Ideas - Why there's no place like Oz

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an instant bestseller in 1900. Thirty-nine more official Oz books followed, as well as other derivative works like Broadway musicals, films, comic books, cartoons, sitcom parodies and more. IDEAS follows the proverbial yellow brick road to uncover how this seemingly simple story of friendship, self reliance and longing for home continues to speak to us, 125 years after it was published. 

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this song may well be it. Judy Garland, wistfully singing somewhere over the rainbow. From the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz. I remember sitting on the floor at my father's feet. He was in an armchair. I was totally entranced. My mom would make popcorn. We got to stay up past our bedtime.

It was like the event. The Wizard of Oz showing on national television was like the Children's Super Bowl. Everybody talked about it at school, a church, a temple in the backyard. And I was scared to death of the flying monkeys, like every child. Erica. But it was just a feeling of total immersion, of transportation, if you will, off to Oz. That's where I went. Whenever I hear this song, my own mind goes to playing that very tune in band class in high school. And that memory immediately reminds me of the times that I contemplated, the incredible idea that just a pair of ruby slippers and a few heartfelt

words can help you find your way home. Then close your eyes and tap your heels together three times. And think to yourself, there's no place like home. There's no place like home. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. It may seem a bit shocking now, but the Wizard of Oz did not make much of a dent at the box office back in 1939. Today, it's considered both the most watched, and according to the U.S. Library of Congress, the most influential movie of all time, as well as being among the most quoted.

Coach, I got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore. You're a good witch or bad witch? Depends on who you ask, I guess. Now be gone before someone drops a house on you. There might be lions in there. Tigers and bears, oh my. Melting! Mounting! Oh, what a world!

Many of those famous lines first appeared nearly four decades before the movie was ever made on the pages of a children's book by L. Frank Baum called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published 125 years ago. It was the best-selling children's book, American children's book, of the 20th century. By 1956, when it went into public domain, it sold at least six. six million copies. So how is it that this turn of the century story about a little girl, her scruffy dog, and her three unconventional, and let's face it, needy friends, continues to transfix us now? It's more than a coming of age tale. Remember, Dorothy's journey

is to go to Oz, rediscover herself, gain confidence, and a sense of wonder. It's about this journey towards enlightenment and happiness and understanding that we all undertake. I don't think you could even go back to any point in history since the book first came out where it wasn't relevant. So far? Okay, good. Welcome. Where are you guys from? I'm from Toronto. I'm just doing a documentary about it was wrong. Wonderful. Ideas producer Donna Dingwall is a long-time fan of both the movie and the book. When she set out to understand the enduring appeal of Oz, she went to where the yellow brick road actually began. Welcome everyone to our museum here and to our...

Here's her documentary. No place like Oz. The official story is that the Erie Canal put Chittango, New York on the map. Construction workers who came here to connect the Great Lakes to the Hudson River just never left. But if you asked anyone here today, what really makes this town special, you'd be far more likely to hear about a wizard than a waterway. We, of course, are here because Elfrink Baum, there's a wonderful Wizard of Oz, was born here in Chittenden. Live just down the road on Fall Foll Boulevard over here at Pustle Library. Alison Lair is outfitted in a dress with a ruby slipper motif, and she's leading a tour at the All Things Oz Museum.

It's filled with some impressive exhibits, like this one. The gem of our collection, this just came in a couple of weeks ago. That is a first edition, first state binding sea of the wonderful Wizard of Oz. And worth about $100,000. This one is a bit more meeker. Blinkin, you will miss it. This is our one piece from the original 1939 film. these tiny pieces of scarecrow's draw.

Yes. Someday we'll up our game a little bit. The crowd's mostly tourists. They're here for Oz Stravaganza. It can bring as many as 20,000 people to the birthplace of Al Frank Baum. They come for lectures, autographs, costume contests, and this parade.

Featuring high school marching bands and Oz themed floats. Special guests, Judy Garland's granddaughter and Al Frank Baum's great-granddaughter, wave from convertibles. Queen! Yes! Then a female motorcycle group kidded out as Oz characters rides by. Look at the flying monkeys.

