I think I just fell off the cliff

[mmcirvin]

I'm now reading The Road to Oz, the fifth Oz book.

Kibo warned me that the Oz books suffer a serious decline in quality at some point, after which Baum is clearly just cranking the things out for the cash and not trying very hard. There are a couple of volumes yet before he switches to a yearly schedule... but I think I just hit the downslope. He's coasting at this point.

I'm almost halfway through Road. Dorothy's teamed up with some creepy old vagrant who has a Love Magnet that makes everyone love him, and an extremely stupid and annoying little kid. The Love Magnet means that none of the adventures they have could possibly be interesting unless the vagrant turns out to be evil, and that possibility is just generating an unpleasant subtext that I suspect wasn't intended.

So, by Oz standards, almost nothing has happened. They've visited a town of foxes who magically gave the kid a fox head out of mistaken generosity, and a town of donkeys who, in exactly the same manner, magically gave the vagrant a donkey head out of mistaken generosity. And now they're talking to a guy who involuntarily makes annoying music. In Wizard all this would have happened in about two pages and they'd be on to something else.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, and there's Polychrome, the Rainbow's Daughter, who is so unfascinating that I forgot about her.

[samantha2074.livejournal.com]

When I was a little girl, I desperately wanted a shimmering rainbow-colored dress like Polychrome. Hell, I wouldn't say no to one today.

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

meee toooo!
or Ozma right after transformation, in all the layers of gauze. or the map-like dresses of the invaders with knitting needles in their hair.

Now it's picking up a little

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, OK, now they're in some danger. The two-faced Scoodlers love the Shaggy Man... for SOUP.

That might blow my theory about Road being an answer to somebody's complaint about the really rather unsettling level of violence in Dorothy and the Wizard, where everywhere the protagonists went inside the earth, they had to kill somebody to survive. (The country with invisible bears that can be escaped only by walking on water was a really dead-on evocation of ritualistic little-kid fears; and the country of the wooden Gargoyles would make an absolutely terrifying movie-- the Gargoyles are hostile, can fly, and move fast.)

Re: Now it's picking up a little

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... they got out of there without killing anyone. I dunno, I still think he's lost his edge.

Santa Claus just showed up

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I sense that we are in Desperation Crossover Territory.

Re: Santa Claus just showed up

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah... The fundamental problem here is that Oz under the reign of Ozma is a pretty insipid place, with all the horrors destroyed, tamed or driven out. So these books basically have to involve characters having wild adventures in other parts of Baum's "Fairyland" universe outside of the country, then making a token visit to Oz at the end. Here, the extra-Ozian preliminaries are particularly uninteresting, the characters ill-chosen, and the visit to Oz mostly taken up with a giant birthday party for Ozma with cameos by dozens of other Baum characters.

Re: Now it's picking up a little

[thf2.livejournal.com]

Complaints about violence in children's literature/entertainment was a 1950s innovation, beginning with the bowdlerization of the comic book industry, and continuing in increasing intensity to this day: witness Spielberg deciding that "E.T." was too violent and reworking it digitally.

The Tin Woodman: Another View

[jwgh]

I found the following in an Amazon review of the Patchwork Girl Of Oz and thought others might be interested:

I REALLY MUST DISAGREE THAT THE TIN WOODMAN WAS SO KIND AND GENTLE THAT EVERYONE LOVED HIM (I HATE HIM MORE THAN THE DEVIL EVEN) NO ONE CANNOT PRETEND THAT HE DOESN'T HAVE A MENACING, DISCRIMINATING SIDE TO HIS PERSONALITY! HE DOES NOT REALLY HAVE A HEART! THE WIZARD WAS NOTHING MORE THAN A HUMBUG, REMEMBER! WHAT HE DOES HAVE IS A VERY POOR SUSTITUTE TO THE REAL THING! THIS IS WHAT I MEAN, IN "VISITORS FROM OZ" HE SAYS, "I COULD CHOP OFF HIS HEAD, BUT THAT WOULDN'T BE KIND. MY HEART WOULD NEVER ALLOW IT." IF HE HAD GOOD HEART HE NEVER WOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF SUCH A THING AT ALL! BETTER THAN THINK OF IT AND WANT TO BUT NOT ALLOW HIMSELF TO BECAUSE OF HIS FAKE HEART! HE IS REALLY SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE A GUARDIAN ANGEL! AND, LISTEN! THE REAL TIN WOODMAN DOES NOT THREATEN PEOPLE WITH HIS AXE! I WILL NEVER, EVER, ACCEPT ANYTHING LESS!

Re: The Tin Woodman: Another View

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, he has a point. Lots of the lovely features of the Ozians are what Ken "Acolyte of Jabootu" Begg would call Informed Attributes: things we're told even though depicted events actually contradict them. For instance, in The Emerald City we're told that Oz is an egalitarian communist paradise where Ozma personally ensures that all goods are distributed fairly, and nobody wants more than he needs; but there's certainly no evidence of this from the distribution of goods we can see there.

In the first book, this is done intentionally; the Tin Woodman claims to be heartless though he obviously isn't, etc. But later on I suspect it was because Baum was making stuff up as he went along.