Just The Caffeine Talking

Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 2

In Chapter Four the scene shifts to a ship caught in a terrible storm. Betsy Bobbin is introduced and falls overboard in one sentence, followed by a thin, sad-faced mule named Hank. Then the ship explodes and sinks (well, it is 1914 . . . ). Betsy and Hank climb onto some floating wreckage. Betsy falls asleep, and when she wakes up the storm has cleared and he makeshift raft is approaching a coastline covered in flowers.

If you read Ozma of Oz, this section may strike you as kind of . . . familiar. In that book, Dorothy is swept overboard from a ship bound for Australia (which does not explode), and floats to safety in a chicken coop, accompanied by the incomparable hen Billina. Turn Dorothy into Betsy and Billina into Hank, and rush through the whole thing as if you're trying to save typewriter ribbons, and you've pretty much got this chapter.

And if you know anything about the stage and early film versions of the Oz stories, you know how often small animals were replaced by larger ones, as hiring some aspiring comic actor like Hal Roach to wear an animal costume was a lot cheaper than getting trained dogs or live donkeys to behave on stage or on camera. So Billina had to become Hank, and since Dorothy has already become a Princess of Oz, she's not going to be cruising around on exploding ships, with or without a mule. Enter Betsy Bobbin.

It would be easy to say that Betsy is just a "re-skinned" Dorothy — she's a little girl from Oklahoma with a devoted animal friend and a tendency to get into dangerous situations in magical lands. But Betsy, while certainly courageous, lacks Dorothy's aura of unstoppability. It's difficult to imagine her tossing a bucket of water at a Wicked Witch, or telling off Princess Langwidere when threatened with decapitation.

Betsy and Hank wash ashore in a pretty countryside, but there is no one around. There is, however, an imposing greenhouse, and the two castaways take a look inside, hoping to find a gardener. Instead they find a bunch of giant Roses (note the Baumian Capital Letters) with the faces of pretty girls. The Roses inform Betsy that she and Hank have arrived in the Rose Kingdom (duh) — and that non-Roses are not allowed in that land.

Now since the Roses are plants growing in pots inside a greenhouse, and don't seem to have hands, you'd think that Betsy and Hank aren't in much peril. But you'd be wrong: enter the Royal Gardener (capitalized). He's a funny little man dressed in rose-colored costume with ribbons in his hair, who repeats the warning that Betsy and Hank must leave — when he isn't having hysterics and falling over at the sound of Hank's bray.

The confrontation with this entirely un-terrifying threat is interrupted by the shattering of the glass roof of the greenhouse as a man falls from the sky. It's not just any man, though, it's the Shaggy Man, with his Love Magnet. Unlike most people who smash through a glass roof (in either direction) the Shaggy Man is quite calm and unhurt. The Royal Gardener immediately demands that the Shaggy Man also leave the Rose Kingdom on pain of death, but Hank kicks the little man outside long enough for the Shaggy Man to inform Betsy of some key points:

1.) The wonderful Land of Oz she has read about in Baum's books is real,

2.) The Shaggy Man is a pal of Ozma et al (evidently Betsy only read the earlier books in the series), and

3.) He's looking for his brother, who disappeared in a mine in Colorado.

The Shaggy Man is convinced that his brother was captured by the Nome King, and has come to the Rose Kingdom looking for a way to find the Metal Monarch. The Gardener insists they must leave, and even the Love Magnet can't dissuade him from his duty, but he does admit that at the moment there isn't actually a Ruler of the Rose Kingdom, because none of the royal Roses in the Royal Garden are ripe yet.

. . . Except that Betsy comes across a Princess who looks ripe, and picks her. But the Roses of the Rose Kingdom insist on a King rather than a Princess, and poor Ozga (the Rose Princess) is obliged to accompany Betsy, Hank, and the Shaggy Man into exile.

It's hard not to notice how "stagy" this whole sequence is. The Roses could be played by chorus girls in costume, the Royal Gardener scenes are full of comic slapstick, and most of the action is conveniently indoors. As usual, Baum even helpfully gives costume details for the speaking parts. Most of Baum's ventures into stage and cinema were financial disasters, and it's kind of a shame to see him constraining his fantasy stories to fit a medium he never really got the hang of.

It's also hard not to notice that Mr. Baum is really blatantly recycling material here. The whole Rose Kingdom sequence is taken almost verbatim from the Mangaboo section of Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. You've got a kingdom of plant people, a political crisis due to a lack of ripe rulers, and the brash outsiders defying the rules to pick a vegetable Princess. There's also the crash-landing of a familiar character which interrupts a tense moment.

Self-plagiarism aside, we can assume that the sentient plants of the Rose Kingdom are related to the Mangaboos — either a closely-related subspecies or a strain cultivated by generations of (non-Rose) Royal Gardeners. Interestingly, it appears that only the Royal Roses are fully humanoid and capable of movement; the other Roses grow in pots. This makes me wonder if the Royal Roses are sort of like the "royalty" of ants and wasps: the mobile, reproduction-capable members of the hive. Perhaps Royal Roses can travel about to cross-pollinate with other Rose colonies.

Anyway, Our Heroes cross over the drawbridge leading out of the Rose Kingdom, now intent on locating the Shaggy Man's brother.

Next time: Even More Characters!

 

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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 1

It has been nearly four years since my last Ozblogging effort, but since Oz is a timeless fairyland we can pick up where we left off as if nothing had happened.

Tik-Tok of Oz (first published in 1914) has a rather complicated history: it's an Oz book based on a stage show written by L. Frank Baum, The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, which in turn was based loosely on the book Ozma of Oz. But over the course of two adaptations Baum made so many changes and threw in so many new story elements that Tik-Tok of Oz has only the faintest resemblance to its grandparent Ozma.