Oh, they're all females. Side note, if you want to make a winged monkey even more frightening, picture it hunched over the handlebars revving the engine of a Harley. But many younger fans are not. not here because of Judy Garland or even Dorothy. I guess I'm more of like a newer fan. I saw the movie when I was little, but I got really into Wicked the past few years. The story of Wicked struck me particularly because it's one of the best representations

of like how it feels to be an outsider in society. These two, outside the Oz Museum, have a look I'd describe as steampunk meets Alphaba. Tell me about your costumes. What are they inspired by? Very Wicked Witch inspired. I have the striped socks on, which is kind of a nod to Nessa Rose and the Wicked Witch getting, like, the house on her. I've got, like, green and black throughout the outfit, and so does Christina. I'm a big Alphaba fan, so, yeah, more than...

For the uninitiated, Alphaba is the protagonist of Wicked. Fine. Let's get this over with... No, I am not seasick. No, I did not eat grass as a child. And yes, I've always been green. Gregory McGuire's 1995 novel sympathetically reimagines the backstory of the Wicked Witch of the West

before Dorothy dropped a house on her sister. McGuire's bestseller begat a hit Broadway show, which begat a hit movie, which begat a sequel, which if you haven't heard. I'm off to see the wizard. is coming to a theater near you. Bombs' Wizard and McGuire's Wicked were published 95 years apart, but the latter draws on timeless elements of Oz.

Like, no matter who you are, there's room for you under the rainbow. Why don't you come along with us? We're on our way to see the Wizard now, to get him a heart. And him a brain. I'm sure he could give you some courage. And there's always some guy trying to reel you in with smoke, and mirrors. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

The greatest boss has spoken. You have no real power. Exactly. That's why I need you. But there is something else embedded a bit more deeply in their shared DNA. If you actually go through the book, the only people who have true power are the witches, are the women. It's not the wizard. Michael Patrick Hearn is the author.

of the annotated Wizard of Oz, and he's an expert on children's literature. The Good Witch and the Wicked Witch both have this enormous power, and the wizard is just a complete fraud. And, I mean, you have Dorothy, this little girl who is extraordinarily assertive and aggressive and goes out, and nothing's going to keep her from getting back home. Now, this is quite an important point in American children's literature,

Dorothy loses her temper, douses the Wicked Witch with a bucket of water, and she gets away with it. I mean, we probably would not have Kay Thompson's Eloise or Mory Sendex, Max, without Dorothy losing her temper back in 1900. It's extraordinary that a man, Gregory McGuire, has carried on that theme in Wicked. Hearn is far from alone in recognizing Baum's early feminism. There have been feminist interpretations since the 1970s. I think the very first one was in Ms. Magazine. I think it may have been in the very first issue. They published a list of books for free children.

And the earliest one on the list was The Wizard of Oz, because here was a little girl who goes out and solves her problems. At that point, they could not find an earlier one that had a positive girl protagonist. So how is it that Frank Baum, born in 1856, to a privileged and devout Methodist family, becomes an unabashed feminist. Now, over here in this case, Case 11, all of these stories were also written by bomb. He wrote under multiple pseudonyms,

including a few female names like Edith Van Dyne. His second most popular series was written. At the Oz Museum, our guide Allison provides a clue. Now, he was writing a lot of different strong female leads in his characters. So if you have read the Oz books, you will meet Princess Osma, General Ginger, Glinda, the Wicked Witch, of course, Dorothy, who was approximately eight years old, and she was the one doing all the rescuing in this story.

She didn't need a prince to save her. That unconventional choice makes sense when you understand who the woman or women behind Al Frank Baum were. First? His wife, Maude Gage, was attending Cornell University when they first met, and one of the first classes, obviously, accepting female students. When Frank Baum and Maude Gage were married in 1882, a local newspaper described the ceremony as one of equality, noting that their vows were precisely the same, an idea they no doubt discussed with one of the biggest influences in Maud's life. She was the daughter of Matilda Jocelyn Gage, who was a well-known suffragist. And yet, maybe not well-known enough.

