The Marvelous Land of Oz

[mmcirvin]

I'm currently reading Baum's sequel, The Marvelous Land of Oz..

It's interesting to see the contrast. Land of Oz was published in 1904, four years after Wizard, which had obviously made Baum a huge celebrity, pretty much the J. K. Rowling of his day (and, judging from his dedication, Oz had already been a success on the stage as well). Land has a more sophisticated and knowing prose style, with more puns and wordplay and more use of dramatic irony; it feels written for slightly older children. More time is spent on each incident, which also makes the story somewhat less weird and psychedelic; there's not as much piling up of one crazy three-paragraph adventure after another (though there's still enough weirdness to fill several ordinary books). I wonder how much of this was Baum's development as a writer and how much of it was a reaction to the market.

Leaving out Dorothy and the Wizard was probably a mistake, one that Baum rectified in later volumes.

Comments

[thf2.livejournal.com]

Weirdness? Jumpin' Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, there's a magical castration of the protagonist in the last chapter.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah... one of the reasons I finally sought out the Oz series is that I had heard about that and it sounded terribly strange for a kid's book written in 1904. There was a bargain-basement 1960s movie adaptation of The Land of Oz (http://www.stomptokyo.com/badmoviereport/wonderful-land-of-oz.html) that tried to mute the weirdness of the climactic gender-bending by some added dialogue about how Tip was actually going to depart his body and become a spirit of little boys' adventuresomeness... which just makes it even more creepy, if you think about it for even a moment.

[thf2.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, Baum was already a success before Wizard of Oz; the 1899 "Father Goose, His Book" was a record-setting best-seller.

I don't know if you're reading reprints or e-texts, but the reprints have fascinating illustrations.

Incidentally, Baum didn't turn immediately to Oz sequels; he had a modernized book about a precocious inventor in 1901, and had a series of other fantasy books that he shoehorned into the Oz universe at some point like "Queen Zixi of Ix." It wasn't until 1913 that Baum accepted the idea that he had a cash cow and started churning out Oz books annually. It makes you realize that the contortions Hollywood went through to produce sequels are not at all original to the art of movies.