wonderful wizard

Unlike most people my age... or younger, I don't think I've seen The Wizard of Oz (the movie) the whole way through. It was interesting, then, to read the book and understand the story. Baum apparently avoided writing the Wicked Witch as a haunting character - aiming the story at children, and believing he knew how a children's story should be.

As an important story culturally, I guess I focused on the elements of the story and symbolism that have subsequently pervaded other literature. Each of the characters is on a quest to see the wizard, to gain something about themselves they see as lacking. The Lion's desire for courage and the Tinman's yearning for a heart, I think are done particularly well - the sentiment that courage is to act despite fear, and that to love is to see the world beautifully and to care, come across nicely. Perhaps the only real reservation I have is that the Scarecrow gets a degree as a substitute for a brain... perhaps this idea was less loaded back in the day. By the way, there's an interesting story about the movie: on receiving his degree, Scarecrow decrees "The square of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side" - which is false in all cases. Obviously based on pythag. thrm which concerns right-angle triangles, and the square of the hypotenuse, not the square root... but there's some dispute as to whether this was deliberate, accidental, or just stupid.

The main thing I noticed here was the lack of description - particularly of action sequences. The group are surrounded by hounds, all of a sudden, the Tinman cuts their heads off, the end. Done deliberately to avoid frightening the young children. I remember writing a very similar descriptive passage in my story "The Three Missile Men", which I wrote at the age of 6.

The Wizard of Oz is not a story like The Hobbit, The Little Prince, or even Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, all of which are well crafted, interesting stories in themselves but also hold deeper meanings for adults. Perhaps of this lot, The Little Prince stands above the rest - but I am biased towards that particular book.