Now, you probably will not have read about her in history books. and that is because she was kind of edged out of that entire movement. She was fighting alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for women's right to vote. But you really only hear about those two gals. Matilda Jocelyn Gage Frank Baum's mother-in-law and those two gals, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founded the National Women's Suffrage Movement in 1869.

They wrote the history of the women's movement together, three volumes. But then Gage herself was written out of that story. And part of that is because Matilda was considered too radical even for her suffragist friends. She was not just fighting for white women's right to vote. She wanted everyone to be able to vote. Matilda Gage was a fierce proponent of separating church from state. She openly accused the church of using its influence over marriage, education, and law to a person. women. She even called out priests for abusing children and women, and this was in the 1800s. She once got arrested for running a stop on the Underground Railroad out of her home.

So when Susan B. Anthony moved to merge with more conservative Christian-based suffragists to shore up support for their cause, Matilda Gage balked. And then she bailed and formed her own more liberal group. Because she stepped away from the, what I will call the mainstream movement, she was punished. She was not just oops we forgot about her. She was actively erased from history. And in fact, the phenomenon of erasing women's contributions to society is called the Matilda effect. It's named after Matilda. My name is Carrie Eaton and I'm the executive director of the Matilda Jocelyn Gage Foundation. Carrie Eaton's in charge of a different museum.

This one is in Fayetteville, New York, which is about a 10 or 15-minute drive west from the Oz Museum. I guess there is some full-circle sense of things in that, in some ways, her relationship with L. Frank Baum and the Wizard of Oz has been a mechanism to write her back into the world. Absolutely. Unabashedly, we use that connection to talk about Matilda. because she is so important. And I think that it's exciting for people to learn about her for the first time.

I see people get so wrapped up in the story and they'll get so upset on her behalf and say, well, how could we not know about Matilda? Why didn't I learn about this in school? The bomb room is actually the parlor where Maude Gage and Frank Baum exchange vows. But it's also where Baum's mother-in-law Matilda exchanged ideas with those newlyweds. The three of them had a regular book group, book club, I think we would call it now, where they would read books together and then they would discuss what they had learned. And they were really the forefront thinkers of the time that they were reading. And on a deeper level, beyond this book club, there are a lot of.

of things that Matilda learned and talked and wrote about herself. Abolitionism, equal rights, the matriarchy of the Haudenoshone, suffragism, and all of those things come in in the Oz world, that world that he was creating. Matilda also wrote about the plight of women historically accused of witchcraft, and she called them the most advanced thinkers of the Christian age. Oz scholar Michael Patrick Hearns says, Witches Frank Baum created were, at least in part, conjured by Matilda. You find in her controversial book, Woman Church and State, she talks about witches, and she said, a witch is just a wise woman. She is good or bad, depending upon how she uses her knowledge.

So good and wicked witches, she defines that in that book. Right. Are you a good witch or a bad witch? Are you a bad witch, exactly. And that goes to Matilda Jocelyn Gage. And there are other more direct connections to Matilda Gage in the land of Oz. I want to see you and your wife right away about Dorothy. Dorothy, well, what does Dorothy do? She was loved by all the kids in town.

They called her Auntie Matilda. Now, the little tiny ones who couldn't pronounce Matilda, can you guess what maybe they called her? Antie M. Auntie M. Well done. And so I'll give you then one guest to what her. husband's name was.

Henry. She really did have a husband named Henry. Uncle Henry, you won't let her, will you? Of course we won't. Where do we in? Please, and him? Total didn't... In fact, it was Matilda Gage who encouraged Baum to write down the fantastical stories.

She heard him telling her grandsons. And that request may have been born out of frustration. She was unhappy that Maude dropped out of Cornell to Mary Baum. And now he was in his 40s with a string of interesting but failed careers behind him. Prior to that, he had several different jobs. Actor, playwright, traveling salesman, an expert on window dressing, and the list doesn't end there. I think my favorite is the fancy chicken breeder. But Frank was a dreamer and Maude was the person who got stuff done.

