This character may trouble children, who cringe inwardly at the thought of limbs being chopped off and cannot help wondering whether they could still be themselves if their parts were replaced. The philosopher Gareth Matthews, in Philosophy and the Young Child, points especially to the Tin Woodman. He actually helps children learn to think. Subtly and with great charm, he explores in children’s terms the realms of ontology, epistemology, and ethics. One adverb reveals all: “‘From the Land of Oz,’ said Dorothy gravely.”īeyond this-beyond magic, fantasy, and psychological verisimilitude-Baum brings to his pages a plenitude of intellectual puzzles. Aunt Em asks her on the last page where she has come from. But Baum keeps her a little girl from start to finish. Some interpreters pretend she grows up along the way so that, by the end, she comes to accept her dull Kansas home with aplomb. Who can fail to admire her for slapping the roaring lion’s nose while telling him to be ashamed of himself for trying to bite Toto? And for chastising the Wicked Witch who trips her and steals one of her silver shoes? And for steadfastly denouncing the less-than-candid Wizard and calling his bluff? Kind, gentle, honest, and loyal to her friends, Dorothy is endowed with Aristotelian virtue, with genuine heroism. Denslow’s line drawings make her out to be no more than six. Do we know why? Reading it again and trying to recall how turning its pages felt to me years ago as a child growing up in New York, I realized one would need a cloak of invisibility so as to slink past that angel with the flaming sword.īut first: Dorothy, whose shoes, in the pages of Baum’s story, are silver, not ruby-red, appears before us not as a puppet but as a believable child. Denslow), the original masterpiece survives and defies its would-be re-fashioners. Notwithstanding the whirlwind of adaptations, adulterations, dramatizations, spin-offs, ad-ons, pop-ups, memorabilia, and kitsch that have spiraled throughout the century since its original publication by George M. This text-literary, philosophical, and brilliant-merits priority.
#THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ SERIES#
By midsummer this year, the Harry Potter film series will have run its course, and what better way to fill the gap than by taking up Baum’s set of Oz books (this is the first), with its cast of zany characters including a princess who undergoes a sex change and a legion of splendidly garbed humanoids whose limbs end in wheels instead of hands and feet? I disagree with Salman Rushdie’s elevation of the iconic and justly well-loved 1939 film, the Judy Garland one, over the original Baum text.
#THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ MOVIE#
ALTHOUGH DETAILS HAVE NOT yet been released, The Los Angeles Times reported last year that preliminary plans are in the works for an upcoming movie of L.
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