about the movie: the witch writes a message to Oz to send Dorothy. He immediately tricks her into going there; presumably to her death.
the book series is interesting. one of the main characters (Ozma, the queen of oz) spends her childhood as a boy and then is transformed back to a girl.
The real hidden promise is the promise of a portal (rabbit hole) that will turn your normal grey daily life into technicolor, and that you can bring what you find through this portal back to enrich your own little house in the prairie.
[+] [-] not2b|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinator|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomMckenny|6 years ago|reply
The Lion gets his courage from a bottle in the original (the joke being a reference to a common joke at the time that some people get their courage from a bottle of liquor) But 1939 was so close to the prohibition fiasco, it seems the producers did not like this joke.
Likewise, the scene in the field of (presumably opium) poppies that put everyone to sleep was only added in 1939. It's hard to imagine that joke being added in, say, the time of height of the war on drugs: could Bart Simpson play with opium poppies and pass out to audience laughter 1980's?
[+] [-] byproxy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuaheard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joegahona|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nitwit005|6 years ago|reply
One of my economics textbooks contained an explanation of the theory that the yellow brick road was a reference to monetary policy (gold standard), but that theory seems to have been heavily challenged (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_T...).
[+] [-] jihadjihad|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chasontherobot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feedbeef|6 years ago|reply
Bill Still: The Secret of Oz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swkq2E8mswI
[+] [-] rabidrat|6 years ago|reply
L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which appeared in 1900, is widely recognized to be a parable for the Populist campaign of William Jennings Bryan, who twice ran for president on the Free Silver platform – vowing to replace the gold standard with a bimetallic system that would allow the free creation of silver money alongside gold. … [O]ne of the main constituencies for the movement was debtors: particularly, Midwestern farm families such as Dorothy’s, who had been facing a massive wave of foreclosures during the severe recession of the 1890s. According to the Populist reading, the Wicked Witches of the East and West represent the East and West Coast bankers (promoters of and benefactors from the tight money supply), the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman [sic] was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene). The yellow brick road, silver slippers, emerald city, and hapless Wizard presumably speak for themselves. “Oz” is of course the standard abbreviation for “ounce.”
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|6 years ago|reply
This is more "crackpot theory" than "widely recognized".
> the Scarecrow represented the farmers (who didn’t have the brains to avoid the debt trap), the Tin Woodsman [sic] was the industrial proletariat (who didn’t have the heart to act in solidarity with the farmers), the Cowardly Lion represented the political class (who didn’t have the courage to intervene)
This, on the other hand, doesn't even meet that standard. If you read the book, the joke about those three characters is very clear -- the Scarecrow is the intelligent one, who solves all the problems the group encounters. The Tin Woodman is the empathetic one, who constantly worries about inadvertently harming anything else. And the Cowardly Lion is the brave one, always volunteering to put himself at risk for the benefit of the group. It's a major theme of the novel that they all already have the things they claim to need.
[+] [-] SilasX|6 years ago|reply
>Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages.
https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/02/gabriel-rosser-on-dav...
[+] [-] msla|6 years ago|reply
http://www.halcyon.com/piglet/Populism.htm
I'll just quote a bit from the end:
> Thomas A. Bailey once suggested that we set up a computer network to keep track of misinformation that has been corrected--sort of a national clearinghouse for discredited myths. Is it time to move Littlefield to the computer trashpile of misinformation? Given the mounting evidence against it--given that Littlefield himself has admitted that it has "no basis in fact"--should we forget the whole notion of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a parable on Populism? That would be a big mistake. Perhaps we can no longer say that Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz "as an allegory of the silver movement," but we can still read it as an allegory of the silver movement--or, as Henry Littlefield noted just two years ago, "we can bring our own symbolism to it." Recent scholarship might have taken away Baum's intent, but the images are still there, vivid as ever.
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjkennedy98|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peteey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EGreg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] samstave|6 years ago|reply
Its so sad how few people are aware of this and the fact that we were FUCKED when 1913 Fed Reserve happened....
and after the fact Woodrow Wilson the scumbag wrote a letter regretting the decision and signing of the act.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act
[+] [-] jackhack|6 years ago|reply
People then seemed to realize the danger of fiat money, yet The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states -- and it passed on a simple majority of those present vote. The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the US Government) seized control of the US monetary system and their policy of deliberate inflation has eroded purchasing power 97+% (50% reduction since just 1970!). Even though the constitution still describes the value of a dollar as a specific weight of gold, like most other things in that document it is ignored.
Private ownership of gold was decreed to be illegal just 20 years later -- Presidental Executive Order 6102, signed on April 5, 1933, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt "forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States" was designed to prevent an internation run on our (drastically less valuable) dollar. Silver was removed from the coin in 1965, completing the transition to fiat money.
President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold Standard. He was assassinated soon after. His Vice President, who assumed the Presidency, wasn't so foolish as to express support for that idea.
Now it seems to be a spending free-for-all, as if there is no concern whatsoever for the peril that debt (national or private) presents.
What a dangerous time we live in. "Ignore that man behind the curtain!" Who, then, was Glenda, the Good Witch meant to represent?
[+] [-] jfengel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Causality1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benj111|6 years ago|reply
And surely what the reader sees in a work is at least as valid as what the author intended. If I see Mordor as Stalinist Russia, isnt that my prerogative? Its selling the art form short if the only possible interpretation is the authors own. /rant (against a dead guy)
[+] [-] decebalus1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joker3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krustyburger|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mttjj|6 years ago|reply
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books
[+] [-] rmidthun|6 years ago|reply
And if that isn't enough, it is established that nothing in Oz ever dies. Including all his chopped off parts...
[+] [-] ourmandave|6 years ago|reply
Planning to turn Tip into a statue and the threat of beating him black and blue made it a non-starter.
[+] [-] pronoiac|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dekhn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inflatableDodo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timw4mail|6 years ago|reply
Reading into the story like this ruins the escapism.
[+] [-] drdaeman|6 years ago|reply
> “I don't understand this at all. I don't understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics... culture... history... aren't those natural ingredients in any story, if it's told well? I mean...' [...] 'I mean... can't you guys just let a story be a story?”
> - Stephen King, "It"
[+] [-] danzig13|6 years ago|reply
Not a very good man.
[+] [-] dekhn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noja|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anotherevan|6 years ago|reply
https://www.peterdavid.net/2002/07/25/bid-3-pay-no-attention...
[+] [-] chengiz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asabjorn|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousiam|6 years ago|reply
Funny how BBC's view remains true whether it's 2019 or 2009.