He didn't have a lot of success until he really found. his voice in the literary world. But I think that he wouldn't have been able to do it without Maude holding down the fort, taking care of the bills, taking care of the house. I think that she was an integral part of their relationship. It allowed him to be the person that he was. Frank Baum's relationship with his wife and mother-in-law is crucial to why Oz and its strong female characters endure. But casting him and his world as proto-feminist doesn't fully explain. why his American fairy tale comes alive in so many other ways for every new generation, or even how it came alive for him.

He didn't say a whole lot about how the moment of inspiration came to him, but he said it was like a bolt from the blue, like a radio broadcast that came to him all in one moment one day during dusk after playing with his kids in the snow in 1898. And he started writing down all these visions that came to his mind on scraps of paper in his hallway in his house. Evan Schwartz has spent a lot of time thinking and writing about how Oz came to be. I'm the author of Finding Oz,

how L. Frank Baum discovered the great American story. He was living in the Gilded Age, but it was also an age of invention and innovation with the railroads and the telegraph and telephone and the beginnings of motion pictures even. So he was very much attuned to the future. Now you'll notice in this case, we've got TikTok of Oz down here. He is one of the very first robots in all of literature.

He makes his first appearance in book three, which is Asma of Oz. But Longwood was not just writing things like robots. He was writing cell phones, tablets, augmented reality, microwaves, things that he had absolutely no way of knowing what manifest later on. Oz expert Michael Patrick Hearn heard from many famous fans after his annotated Oz was published in 1973 and then updated in 1990 when the book turned 100.

I know Ray Bradbury wrote to you thanking you for the annotated version of the book. He called me up. Oh, he called me up on Thanksgiving. I was shocked. I was so thrilled. Yeah, yeah. And as a science fiction writer, what was his relationship to the material? Well, he loved the Oz books when he was growing up.

I think it was the technology the bomb plays with, like the Tin Woodman, TikTok, the mechanical man. He calls it the magic, but they become technological wonders. And this was, you know, decades before. they became practical. There are all these mechanical gadgets and there's the great book of records which is really you know Glinda's great book of records where everything is recorded as it happens. It's the early internet but he also had great faith in technology and thought that the world would be improved by the development of the imagination of children.

He was looking for the story of America and how it was changing. It's one reason why the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 appealed to him so much and he was a reporter there. This is how people found out about new ideas, new products, new experiences. They had a Ferris wheel there. They had so many exhibits.

And this was the biggest until that time, the 1893 World's Fair. And Frank Baum was a reporter and he was chronicler order, and he was chronicling these things as they were being invented. While the fair marked the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus, quote, discovering America, it also celebrated American innovation. And architecture was a focus. There was a gleaming neoclassical structure that was dubbed the White City, and it caught

the eye of the book illustrator Baum would eventually work with. Here's finding Oz author Evan Schwartz. Denzlo, William Wallace Denslow, was illustrating the World's Fair for a rival newspaper at the time. And if you look at those illustrations and if you look at just the photographs of the architecture of the World's Fair, it's reflected in the Emerald City, in the illustrations that Denslow drew for Frank Baum's book. Look, Emerald City is closer and prettier than ever. You're out of the wood, you're out of the dark, you're out of the night. The Emerald City was a world's fair, and Denzelo was a genius himself.

Well, children may have been charmed. Neither those illustrations nor the future wonder of Oz succeeded in winning over librarians and literary critics. You wrote in your preface that The Wizard of Oz was the most beloved children's book of the 20th century but was also the most reviled millstone as much as milestone. So what led to that? Well, the children's librarians at the time were progressives and their primary interest was in teaching rather than entertaining.

So the books had to either preach or they had to provide some sort of a lesson, but they didn't have fantasy. They didn't believe in, certainly not an American fantasy, an American fairyland. That was considered outrageous, even to think about such a thing.

The fairy tales, they thought the fairy tales from Europe were just fine, who needed an American fairyland. And so there was a lot of resistance to the books by many of the leading children's library. at the time. The other problem was it did develop into a series. Baum actually wrote 14 Oz books and then other people wrote a sequel. So the final series was about 39 volumes.