The chapter titles are charmingly alliterative, running from "Ann's Army" through "Tik-Tok Tackles a Tough Task" and "The Jinjin's Just Judgement" all the way to "The Land of Love." It is dedicated to Louis F. Gottschalk, who composed the music for the stage show The Tik Tok Man of Oz, and later was one of Baum's partners in the Oz Film Manufacturing Company. He wrote musical scores for several silent Oz movies made by the Oz company. Louis Ferdinand Gottschalk should not be confused with his more famous uncle Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the New Orleans-born composer who died in 1869.

Our story opens in the tiny mountain valley of Oogaboo, an isolated and quasi-autonomous province of the greater Land of Oz. Oogaboo is ruled by the ambitious and dissatisfied Queen Ann Soforth. She is ambitious because her kingdom has only 89 inhabitants, and is dissatisfied because she has to sweep the floor herself while her younger sister lazes in the hammock out in the yard.

So, in a grimly prophetic move (did I mention the book was published in 1914?) Queen Ann Soforth decides to go forth on a campaign of conquest and plunder. She intends to start by conquering Oz, then the rest of the world, and possibly the Moon as well, if she can figure out how to get there.

Of course, if you're going to conquer the world, you need an army. Ann recruits most of the male population of Oogaboo to be in her expeditionary force. She has to let most of them be generals and colonels in order to persuade them to join, but the equally ambitious and warlike Jo Files agrees to be the sole private in the Army of Oogaboo, so that he can win glory by doing all the fighting.

The imbalance in size between Oz and Oogaboo is offset by Oogaboo's superior military organization: both armies are top-heavy, but Ann actually has a private in her army, while Ozma's own military has none at all. Nattily turned-out in a green unform with gold braid and a purple plume, Queen Ann accompanies her army as it marches forth on a bid for interplanetary domination.

Queen Ann Soforth is of course making one of the classic blunders of grand strategy: convincing herself that the quality of her troops can overcome their numerical disadvantage. This happens over and over throughout history: some leader decides that bushido spirit or Nordic blood or the dialectical forces of history will allow a small army to beat a bigger one. It does sometimes happen, but it seldom lasts. Charles XII of Sweden's army routinely beat much bigger Russian forces during the Great Northern War of 1700. He beat the Russians and Saxons so soundly that eventually he ran out of Swedes and had to go home again.

Of course, even the biggest battalions are pretty much irrelevant given that Oz is defended by the might of Glinda the Good. In this novel her seat of power has inexplicably moved north of the Emerald City, but since the Good Witch of the North has dropped out of Baum's novels since the birthday party in Road to Oz, maybe Glinda has taken over her territory as well.

Glinda, of course, has magical intelligence-gathering systems in place which tell her everything going on anywhere in the world, so she's on top of the Oogaboo situation from the beginning. She uses her space-warping magic to bend the road out of Oogaboo away from the rest of Oz, depositing Queen Ann and her Expeditionary Force in some desolate land beyond the Deadly Desert which guards the kingdom. Glinda is so helpful she doesn't even bother to inform Ozma, the lovely Girl Ruler and her nominal sovereign. In modern parlance, Glinda is a rogue agency.

The Expeditionary Force does manage to acquit itself well in battle against a vaguely dragon-like creature called a Rak, which surrounds itself with a dark cloud of salt-and-pepper scented breath. Private Files blasts it out of the sky with his musket, and the Army of Oogaboo heartlessly ignores the Rak's polite requests to stay around until it recovers and can eat them properly. Cheered by their victory, the Oogabooans make camp.

I don't know if the Rak is Baum's take on the gigantic Roc of middle-eastern folklore, a bird so vast it hunts elephants to feed to its chicks. This one is big enough to lie atop the entire officer corps of Oogaboo, but isn't heavy enough to crush them. It is very polite, though.

Next time: Deja Vu!

 

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Movie Magic

Last weekend the family went out to see Dr. Strange, the latest Marvel Comics movie. This one is the origin story for Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme and master of the mystic arts. It was entertaining and visually wonderful. It did get me thinking (uh-oh) about how magic is depicted in most modern films — and in a lot of modern fantasy fiction and games. "Cinematic magic" has several recognizable features:

• Spells are cast quickly
• Showy visual effects
• Physical effects are immediate and un-ambiguous
• Effectiveness depends on the skill and personal "power" of the magician
• No spiritual cost

This is the magic of Dr. Strange, of Harry Potter, the film incarnations of Gandalf and the White Witch, the witches of Bewitched, and on back past the Wicked Witch of the West all the way to The Magician by Georges Melies. In games this is how characters do magic in Dungeons & Dragons, Fantasy Hero, the World of Darkness, and most other roleplaying systems. And, unsurprisingly, it is how magic works in the hybrid child of tabletop games and cinema, electronic games. You do the spell and stuff happens.

What's interesting about this is how different it is from how magic is described throughout the ages by people who believe it's real. "Real" magic rituals take forever to perform, often involving days of fasting and purification beforehand. They tend to involve a lot of physical apparatus — inscribed charms, ointments, potions, figures, ritual circles and other paraphenalia. In fairness to "real" magicians, they don't have access to post-production visual effects the way moviemakers do, so naturally they need to rely more on stage-dressing and psychological preparation.

