Oz

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) The film is, no doubt, a triumph of technical dexterity and especially of skill in colour photography, but what is the use of making a hollyhock out of cellophane, painting it an ugly colour, and then photographing it with complete accuracy? A portion of the same column not shown on that pa...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) When the teacher called her name to try out for the play, Lin passed, saying that at the time she didn’t feel so much “angry, as stupid.” I can imagine that happening among the kids at my school. Children in the early elementary grades are mighty rigid about the “right” way to do things. But would...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) More typical is how Baum introduces the villain in The Lost Princess of Oz (1917): A curious thing about Ugu the Shoemaker was that he didn’t suspect in the least that he was wicked. He wanted to be powerful and great, and he hoped to make himself master of all the Land of Oz that he might compel e...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) I saw one addition to this version which seemed to come from the MGM movie. After the Lion’s earlier, solo interview with the Wizard (appearing as a great ball of fire), the frightened beast runs out of the throne room and breaks through a door (“SCRUNCH”!). Quite reminiscent of the candy-pa...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) “To the Emerald City,” said Dorothy, “to see the Great Oz.” “Does he never go out?” asked the Scarecrow. “I want him to give me some brains,” said the Scarecrow eagerly. “I don’t know,” replied Dorothy sorrowfully, “but it is my home, and I’m sure it’s somewhere.”

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) So, when they came to a good-sized farmhouse, Dorothy walked boldly up to the door and knocked. “We wish to pass the night with you, if you will allow us,” answered Dorothy; “and the Lion is my friend and comrade, and would not hurt you for the world.”

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) I’ll quote from the perceptive review (i.e., I agree with its points) from The Graphic Classroom: Shanower took care in this adaptation by giving us details that have – for most people anyway – been lost because of the celluloid translation. In fact, so many details were left out of the movie t...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) This contemporary fantasy starts just outside Kansas, strictly speaking—in a patch of magically-made land between that state and Nebraska. But the Oz allusions are inescapable:swirling wind storms that send Mibs Beaumont, her brothers, and their neighbors on their journey of disco...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) There may even be a rule that the closer American children’s books come to Kansas, the more they have to allude to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and/or its sequels. Case in point: Matt Phelan’s graphic novel The Storm in the Barn, set in Kansas in 1937.

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) Multinational multimedia corporations make deals with rivals all the time. For instance, Disney's television department produced Scrubs, but for the first several seasons it was on NBC, owned by GE. After NBC chose not to renew that contract, Disney's ABC network (which had originally...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) As for “literary,” Katharine M. Rogers, author of L. Frank Baum: Creator of Oz (2002), was a professor of English and a literary scholar who analyzed Baum’s fiction in detail. So, you know, I’m going to show the cover of that book instead of the new one.

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) L. Frank Baum almost certainly never intended people to know that Ozma had a birthday on 21 August. Throughout The Road to Oz, published one hundred years ago, characters refer only to the party planned for “the twenty-first of this month." But earlier in the book Dorothy mentions that it's A...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) The Boston Globe recently profiled Erwin Ehrenreich, who co-owns the Rose Man Nursery & Emporium in Carver and Barnstable, Massachusetts. One feature of that enterprise is a garden designed on an Oz theme, based on the 1939 MGM movie: he’s envisioning crowds of visitors walking thr...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) The Design Inspiration collected depictions of Dorothy and her companions along the Yellow Brick Road in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz from twenty-three different illustrators. They appear to be influenced largely by: the 1939 MGM movie. a wish to break expectations of what these characte...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) Hits as house gifts: Pierce's BEKA COOPER: TERRIER and Childs's OH. MY. GODS. Did I mention there were 12-year-old girls in the house? Background: I'd heard that both girls liked Twilight. So I hunted for other recent fantasies told from a first-person female point of view--with more female...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) Don't know." Dorothy watched the boy dig. . . . "What are you going to do?" she inquired. Dig," said he. But you must know something," declared Dorothy, getting provoked. I can't say I do," replied Dorothy, remembering her present difficulties. No one knows everything, Dorothy," he said.

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) I like when Dorothy met the Scarecrow and he woke up and winked at her and started talking. It was funny that the Scarecrow said that he doesn’t have a brain and wants to find the wizard with Dorothy and maybe he’ll get a brain. And the Scarecrow says because he is made of straw he doesn’t get hurt a...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) On Wednesday I mentioned my recent article on the big plot problem in Baum's previous Oz book, Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. That adventure puts Dorothy and her companions in terrible danger, then rescues them magically with no preparation.