And the librarians thought that series books were terrible for children, that they wouldn't read anything else if they got caught up in a series. And they didn't believe that the other books could be as good as the first one. They would publish acceptable books, unacceptable books. And one of the very first lists attacked Baum and Denslow for being, they were just popular. There was no literary value in them, which of course was absurd. In the 1950s, librarians in several states targeted the books and the author over a perceived political leaning. The first Red Scare was after the Russian Revolution, and there were accusations that Elfrink bomb was a common.

communists, which he wasn't. And then after World War II, the rise of, well, the Soviet Union, the beginning of the Cold War, Baum was also attacked. He does create an utopia in the land of Oz where everybody gets along, everybody benefits from the labors of others. I mean, it's very idealized. Even Baum said, well, it might work in Oz, but it won't necessarily work in America. Oh, the world of Oz is a very funny place. That's Michael Patrick Hearn, talking about the novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And no one ever grows old. In that funny land lives the Wizard of Oz. Hey there, I'm David Kahn. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy.

Every day on This is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA. The news you've got to know and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out, This is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer. and Aunt M, who was the farmer's wife. Their house was small.

For the lumber to build it had to be carried by wagon. 125 years after it was published, El Frank Baum's novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, has become a cultural touchstone. The story has generally been understood as a tale of self-reliance and longing for home. When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great,

gray prairie on every side. But others have found serious political messages in Oz, whether Frank Baum put them there or not. L. Frank Baum did not write this just as a children's story, and I'm going to give you a competing theory.

That's conservative American political commentator Glenn Beck, expounding on an academic theory that has attached itself to Oz, the way a winged monkey sinks its claws. into a scarecrow. You compare the story and the monetary politics of the era,

it's known as the populist era, it'll all suddenly jump out at you. And yet, the details to support that theory seem a bit hard to pin down. Dorothy's little farm girl, she represents the U.S. The tornado, which is here, actually represents the free silver

movement that swept across America at the time. The Wicked Witch of the East, which is Now that's the Wicked Witch of the West. The Wicked Witch of the East, I don't know where she is. The house coming down on her foot. That is the the bankers in the east.

Ideas producer Donna Dingwall is our guide as we travel down the yellow brick road to see how Oz has been parabolized, allegorized, satirized, and maybe even cannibalized to explain our world today. So all of this monetary policy talk started around 1964 when an essay titled The Wizard of Oz Parable on Populism was published in the American Quarterly.

The problem is, Henry Littlefield, the author of that paper, didn't even buy his own theory. Oz scholar Michael Patrick Kern. I did know Henry. He was a high school teacher, and he used it as a tool to get kids interested in 19th century American history. He said that no one should take it literally,

But yet, the academics have taken that and, you know, twisted it and expanded on it. And often they don't even give Henry Littlefield credit for it. But Hearn isn't at all surprised that Oz has been used to explain everything from post-humanism to eco-criticism. Actually, the scholarship started about 1920 by Everett Wagonek. He wrote Utopia Americana, which was the first critical serious scholarly interpretation. of the Wizard of Oz. I mean, the whole thing about populism is that what was the big issue

in politics in 1900? It was populism. It was William Jennings Bryan. It was the whole issue of the gold standard. What's extraordinary is that this was in the air and not a single reviewer or a commentator

saw any relationship between the populist movement and the Wizard of Oz. There's absolutely nothing in any of the reviews. Baum was not a political thinker. You know, there are a lot of influences. I mean, certainly the influence of Alice in Wonderland, Pilgrine's Progress, other 19th century children's literature.

But he wasn't, it certainly was not his intent to create an allegory. But anyone looking to understand Baum's actual intentions doesn't even have to go past the introduction to the wonderful Wizard of Oz on page three, at least in my copy. The story of the wonderful Wizard of Oz was written solely to pleasure children of today. It aspires to be a modernized fairy tale in which the wonderment and joy are retained, and the heartaches and nightmares are left out. L. Frank Baum, Chicago, April 1900.

The writer Gore Vidal was, another fan of Oz, and in a New Yorker article, he mused, is it possible that bomb survival is due to the fact that he's not taught, that he's not officially literature? If so, he warned, one must be careful not to murder Oz with exegesis. But academics are hardly the only ones guilty of that crime. You know, he reminds me of that guy in the Wizard of Oz. You know, when you pull back the curtain, it's a really small dude. Joe Biden's America is a Wizard of Oz democracy because we don't know who's calling the shots right now. Hillary Clinton is the wicked witch of the left.