While the spell-casting process is a lot more cumbersome and visible than cinematic magic, the effects of "real" magic are often much more subtle. Do this and you will have good fortune, or success in love, or prophetic dreams. Your enemies will get sick or have nightmares. There are exceptions: I've read Greek magical formulas for making corpses talk or to turn yourself invisible. But it's remarkable how few "fireball" spells there are in real books of magic. (This is one distinct difference between the Lord of the Rings films and Tolkein's novel — in the book Gandalf's magic is much more subtle and ambiguous.)

Similarly, while skill and preparation are important in "real" magical operations, there's a lot more randomness and wiggle room. Wizards can always fail, even if they did everything right. (This is a very handy excuse to tell the mark when you're using "real" magic to accomplish the only thing it's really good for: conjuring money from the pockets of gullible people into the hands of magicians.)

One very important element of "real" magic is entirely absent from cinematic sorcery: spirits. Most "real" magic involves summoning spirits, communicating with them, learning from them, and making them do the wizard's bidding. That's how "real" magic generally works: you get a spirit to do something. And by spirits, we mean elemental beings, the souls of dead people, "planetary intelligences," angels . . .

. . . but mostly we mean demons. Which brings me to the final big difference between cinematic sorcery and the stuff real people worried about until they could blame corporations instead: movie magic isn't going to cost your soul. It's morally neutral. Bad people like Voldemort or the Wicked Witch of the West may use spells to cause harm, but it's the causing harm that marks them as evil, not the using spells. Whereas for most of human history, in most cultures, just doing magic is enough to damn you eternally. Even if you might get away with a little harmless "folk magic," the moment you start calling up spirits, you've doomed yourself.

This last points up the common thread of what separates cinematic magic from real magic: it's technological. After all, technological devices tend to work quickly; flip the switch and the light comes on. They have unambiguous effects; pull the trigger and the gun blows a hole in something. They work reliably; click on the Word icon and the application loads (unless you messed up when installing it). And technology (as everyone but a few "Deep Greens" will admit) is morally neutral; the same rocket can launch a weather satellite to save millions of lives from typhoons, or put a warhead on target in an undefended city.

Unsurprisingly, the "technological" style of magic began to appear as the world became more technological. In The Tempest, Shakespeare's Prospero accomplishes all his wonders through the agency of his tame spirit Ariel. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, even the King of the Fairies has to make use of a love potion made from a flower to trick his Queen.

But by the time L. Frank Baum began writing the Oz books, magic had become as mechanistic as a clock or a locomotive. In fact, his amazing final novel, Glinda of Oz, is full of what can only be called magical steampunk technology, with submarines, a domed city that rises and sinks — all of it operated by complex machinery which is powered by magic.

And I think this explains why cinematic magic has completely eclipsed "real" magic, at least in entertainment. The genuine wonders of science and technology left real magic in the dust. Want to fly? You don't have to sign a compact with the Devil and coat yourself in some kind of nasty goop made of nightshade and baby fat; just hop in a plane. Pass the written exam and put in some practice time with an instructor and you can fly it yourself. Looking for buried treasure? You don't have to mess around with stealing corpses and making them tell you where they hid gold, just buy a metal detector (50 bucks at Wal-Mart). Everyone can do magic now.

With technology providing wonders beyond the imaginations of preindustrial wizards, on demand and reasonably-priced, fictional sorcery had to leapfrog ahead, doing things machines can't do (yet), but with the same reliability and moral neutrality people have come to expect. It's notable that "real" magic in the modern world tends to focus on precisely those areas most resistant to technological obsolescence: personal relationships, psychological support, and questions about the soul and the afterlife.

All of which goes to explain why, even though I've written fantasy stories and plan to write more, I call myself a science fiction writer. I know what true magic is: spells that can show me other planets, creatures living inside rocks, and devices to put the power of the Sun at our fingertips. Beat that, Dr. Strange!

Ozblogging: Oz the Great and Powerful Review

I saw Oz: The Great and Powerful earlier this week with my wife and my 10-year-old son. He liked it a lot, we . . . liked it less than he did.

Oz: The Great and Powerful isn't a bad movie. It's a perfectly fun children's movie that adults can enjoy. But I'm afraid that a prequel to The Wizard of Oz needed to be great, and this movie just isn't.

I'm not going to go all Oz purist and complain that Glinda isn't supposed to be the daughter of the King of Oz, or other details about the setting. L. Frank Baum his own self was perfectly content to cut and paste story elements, make up new stuff, and ignore past continuity. I'm not even going to gripe that the story is set in 1905, which means that the Wizard doesn't even get to Oz until five years after Dorothy's been there. We can assume that the film The Wizard of Oz takes place in its release year of 1939 (and handwave the absence of any post-1900 technology as being due to Dust Bowl era poverty on the part of Uncle Henry and Aunt Em), which gives Oz a quarter-century to age from James Franco into Frank Morgan. These aren't huge problems.

No, the three main problems I had with Oz had to do with odd casting, a big hole in the plot, and technology.

First, the cast. James Franco is okay as the Wizard (though I think the film would have been better with a more energetic wiseacre as the lead actor -- someone like Vince Vaughn or even Steve Carrell would have pumped more energy into the role).

But Mila Kunis as Theodora (the not-yet-Wicked Witch of the West) is completely wrong. Physically she's pretty buxom and curvy, which doesn't really fit the bony, almost skeletal look we associate with the Witch. And for some reason she (and the director) chose to underplay everything. She spends the first half of her time in the movie looking like she's got a sinus headache, and the second half looking like she's got a sinus headache in green makeup. Again, a more energetic, over-the-top actress would have helped.

