Episode VI: The Long Slog Home
In the movie, once the Wizard is off the scene, Glinda the Good drops down out of the fly gallery to send Dorothy home and wrap everything up in the last five minutes. In the book we still have six chapters to go.
Dorothy and her three companions set out on yet another road trip, to see Glinda the Good in her stronghold in Quadling Country to the south. There's yet more friction along the way, because apparently the Good Witch of the South has mysteriously made her realm as inaccessible as the Wicked Witch of the West did hers. Hmmm.
Along the way the heroes have to deal with Fighting Trees (who showed up in the movie in the form of the hostile apple trees), and the Dainty China Country. The Dainty China Country is one of the odd enclaves which practically carpet the landscape of Oz. It's inhabited by living, intelligent china figurines, who understandably spend their lives in terror of getting broken. It's implied that all china figures in the world come from the Dainty China Country, but when they leave the land of Oz they stiffen into a hideous living death state, helpless and unable to move. So when you played ball in Auntie's parlor and broke a Dresden shepherdess, you were guilty of murder.
The Winkies invited the Tin Woodman to become their Emperor after the death of the Wicked Witch, and the Wizard put the Scarecrow in charge when he left the Emerald City. Now it's the Lion's turn to gain political power. The creatures of the forest are oppressed and terrified by a giant spider, so the Lion kills the beast in less than a page, and is crowned King of Beasts by the other animals. Presumably when Jon Peters makes his big-budget Oz remake, this will be the centerpiece of the film.
After that, they have to get past the Hammerheads -- weird little armless guys with extensible necks who hit passers-by with their heads out of sheer motiveless hostility. Communities like the Dainty China Country and the Hammerheads are a favorite device of Baum's in all the Oz books, as we'll see. Whenever he needs to bulk out a chapter, his characters encounter yet another strange isolated enclave inhabited by animated household items, talking animals, or randomly hostile freaks.
Once Dorothy and the others wade through the padding, they come to the castle of Glinda. She bums the Golden Cap off of Dorothy and uses it to send the Scarecrow, Woodman, and Lion off to their new kingdoms via Winged Monkey express. Then Glinda tells Dorothy about the Silver Shoes, and off the little girl goes to Kansas and the end of the book.
This is the problem I alluded to way back in Part One: the last six chaptes of the book are a thundering anticlimax. No amount of giant spiders, Hammerheads, or Fighting Trees can match the Wicked Witch for menace, or the stunning revelation of the Wizard's true nature. It becomes just another plod through Oz. That's why the moviemakers wisely decided to just drop this whole section, and combined Glinda with the Good Witch of the North in order to streamline the story. Only nitpickers like myself seem to be bothered by the logical inconsistency it creates.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a big hit. The novel was a best-seller, and L. Frank Baum immediately penned a stage adaptation, which was also a huge success. It opened in Chicago, ran nearly a year on Broadway, and toured for several years after that. Nitpickers and book purists like myself should note that in the play Dorothy was not accompanied by Toto but instead by her cow. The reason presumably being that trained dogs are expensive, but a touring theater company can easily afford a two-man cow suit. We should be thankful the moviemakers didn't follow the stage version.
And of course Baum also started work on a sequel, which we'll start blogging in a couple of weeks.
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