It's all thanks to the mega munchkins and ultimately the wizard himself, Donald Trump. Well, first of all, Mickey's made me really think differently about the Wizard of Oz, but it is such a perfect analogy that Trump is like the wizard who doesn't have actual powers and pretends. Mad Magazine did that. did that. Back in the 1980s, they did a whole spoof of the Wizard of Oz, and the humbug was Donald Trump. You probably know the old joke when Bill Clinton was running for president. They said, well, Bush needs to get brains. Ross Perot needs a heart. And Bill Clinton wants Dorothy. So there have been jokes

from the time, almost from the political jokes, almost from the time the Wizard of Oz appeared when William Randall first was running for the presidency, I think it was governor, he was running for governor. He was a great newspaper tycoon. They satirized him as the scarecrow and called him the Wizard of Oos. But, you know, the flim-flam man is throughout America. literature, American history. And of course, the Prince of Humbugs was P.T. Barnum.

I'm an old Kansas man myself. Born and bred in the heart of the Western wilderness. Premier Balloonus, our excellence, to the Miracle Wonderland Carnival Company until one day while performing... The Wizard is this P.T. Barnum-like character. He is a circus man. I'm Ryan Bunch, author of Oz and the Musical, Performing the American. and fairy tale. He also holds one other position. I'm the president of the International Wizard of Oz Club. I discuss a lot of my book in terms of humbug, which is this kind of performance of something that you're supposed to believe at. And that's much like the humbug of the 19th century represented by Barnum. So even though he's not a real wizard, Dorothy's friends believe that he

has given them these qualities. Oh, it ticks. Look, it ticks. And read what my medal says. Courage. Ain't it the truth. Ain't it the truth. And it was a kind of consensual deception. I think that's a very American idea. There's a dark side of that, of course, too.

Ryan Bunch believes that Baum's ability to tap into what turned out to be a never-ending well of fans lies not just in how easily Oz can translate and convey ideas political and otherwise. he credits Baum's background as an actor, a showman, if you will, who understood the potential for Oz beyond the page. So in 1902, just two years after the publication of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, he had written the lyrics to the stage musical of The Wizard of Oz. It opened in Chicago. Then the following year, in 1903, they went to Broadway,

and it became a hugely successful show. Baum loved theater, and almost immediately after the book was published, somehow the idea came about of making a musical, theatrical experience of it. The truth is, Baum's collaborators took a lot of liberties. Dorothy's dog Toto was nowhere to be found on stage, because he'd been replaced by a cow named Imogen. It was a musical extravaganza, which means it was sort of a hodgepodge of all those different popular theatrical genres of the time,

including vaudeville and operetta and some elements of minstrelsy. LeBomb initially protested those changes. The potential for bigger audiences and, of course, bigger box office returns, convinced him to compromise. And that's when the legacy of Oz being transformed, translated, and reiterated really began. Obama is sometimes credited as being the first transmedia author, meaning that he was immediately interested in translating Oz into other media besides books. There were comic books. He established his own film company to make films of the books. But the stage musical is what really took off. And so there's a long history of the Wizard

of Oz being produced as a stage or screen musical. And most people know it in one of those forms rather than from reading the book. And that's always been the case. I do think the fact that Oz has endured as musical theater in one form or another is part of why it has endured, and particularly why it has endured as American culture because the musical, as we think of it today, is usually described as an American art form. It was something that was cultivated and developed in the U.S. through kind of the melting pot of different influences that came into it. Musical theater and Oz have turned to each other over the course of the past 125 years. And in that 125-year history, there's one year that stands out, 1956.