Second, the plot (spoilers here): there's one big hole in the story. In order to give us a story echo of The Wizard of Oz, there's a sequence in which Evanora (the other Wicked Witch) sends Oz off to defeat Glinda, after telling him she's an evil sorceress and the cause of all the kingdom's problems. But since Evanora is the actual wicked one, this makes no sense at all. I could understand if she sent Oz off to some extremely dangerous place hoping to get rid of him, but sending him straight to the one person who can disprove Evanora's story seems pretty poor planning for the arch-villain of the story. 

This may seem like I'm nitpicking, but it's actually pretty significant. Contrast the Wizard's scheme in Wizard of Oz, when he sends Dorothy after the Wicked Witch of the West. He has two problems: a Wicked Witch, and a little girl who can expose his fraudulent nature by asking for help he can't provide. It's pretty callous to send Dorothy after the Witch, but no matter who comes out on top he solves one of his two problems. Evanora's scheme looks the same on paper -- except that Glinda isn't wicked. She's not going to kill Oz if she can possibly help it. Unless Oz is going to snipe at Glinda from long range with a buffalo rifle (which is how I would tackle a powerful sorceress), the odds are good that he's going to learn about Evanora's deception. Evanora should be aware of this.

In other words, the characters are moving around the map because the action setpieces require that they be in certain places, not for any reason that makes sense within the story. That's careless writing.

Finally, the technology: there's too much of it. The movie is jam-packed with eye-popping 3D computer animation. Which means it gets almost tiresome when things keep lunging at the viewer, and the disconnect between the foreground actors and the animated backgrounds is very noticeable. The actors know they're standing in front of a green screen, and it shows. Painted backdrops like those of Wizard would have been more convincing than high-tech super-detailed animation.

Overall, I'd give this movie a gentleman's B+. It's competently made, but never really surprised me or made me wonder what was going to happen next. Younger viewers will enjoy it, but I don't think they'll be enchanted.

Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 5

Beyond the Tottenhot village the team enters some rocky mountains, and immediately start seeing warning signs: "LOOK OUT FOR YOOP" and "BEWARE THE CAPTIVE YOOP." Eventually they come to a huge cage carved into a cliff, in which is imprisoned the ferocious giant  Mr. Yoop. Yoop is fierce and hungry, and longs to eat up Dorothy and Ojo, but one must take note of his dress sense: 

". . . they noticed he was dressed all in pink velvet, with silver buttons and braid. The Giant's boots were of pink leather and had tassels on them and his hat was decorated with an enormous pink ostrich feather, carefully curled." 

He's basically Elton John circa 1978, only he's 21 feet tall and hungry for human flesh. The Scarecrow (of course) comes up with a plan to get past the giant cannibal fashionista, and the travelers pass on into the country of the Hoppers and the Horners. 

I confess I expected the Hoppers and Horners to be another group of randomly hostile freaks, but I guess Mr. Yoop provided enough danger for this part of the story so instead they turn out to be wacky wayside tribes. Both groups live inside the mountain. The Hoppers are monopods who travel by hopping about (which seems like an invitation to disaster if you live in a low-ceilinged cave system). They are currently at war with the Horners, who are plump little people equipped with six-inch horns in the center of their foreheads. Just like Captain Kirk half a century later, Dorothy brings peace to the warring factions with an earnest chat. 

Having accomplished that, the heroes can look for a dark well, and happily the Horners know of one. It's down in the radium mine. What was L. Frank Baum's fascination with radium? Ozma gets a radium crown as a birthday present in The Road to Oz. I guess given how everything in Oz is made of gold and studded with jewels, Baum needed a way to show that something was really rare and valuable.

Since Oz apparently has a good-sized deposit of fissionable material, now I'm thinking about what the Wizard and Glinda would make of it, especially post-1945. (Remember, nobody dies in the fairyland of Oz, so the Wizard will still be around despite having been born circa 1840.) With Glinda's Magic Book and Ozma's Magic Picture to provide the necessary secret intelligence, and with Professor Wogglebug and Tik-Tok to run the project, we can expect Oz to become the first nuclear superpower of Nonestica. That should keep the Nome King in line. It would be particularly entertaining to sprinkle a little of Dr. Pipt's Powder of Life on an Ozian deterrent, so that using it would require a philosophical argument as in John Carpenter's Dark Star.

But I digress. The heroes now have three of the five ingredients, which is good because we're nearly at the end of the book. 

After some trouble with a reversing river, Ojo's posse arrives at the magnificent tin castle of the Tin Woodman, Emperor of the Winkies. The Woodman is of course the key to the fourth ingredient, a drop of oil from a living man's body -- he's alive in a somewhat unconventional way, and has to keep himself carefully oiled to prevent rust. Ojo catches a drop from the Woodman's knee, and that leaves only one item left.

Which the Woodman refuses to give them. The Emperor of the Winkies is of course the most tender-hearted man in Oz and absolutely won't permit them to take the left wing of a yellow butterfly (apparently even butterflies in Oz are immortal, since nobody proposes looking for the wing of a dead one). So he and the travelers all go back to the Emerald City to dump the problem in Ozma's lap. 

Ozma has been monitoring them the whole time, and has ordered the petrified Unc Nunkie and Margolotte brought to her palace, along with Dr. Pipt. She forbids the Crooked Magician from ever working magic again, and then the Wizard of Oz (using a magic spell helpfully provided by Oz's resident deux ex machina, Glinda) un-petrifies the two poor victims without any butterflies at all. Which means all of Ojo's adventures since leaving the Emerald City were just Ozma jerking her friend Dorothy around some more.

Ojo, Unc Nunkie, Scraps, the Woozy, and the Glass Cat are invited to remain in the Emerald City. Ojo realizes that he isn't unlucky after all, and the story comes to an end rather suddenly.

