Episode Two: The Scarecrow and Jinjur
Tip and Jack Pumpkinhead leave Mombi and travel south, aiming for the Emerald City for no very good reason. It turns out to be pretty close: they spend a day hiking through the countryside and then come to the main road only nine miles away from the city. This suggests that Mombi lives within about thirty miles of the Emerald City.
This does present a minor inconsistency with one of the later books: Mombi gets the Powder of Life from the magician Dr. Pipt on her grocery-buying expedition, but that's described as only a couple of days. But in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, it takes Ojo and the titular Patchwork Girl half the book to get from Dr. Pipt's remote house in Munchkin Country to the Emerald City. Maybe he moved in the interim.
There is something remarkable about Tip and Jack Pumpkinhead's journey: they don't run across any of the weird little enclaves that infest Oz. No villages inhabited by living oil paintings, no hostile tribes with arms growing out of their noses or whatever.
Of course, since Tip (and Jack) are natives of Oz, this is understandable. They wouldn't be particularly surprised by the Oil-Painting People, and would know to avoid the Nose-Armers. It's only the kids from "civilized" places who get into trouble with minority groups in Oz.
The real explanation, of course, is that Baum was thinking of the stage adaptation. Keep the plot moving, keep the cast small. Land of Oz has a fairly small "ensemble cast" with only a dozen speaking parts.
Unfortunately, what that means is that Tip and Jack spend two whole chapters engaging in what is frankly tedious comic dialog. See, Jack's head is an empty pumpkin, and he's only been animated for a couple of days, so he doesn't know anything. He gets confused about the definitions of words! It's hilarious!
And then, because Jack's wooden joints can't stand the strain, Tip uses the Powder to animate a wooden sawhorse, and he doesn't understand ordinary figures of speech, either! Double the hilarity!
Maybe it played better on stage.
At one point the Sawhorse bolts off with Jack on board, and the wooden horse's supernormal speed and stamina carry the two of them all the way to the Emerald City in just a few minutes, leaving Tip behind. This gives Jack a chapter on his own in which he meets all the Usual Suspects in the Emerald City -- the Guardian of the Gates, the Soldier With the Green Whiskers, Jellia Jamb, and the Scarecrow himself. The Emerald City still has its mandatory green spectacles policy in place, and the Guardian has a heck of a time finding some that will fit on Jack's giant pumpkin head.
Jack's arrival without Tip does set up a genuinely entertaining scene in which he and the Scarecrow meet for the first time. Jack has convinced himself that since he comes from the country of the Gillikins, he must speak a different language from the Scarecrow. Impressed by the logic of this, the Scarecrow agrees, and gets Jellia Jamb to translate between the two of them. She deliberately mis-translates everything the two of them say, and since they can understand each other perfectly the confusion reaches epic levels.
Meanwhile, Tip hurries to catch up with his runaway creations, and bumps into a girl sitting by the roadside. The girl is dressed in a gaudy multicolored uniform, which Baum describes in minute detail. This, it turns out, is Jinjur. General Jinjur -- Oz's first militant feminist. She has an army of girls, all in colorful uniforms and equipped with sharp knitting-needles. They are planning a coup against the Scarecrow.
Despite the fact that L. Frank Baum was himself a fairly outspoken advocate of women's rights, it's hard to see General Jinjur and her Army of Revolt as anything but a satire on the Women's Suffrage movement of his day. The girls want to sieze the Royal Treasury because there's enough money there to buy each soldier in the army "a dozen new gowns" and they want to despoil the Emerald City of its jewels to make themselves rings and necklaces.
Moreover, Jinjur is certain of victory because "What man would oppose a girl, or dare to harm her? And there is not an ugly face in my entire Army."
Of course, the Army of Revolt has another useful purpose: it lets Baum put some colorfully-costumed chorus girls in his stage play. (In some alternate Universe MGM decided to follow up the success of their 1939 movie with a sequel, and let Busby Berkeley direct it.)
The Army of Revolt marches upon the Emerald City, followed by Tip -- "carrying several baskets and wraps and packages which various members of the Army of Revolt had placed in his care." Nope, no satire there.
They quickly win a bloodless victory over the Soldier With the Green Whiskers and the Guardian of the Gates, but Tip manages to ditch his parcels and slip away to warn the Scarecrow. Now the Scarecrow didn't get the job of being King of the Emerald City by being stupid. He really is one of the wisest men in Oz. He quickly works out a plan of escape. The three of them -- Tip, Jack, and His Majesty the Scarecrow -- tie themselves onto the Sawhorse with a clothesline and use his supernatural (superequine?) speed to bust out of the Emerald City and find refuge at the castle of the Tin Woodman.
Jinjur obviously never read Edward Luttwak's useful guide The Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook. If she had, she'd have known that letting the "legitimate" ruler escape to a power base outside her control is a major mistake. Now at some point she's going to have to fight a civil war instead of taking power swiftly and at minimal cost. Should've spent more time planning your tactics and less time designing uniforms, Jinjur.
Continued in Part Three!
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