That's the year the Wonderful Wizard of Oz went into the public domain. That means anyone could use, copy, and adapt the work without permission or paying royalties. And then, in an unrelated move, it was in 1956 that the Wizard of Oz was shown on network television for the first time. Between 35 and 45 million people watched that first night, more than half of the viewing audience, and John Fricky was one of them. I fell in love with it all that night. The story, the songs, the characters, the little girl who played Dorothy. For my next birthday, my parents gave me the Wizard of Oz soundtrack album

and an abridged Wizard of Oz storybook. That night changed his life. The guy who knows everything there is to know about Judy Garland is that one that we just saw in the reading room over there. His name is John Fricky. John is the world's preeminent Oz historian. He has worked with the Smithsonian on the Ruby Slippers Conservation Project. He is one of the people who helped identify the missing ruby slippers. If you watch any Judy marathons on AMC or TCM, usually he is the guy who is hosting all of that.

When Oz became an annual tradition on TV, it also cemented our relationship with the material. When you were a kid, there were three most important times in the year. If you grew up in the 60s, 70s, 80s into the 90s, it was the December holidays, be they Christmas or Hanukkah, your birthday, and the night the Wizard of Oz was on. It was something that was shared still carries, or you wouldn't hear all the references to Oz in sitcoms

or in contemporary movies or in editorial cartoons. You can go, And everybody picks up on it. It also helped that Oz was embraced by a group that's known for being at the forefront of popular culture. Now, in the past, asking, are you a friend of Dorothe's, was a secret code to help closeted people identify each other. And still today, I call my closest friends my best Judy's. That's the doyen of drag, Rupal, who's challenged contestants on his wildly popular drag race

to channel Oz more than once. And now, the world premiere of the Wicked Whiz of Oz, the Rusical. Well, who am I to deny the great Dorothy Gale? Like many gay men, Rupal's love of Oz is deeper than just a made-for-TV spectacle. I think you guys know the Wizard of Oz is my all-time number one favorite movie. Everything you need to know about life on this planet is in that movie. Of course, it's encoded and cryptic. Judy Garland and Oz also helped John Fricky find his tribe as a young gay man.

When everybody else was into the Beatles and the Stones and the Dave Clark 5 in the late 60s, and I was into Judy Garland and Broadway shows, luckily that stuff was still very mainstream. So I didn't get blasted too bad. I instinctively made friends who liked Oz, who liked Judy, who liked performing, who liked writing, all through grade school and high school and into college. And the current president of the Oz fan club, Ryan Bunch, recalls a similar experience. I was gay, which I sort of figured out probably actually a couple of years after I started reading the Oz books. I always felt different.

It's sort of filled a void for me once I joined the Oz Club. I think we can speculate that bombs, Oz, which includes all kinds of eccentric and unique individuals in it, has long been kind of an attraction to young readers who feel different in some way or another. There's an important literary representation of a kind of implicit queerness there that's important. And that is certainly important to some of the people who journeyed to Baum's birthplace to celebrate Oz. It really is a thing where people can find all kinds of space in it. We noticed that there are no heteronormative relationships in Oz. You know, like the scarecrow, the Tin Woodman are essentially platonic gay men. The Cowderly Line and the Very Hungry Tiger are also queer.

Peter and Luca Coogan drove more than 13 hours to be here. Where are you both from? We came all the way out here just for this. We're autistic, and Oz was one of their first special interests. We're actually Oztistics. Oz has been a special interest of mine since I was a kid. I grew up with the Bound Books. I didn't even watch the MGM film until I was about 16.

The books were my Oz for my entire life. They aren't the first neurodivergent fans I've met here, but there is another point of connection for Luca. My kid's trans and came as Osma and Tip. Because Osma and Tip are one of the first transgender characters. In Frank Baum's 1904 follow-up to The Wizard of Oz, he introduced a new character, a boy named Tip. But Tip was later revealed to be a girl who was named Osma. They've become something of a trans icon, even making their way into a jeopardy competition, thanks to the game shows,

first openly trans player. Amy Schneider, a writer from Oakland, is showing off a tattoo we did not get to see during your original run. Tell us about your left arm. Yeah, so this is Princess Osma of Oz. So the person who wrote The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Bond wrote a bunch of sequels to it, and all of them, she is the ruler of Oz.