Ojo becomes a fairly regular recurring character in the later Oz books. I think Mr. Baum must have noticed that the Emerald City was getting crowded with little girls, and wanted to balance things out a bit. Unfortunately, Ojo never really develops much of a personality. He's no Tip, that's for sure. Compared with the determined and assertive Dorothy, or the sweetly autocratic Ozma, Ojo's just kind of there. Once the quest to save Unc Nunkie is over, he even loses his forthright contempt for mere laws and becomes just another brave, good-hearted, but ultimately colorless inhabitant of Oz.

Overall, The Patchwork Girl is what I'd describe as a middleweight Oz book. It's entertaining, we get some nice glimpses of magic, and it introduces a couple of interesting characters who will become regular cast members: Scraps and the Glass Cat. The plot is pretty much boilerplate, though: wander around Oz having random encounters until you get to the end of the book, and an entirely superfluous life lesson is learned. As I said, middleweight.

Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 4

Our heroes have a couple of random encounters on their way out of Munchkin country -- a weird spacetime distortion, a giant porcupine, and an illusionary wall -- but with the help of the Shaggy Man they get past all of them. As in Road to Oz, these sequences strongly suggest that Baum was thinking of staging this book as a play. Most of the things that have happened so far in the story are well within the resources of a small-town vaudeville theater. The Woozy could be knocked together by any competent cabinetmaker, the Patchwork Girl would be nothing more than a cool costume and some makeup, and even the giant carnivorous plants could be done with ropes and cloth.

The only element in The Patchwork Girl of Oz which would not be easy to stage -- or to film, either -- would be Bungle, the Glass Cat. Until the development of modern computer-generated animation, it would be almost impossible to make a moving, talking, transparent cat. I expect Mr. Baum planned to switch in a different character for the stage version, just as he replaced the little dog Toto with Dorothy's pet cow for the play The Wizard of Oz.

Once in the territory around the Emerald City, Ojo starts looking for a six-leafed clover, as per instructions, but the Shaggy Man informs him that the law expressly forbids it. Damned EPA. They also run into the Scarecrow and the famous Sawhorse. The Scarecrow and Scraps immediately begin a comic romance, but the Sawhorse and the Woozy start bickering. The Scarecrow is bound on an errand of his own -- getting his painted ear renewed by, of all people, ex-General Jinjur -- so he doesn't join the group, which is good because they'd need their own area code at this rate. 

Just before they reach the Emerald City, Ojo spots a six-leafed clover and picks it at once, despite Ozma's pointless feel-good regulations. However, the regime has eyes everywhere, and as soon as the party reaches the gates of the Emerald City, the Soldier With Green Whiskers summarily arrests Ojo for his crime. He drapes the unlucky Munchkin lad in a hooded white robe with eye-holes (not unlike the garb of Spanish capirotes) and hauls him off to jail.

One generation's absurd humor is another generation's nightmare. When Baum was writing The Patchwork Girl of Oz, the notion of being arrested and jailed for picking a plant was comic nonsense. Modern readers remembering the ocean of blood resulting from 20th Century Utopian schemes may find the whole sequence considerably less funny.

Meanwhile the Shaggy Man and the other guests call upon Dorothy in her rooms at Ozma's palace. They explain the situation, and we have an unexpected development: with Ojo in jail, neither Scraps nor the Glass Cat has much interest in continuing the quest. The cat's heart is a cold ruby, and Scraps has nothing but stuffing in her chest. As the Patchwork Girl herself put it, "A heart must be a great annoyance to one. It makes a person feel sad or sorry or devoted or sympathetic—all of which sensations interfere with one's happiness."

One might call this cod-Objectivism, except that little Alisa Rosenbaum was still in grade school in St. Petersburg at the time this was written. 

It's the Woozy who shows real heroism. "I have never seen those unfortunate people you are speaking of, and yet I am sorry for them, having at times been unfortunate myself. When I was shut up in that forest I longed for some one to help me, and by and by Ojo came and did help me. So I'm willing to help his uncle. I'm only a stupid beast, Dorothy, but I can't help that, and if you'll tell me what to do to help Ojo and his uncle, I'll gladly do it."

Dorothy takes an immediate liking to the beast, as did I upon re-reading this passage.

Ojo's hard time is cut short when Ozma pardons him, though not before hauling him before her royal court and letting him denounce himself for his crimes. (Reading this whole section of the book really does give me the totalitarian creeps. It's all perfectly innocent and well-meaning, but you can see the germ of Stalin and Pol Pot in the heart of Baum's earnest turn-of-the-century Progressivism. It's just too easy to shift from "wouldn't it be nice if everyone did this . . . " to "we must make everyone do this . . . " to finally "we must execute everyone who doesn't do this . . . ")

Anyway. With Ojo rehabilitated and no longer compelled to dress like Robert Byrd, he can resume his quest for the magic ingredients. He still needs a gill of water from a dark well, the left wing of a yellow butterfly, and a drop of oil from the body of a living man.

But now Ojo's got some heavyweights on his team. Dorothy and the Scarecrow are joining the party, although the Glass Cat prefers to remain at Ozma's palace. They stop for a visit with Jack Pumpkinhead, so that the three animated constructs of Oz -- the Scarecrow, Jack, and the Patchwork Girl -- can hold a little private summit and trade wordplay. I have to give L. Frank Baum credit here. He manages to make the three of them distinct characters, despite all having the same basic concept. Jack is naive, the Scarecrow is witty, and Scraps is whimsical. A fool, a joker, and a clown.