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) Yesterday I mentioned my article on Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz in the latest Baum Bugle. Here is a passage from the book itself, as L. Frank Baum has his usual fun with authority figures. “We don’t have to prove it,” answered Dorothy, indignantly. “If you had any sense at all you’d known it was th...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) And then there's the plot issue. Baum literally wrote his characters into a hole, and then got them out by having Princess Ozma wish them to Oz with her immensely powerful Magic Belt--a dea ex machina. She had, after all, promised Dorothy she'd look in on her at the end of the previous Oz book.

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) Here's an extract from Schwartz's interview with the Boston Globe this weekend: A. He [Baum] had this dream when he was a kid of being a great writer, and life got in the way. The amazing thing is that he got back to it. He followed his path to his true self. That's what gives the yellow brick road its...

By J. L. Bell(noreply@blogger.com) amp;lt;span style="font-weight: bold;font-family:courier new;" >Various folks have been discussing the representation of racial and ethnic minorities in American children's books. This commentary has focused on such matters as <a href="http://www.pen.org/vie...

By noreply@blogger.com (J. L. Bell) Born Michael Finocchiaro, Carroll had entered show business before being cast in the movie, singing and dancing in regional theaters. His website says, “He was the warm-up for Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman as they campaigned across the country in the Presidential race,” which...

By noreply@blogger.com (J. L. Bell) Here are two long interviews with Evan Schwartz, author of Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story-- at Blair Frodelius's Daily Ozmapolitan website. on WBUR's On Point interview and call-in radio show.

By noreply@blogger.com (J. L. Bell) In 1921, J. Malcolm Bird, an editor at Scientific American, compiled a book titled Einstein's Theories of Relativity and Gravitation: A Selection of Material from the Essays Submitted in the Competition for the Eugene Higgins Prize of $5,000.

By noreply@blogger.com (J. L. Bell) Last fall I met Evan I. Schwartz, whose book Finding Oz: How L. Frank Baum Discovered the Great American Story has just been published. Schwartz had been researching the historical context which inspired Baum. He's shared some of that on his website for the book.

By noreply@blogger.com (J. L. Bell) Prof. Hansen also goes on to supply the article's money quote: "While it may have grabbed students' interests, it doesn't really teach them anything about the gold standard and, in particular, the debate about the gold standard." Exactly. How does walking on a yellow brick road in silver sh...

By noreply@blogger.com (J. L. Bell) Baum based The Maid of Arran on William Black's novel A Princess of Thule, so he wasn't responsible for the whole story, but he added elements that struck me as particularly Baumian. (I should acknowledge that I'm basing these comments on my memory of a show boiled down from Baum's longer sc...

By noreply@blogger.com (J. L. Bell) Unfortunately, SharedBook doesn't go as far as I'd hoped when I first saw “customized classic children's books.” You can personalize only that one page. But you can't improve the final act of Huckleberry Finn, write yourself into Oz alongside Dorothy, or give a name to The Poky Little Pupp...

By noreply@blogger.com (J. L. Bell) In other words, I use children's stories as kind of a snare and temptation and illusion to draw in readers who say this is going to be easy...and it's going to be fun. And indeed I hope it is fun. But once I get people involved in the plot, I hope to also communicate some of the questions I have about the...

By noreply@blogger.com (J. L. Bell) The offer to Millican to prove that Ayers wrote Obama’s book was made by Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah. He hoped to corroborate a theory advanced by Jack Cashill, an American writer.

By JL Bell 11:13 PM · Mitali Perkins said... In North America, such children's book writers tend to be clerical wives or daughters, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, L.M. Alcott (sort of), L.M. Montgomery, and in modern times, Katherine Paterson. ...

By noreply@blogger.com (J. L. Bell) Today the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London was going to host a panel discussion on this topic: So many of us find powerful significances and lost worlds within The Wizard of Oz, both the film and the book. Why is this story still so important and so resonant a fable? Among the schedule...

By noreply@blogger.com (J. L. Bell) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) is without doubt the most successful and influential thing L. Frank Baum ever wrote. It's tempting, therefore, to treat its successful publication as the climax of his life story, the reward for his many failed ventures.

By JL Bell A while back, Alison Morris at Shelftalker quoted this passage from E. Nesbit's The Treasure Seekers. It comes to us in one of the finest narrative voices that any writer has ever conceived, the self-effacing chronicler Oswald Bastable: ...

By noreply@blogger.com (J. L. Bell) In a few books, when the text quotes words that no character is saying in the present scene--words that a character has said before, or often says, or that another character imagines being said--that dialogue appears in single quote marks instead of the regular (American) double quote m...

By J. L. Bell I've written about the close relationship of the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman in L. Frank Baum's The Tin Woodman of Oz, and (not yet on this blog) about Glinda the Good's appreciation of female beauty and lack of interest in men. But Baum would have surely disavowed any interpretations of his ch...