Their next encounter is with the Tottenhots, strange little "dusky" people with scarlet hair that stands straight up like wires, who live in pot-shaped houses. They are mischievous almost to the point of sociopathy, and are nocturnal. After tossing the Scarecrow and Scraps around -- which neither one minds very much, as it gives their stuffing a good shaking out -- they eventually agree to let the travelers stay in their houses during the night while they bounce around like six-year-olds dosed with Jolt Cola and amphetamines.

Again, one is struck by how Baum is writing for the stage. Some kid actors or midgets, a little greasepaint, and voila! Tottenhots. The scene just cries out for a musical number and Baum even helpfully provides some lyrics.

"Tottenhots" is of course an anagram of "Hottentots" -- a real-world tribe inhabiting South Africa and Namibia, known to themselves as the Khoikhoi. At the time Baum was writing, they were much in the news, because of the extremely brutal war the Germans were waging against them. Germany had claimed Southwest Africa during the "scramble for Africa" at the Berlin Conference, only to discover that the territory was mostly desert, without much in the way of rubber groves, diamond mines, or even farmland. German settlers preferred Texas and Argentina. The Kaiser's colonial office apparently decided that a massacre-based economy was the best way to develop Southwest Africa, and engaged in bloody campaigns during the early years of the 20th Century. 

It's kind of . . . odd . . . that Baum was able to turn a tribe best known for being on the receiving end of some pretty awful treatment into jolly mischievous little imps. (At this point one can put on some hip waders and start deconstructing the racial whatsit of Baum's whatever, but to heck with that. He probably just thought the name sounded funny.) 

Next time: YOOP!

Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 3

We have a chapter of blatant filler in which the travelers seek advice from a Foolish Owl and a Wise Donkey. The Wise Donkey is apparently an immigrant from one of Baum's other books, and provides the opportunity for some wordplay while the Owl recites nonsense verse. I haven't seen anyone try to claim that the Owl and Donkey are political satires or anything -- in hindsight one could describe Woodrow Wilson as a Foolish Owl, but it sounds like a stretch to me.

The next encounter is a huge stroke of luck for Ojo the Unlucky: he and his companions stumble across a fenced enclosure containing the Woozy -- three hairs from the tail of which are required for the counter-petrification potion. The Woozy (there's only one, apparently) is an entirely square animal. Its head is a cube, its body is a box, and its legs are rectilinear. Fortunately, it's a good-natured beast. Very fortunately, because the Woozy is more or less Superman: it is completely invulnerable, shoots fire from its eyes when annoyed, and can run fast enough to catch bees on the wing. The only thing it can't do is jump.

The Woozy's invulnerable hide turns out to be a problem: when Ojo tries to pluck the three hairs from the tip of its tail (the only hairs the Woozy has, it turns out), he can't do it. Even with Scraps helping and the Woozy gripping a tree trunk, they can't remove the hairs. Finally the Woozy agrees to join the quest, so that they can bring Dr. Pipt the three hairs and the rest of the Woozy they are attached to.

With a new addition to the party, the group now heads for the Emerald City along the famous Yellow Brick Road. Where they are almost immediately snapped up by giant carnivorous plants. Dorothy didn't run into those on her journey. These plants have giant sticky leaves, and catch unwary passers-by by enfolding them. When Ojo is caught, he struggles but can't free himself. 

And now we get one of the more nightmarish lines in Baum's canon: "The minutes passed and became hours. Ojo wondered how long one could live in such a condition and if the leaf would gradually sap his strength and even his life, in order to feed itself. The little Munchkin boy had never heard of any person dying in the Land of Oz, but he knew one could suffer a great deal of pain. His greatest fear at this time was that he would always remain imprisoned in the beautiful leaf and never see the light of day again."

Great. You can't die in the magical fairyland of Oz, but you can suffer an eternity of pain. Somehow that isn't reassuring Fortunately for Ojo et al, they are rescued a short time later by the Shaggy Man, who knows the way to control the deadly plants: music. Whistling or singing makes them give up their captives.

There's some pretty strong foreshadowing here, of another well-known fantasy work. Tolkein fans may recall the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring in which Frodo and his traveling companions are caught by a horrible animated plant -- in their case, the sinister Old Man Willow. And, just like Ojo and his companions, Frodo and the other Hobbits are rescued by a wandering hippie character using music. 

I've always said that Tolkein's Tom Bombadil seems like an L. Frank Baum character who wandered into the middle of the War of the Ring -- but what if the reverse is true? We know Tolkein intended his epic novel as a kind of "secret prehistory" taking place around 4000 B.C. We know the character Tom Bombadil is ageless and (presumably) undying. Was he still wandering around, living in his carefree way, six millennia later? 

It's significant, I think, that the Shaggy Man is never given a name by L. Frank Baum. If he were an ordinary Kansas hobo, presumably he'd have a name. Bill "Shaggy Man" Smith, or Benjamin Briggs, or Ludwig of Bavaria. But he doesn't. Hmmm. And even before he enters the fairyland of Oz the Shaggy Man seems well-acquainted with magic and supernatural goings-on. Hmmm . . .

Anyway, Tom Bombadil or the Shaggy Man rescues Ojo, and offers to accompany the little band to the Emerald City. He takes the opportunity to show off the amazing condensed square meal tablets, invented by Professor Wogglebug. Each one is an entire meal including soup, fish, roast, salad, apple dumplings, ice cream, and chocolate candy.

This is an old gag in science fiction, but this is about the earliest use of the trope I've seen. Interestingly, whenever "food pills" are depicted in fiction, it's always with mockery. It is a fictional trope which exists only as a parody. Apparently writers love to make fun of the ridiculous idea of food pills, but never realize that nobody has ever depicted the idea as anything but ridiculous.

At this point the animated phonograph catches up with Our Heroes once again, and we get a little more music criticism from Baum. The phonograph has a new record to play, a popular song. And what is a popular song?: "One that the feeble-minded can remember the words of and those ignorant of music can whistle or sing. That makes a popular song popular, and the time is coming when it will take the place of all other songs."

Prescient fellow, that L. Frank Baum. 

Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 2

The three heroic questers set off searching for the plot coupons, and discover a problem which the Crooked Magician really should have thought of: none of them has the faintest idea where they're going. Ojo has lived his entire life in a remote cabin in the woods with a man who says about two words per day, the Patchwork Girl is a day old, and the Glass Cat only knows what she's seen and heard around Dr. Pipt's place.

Still, they trot along merrily enough. The Patchwork Girl, in particular, is still just glad to be alive and finds the world a delightful place. As we get to know her, Scraps is a pretty entertaining character. She's relentlessly cheerful, combining a sort of "wise fool" naivete reminiscent of Jack Pumpkinhead with an intellect comparable to the Scarecrow. Her only irritating trait is a habit of bursting out into verse, which mostly serves to indicate that L. Frank Baum wasn't as good a poet as he thought he was.

Scraps is almost an archetype: the artificial person (magical or technological) who is a better person than most people. This kind of character mostly shows up in science fiction: Adam Link, Robby the Robot, and Data the Android are examples. Isaac Asimov used to claim that he invented his "Three Laws of Robotics" as a reaction to the old Frankenstein's Monster trope of the created being which turns on its creator. But L. Frank Baum had already dismantled that trope in children's fantasies half a century earlier! I can't actually think of any "artificial" characters in the Oz books who are villains.

During a meal stop on their trip, the Glass Cat does manage to get in a little transhumanist gloating when she observes that Ojo must have food to stay alive. "Can't you understand that you and I are superior people and not made like these poor humans?" she asks the Patchwork Girl. But Scraps is too busy making puns and rhymes to bother.

Their first encounter with the greater Ozian civilization comes in the shape of Munchkin woodchopper who lives at the edge of the forest. He warns them that magic is a closely-guarded monopoly in Oz, and that Dr. Pipt's unlicensed experiments could mean the Patchwork Girl and the Glass Cat might get arrested if they go to the Emerald City.

The woodcutter also tells them about his old colleague Nick Chopper, whose body was eventually replaced with tin, making him the famous Tin Woodman. Ojo, who is currently traveling with a girl made of cloth and a cat made of glass, finds the idea strange. Despite the woodcutter's kind invitation to spend the night, the three decide to press on.

This leads to an exceedingly weird encounter when night falls: they take refuge in an apparently empty house, which turns out to be inhabited by an invisible presence. The invisible entity gives them beds to sleep in -- but also throws Scraps out of the house when she's impertinent. Unlike most sane people, Ojo doesn't run like hell from this temperamental unseen host. He sleeps through the night in the bed.

In the morning a breakfast appears for him, which he eats. Then he and the Glass Cat set out once more. They find the Patchwork Girl waiting outside. She spent the night looking at the stars and the Moon (which she has never seen before) -- oh, and at the big gray wolf which came to the door three times during the night.

And that is the end of the whole incident! We never find out who or what the invisible presence in the house is, or its connection (if any) to the wolf in the night. Ojo doesn't have to pay any price for eating the magical food, there's no payoff later in the story -- the travelers spend the night in what looks like the premise for a horror story, or at least one of the nastier fairy tales, and then check out in the morning without a hitch. It's as if someone were to stop off in Innsmouth or Hill House and then leave bright and early the next morning.  

Just then Dr. Pipt's animated phonograph catches up with them. The Crooked Magician apparently got sick of hearing it and threatened to smash it up, so the phonograph fled and wants to join the expedition. We get a little music criticism from Mr. Baum here. The phonograph describes its first record as follows: "It is classical music, and is considered the best and most puzzling ever manufactured. You're supposed to like it, whether you do or not, and if you don't, the proper thing is to look as if you did. Understand?"

When that proves unsatisfactory, they try the flip side, a ragtime tune, and that's no better. The three adventurers chase away the phonograph and proceed. I've already mentioned in my account of The Road to Oz that Baum was writing at the dawn of the age of musical reproduction, when music was no longer a rare treat but something one might sometimes wish to avoid. From his treatment of the phonograph I think it's safe to assume that L. Frank Baum was not the kind of man who could put up with other people's taste in music.

Next time: feeling Woozy!

Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 1

At the end of his previous novel, The Emerald City of Oz, L. Frank Baum brought the series to what he thought was its end. Threatened by the possibility of discovery by aeronauts, the kingdom of Oz had been cut off from the rest of the world by a powerful magic spell, and there could be no more bulletins from Dorothy to the Royal Historian of Oz.

Three years later, the Royal Historian needed money. Necessity being the mother of invention, Mr. Baum came up with the brilliant rationalization that even if Oz was sealed off from the rest of the world, he might still be able to communicate via wireless. (Since the Wonderful Wizard of Oz has already established an electrical power system in Oz, there'd be no trouble in putting up a transmitting tower in the Emerald City, and Baum informs us that the Shaggy Man is a skilled Morse operator.) 

All of this handwaving seems completely unnecessary to me. I don't think many of Baum's readers actually believed he was spending his nights sitting at the giant Marconi station on Cape Cod, feverishly transcribing the news from Oz as a wireless operator tuned in on the Shaggy Man's Morse Code transmissions. They knew it was fiction.

With his seventh novel, Baum abandons the formula that had served him so well for all but one of the preceding six. Now that travel between Oz and the outside world is impossible, he can't have some kid from a prairie state just drop in. Instead, Patchwork Girl -- like the second book, The Land of Oz -- is entirely contained within Oz itself. The American characters hardly show up at all.

Our story begins in an extremely remote corner of the Munchkin sector of Oz, where a boy named Ojo the Unlucky and his laconic uncle Unc Nunkie live in extreme poverty. Their only source of food is a bread tree, and that isn't bearing much any more. Ojo's circumstances are very much like Dorothy's back before her adventures began -- orphan, living with uncle, dirt-poor. 

With nothing left to eat, Ojo and Unc Nunkie leave their remote home and head off to impose themselves on their nearest neighbors: Dr. Pipt and his wife Margolotte. Dr. Pipt is a Crooked Magician, and he must be something special because he rates Capitalization. After a meal with Margolotte, Ojo and his uncle look in on Dr. Pipt himself in his workshop. Pipt is fantastically busy making the amazing Powder of Life.

Anyone who remembers The Marvellous Land of Oz may recall that the witch Mombi acquired her Powder of Life from a Crooked Magician, and now, five books later, we finally meet him in person. He isn't crooked in the criminal sense, he's just deformed. Turns out he's also pretty gullible, because apparently Mombi traded him a bogus Powder of Perpetual Youth for his previous run of the Powder of Life.

He's making this batch of Powder so that Margolotte can animate the Patchwork Girl she has made -- a girl sewn of cloth scraps and stuffed with cotton, with yarn for hair and buttons for eyes. Margolotte wants the girl brought to life so she can be a servant and do all the housework, and so she doesn't want to put too much brains into the girl's cotton-stuffed head. Just obedience, amiability, and truthfulness.

But while everyone is distracted by Dr. Pipt finally completing the Powder of Life after six years of labor, Ojo takes the opportunity to dump a whole lot of other powdered intellectual qualities into the Patchwork Girl's head: cleverness, judgement, courage, ingenuity, learning, poesy, and self-reliance. 

It almost seems like Mr. Baum is trying to send us a message here: a girl needs more than servile virtues. His mother-in-law Matilda Joslyn Gage was a leading suffragette of the time, and in his newspaper days Baum had written in favor of votes for women. Maybe in Patchwork Girl he was trying to make up for his lampoon of the women's movement in Land of Oz. 

The Powder of Life has to cool overnight, and to while away the time Dr. Pipt brags about some of his other magical marvels, including the Liquid of Petrification, which turns anything it touches into stone.

We're also introduced to one of Dr. Pipt's less successful creations: Bungle the Glass Cat. She's a cat made of glass, animated by the Powder of Life. She's entirely glass, except for some pink marbles which serve as brains, and a ruby which serves as her heart. Because she doesn't need to eat (being made of glass) and has a cold jewel for a heart, Bungle is vain, selfish, and lazy. In short, she acts just like a live cat, except that she also spends a lot of time mouthing off to Dr. Pipt.

In the morning, to the accompaniment of some music from Dr. Pipt's phonograph, the great experiment goes ahead: Pipt pours the Powder of Life onto the Patchwork Girl. Sadly there's no Jacob's Ladder or Tesla coil buzzing away in the background, and Dr. Pipt resists the urge to shout "She's alive!" but the Powder does its work and the Patchwork Girl springs to life.

In fact, she's a little too lively: her arm jerks as soon as the Powder is applied, causing Unc Nunkie and Margolotte to flinch back and knock the Liquid of Petrification off the shelf onto them both. The two of them are instantly turned to stone!

Worse yet, all the remaining Powder of Life has been spilled on the phonograph, so that poor Dr. Pipt has an animated record player and a live Patchwork Girl, but his wife and closest neighbor are stuck as statues.

Making a new batch of Powder of Life will take the Crooked Magician another six years of constant work, but he does know of a compound which will reverse the effects of the Liquid of Petrification, and that takes considerably less time to make. However, the antidote does need several hard-to-find ingredients: a six-leaved clover from the fields around the Emerald City, the left wing of a yellow butterfly from Winkie Country, a gill of water from a dark well (which must never have been touched by light), three hairs from the tip of a Woozy's tail, and a drop of oil from a live man's body.

Dr. Pipt assigns the task of gathering the ingredients to Ojo the Unlucky. Ojo can scour Oz for them while the Crooked Magician gets started on a new batch of the Powder of Life. He sends the Patchwork Girl along with Ojo, and the Glass Cat insists on joining them.

And so our three adventurers set out on their quest while the magician heaves a big sigh and starts another six-year course of work.

Mr. Diggs Goes to the Movies

I don't normally say "Squee!" about upcoming movies. As an adult my most frequent emotion upon leaving the theater has been disappointment, which means that about the highest pitch of enthusiasm I can work up for something I haven't seen yet is "guardedly optimistic."

Well, I'll confess to being as guardedly optimistic as a fourteen-year-old girl in line for a rock concert about one upcoming movie: Sam Raimi's Oz: the Great and Powerful.

According to the description here, it's the story of how two-bit showman Oscar Diggs accidentally voyages to Oz and uses his flim-flam skills to thwart the Wicked Witches and bring stability to the land.

I've been waiting for someone to tell this story since I first read Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz when I was about eight years old! Sure, Raimi probably won't make Diggs an intrepid Secret Service agent sent by President Hayes to thwart the schemes of Bismarck and the Tsar. One can't have everything. But the images look good and it seems blessedly free of "darker and edgier" nonsense.

The movie's scheduled to come out next spring. Until then: a guardedly optimistic "Squee!"