And her backstory is that she was the rightful heir, kidnapped as an infant by an evil sorceress, who enchanted her and raised her as a boy until she was a teenager or so. And then in that first sequel, the enchantment is lifted, and she's revealed as the beautiful princess that she always was. And so I felt that was very appropriate to my life story. Baum may have created Osma slash Tip, as well as some other gender fluid characters, because he imagined them on stage where gender swapping is an age-old tradition. Here's Ryan Bunch, author, and head of the Oz fan club. There's a theatrical tradition that that aligns with, which is that of cross-dressing and the kind of, um, the kind of, um, um, the boy hero who is often played by a woman in male drag.

But that theatrical tradition itself, as well as the character of Osma, have been understood as sort of challenging our assumptions about gender. That diversity of characters in Oz has won Frank Baum, legions of loyal followers. But like the famed wizard he created, Baum has had his own pull-back-the-curtain moment. And that revealed something that even his most ardent fans can't ignore. We give Baum a lot of credit for the feminist and queer elements of Oz.

There are also these infamous editorials that Baum wrote calling for essentially the genocide of Native Americans, which feels odd for him, but they exist and they're real. Baum composed newspaper editorials calling for the extermination of Native Americans, and his words may have helped to inspire the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. L. Frank Baum wrote in South Dakota's Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer. The pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends on the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better in order to protect our civilization, followed up by one more wrong and wiped these untamed and untamable crimes.

creatures from the face of the earth. Matt Hudson is the great-great-grandson of Frank Baum. We're here to say that we're sorry. Evan Schwartz wrote about this period in his book, Finding Oz. He was a newspaper editor on the frontier in Dakota. That was his most stressful job because he had just failed at three other businesses. The most dramatic moment of that time was what they called the Indian scare. Sue natives on the reservation.

were starting to starve through that winter. And there were false rumors that they were about to attack Frank Baum's city. And it was a pervasive moment of fear. And he at first commented on some of these false and senseless scares, as he called it. But then he succumbed to it. And he wrote those two terrible editorials. It was a very dark moment. The latest Oz convention was held in Aberdeen,

and Ryan Bunch, the president of the Oz fan club, spoke about those editorials. He told me the best the Oz community can do knowing what BOM has written is to do better. It's also part of the American story that we all have to own. And so while BOM and the early Oz musicals can be seen as progressive on gender. They're not really on race. In fact, the first musical has a lot of stereotypes in it. But as we continue to transform Oz through song and dance, through the musical and other

media of adaptation as well, hopefully we are making it more inclusive. I wanted my version of the whiz, as I say, to be, you know, everyone's whiz. And so I have nods to all the versions that exist inside my production. And as a matter of fact, we have kind of a nod to the bomb book cover in my poppy scene. My name is Shelley Williams, and I am the director of the 50th anniversary revival of the Wills. It does seem fitting that the adaptation which pushed the boundaries of what Oz could represent in the 1970s, is doing it again 50 years later. My mom took me to see the Whiz National Touring Company

in Dayton, Ohio when I was seven years old. And it blew my mind. It was the most incredible experience to watch a story that I knew so well, but had never been included in. And suddenly I was Dorothy. When The Whiz opened on Broadway in 1975, it was described as an exploration of black emancipation and joy, set to a funky score sung by an all-black cast.

But in terms of the core story, the reason why I believe that it has endured is because the lessons in it are timeless and so universal. So the whiz has black music, it has black vernacular. But the core message of the Wizard of Oz is exactly the same. It is a woman's journey, a young woman's journey, of discovery and belonging. The things that I added to the show that were really important to me were things like, you know, in our lion tin man scarecrow,

we gave them tiny, like, two-line backstories that entrenched them in community. And it was really important to me after the death of George Floyd that I wasn't putting a black man on stage to just sing and dance for an audience. That I was also saying someone misses this person, they have a sense of belonging, they want to get back to people that love them and miss them, and they have great purpose. In August 2025, audiences saw Oz push forward yet again. This time breaking new ground technologically and cinematically. What we're doing with the Wizard of Oz at the sphere is make you feel like you're there.

This is beyond. This is like you dream about something like this. Oh dear. I keep beginning. I'm not in prison. Oh, you. The Wizard of Oz is premiering this week in Las Vegas at the sphere. The film had to be deconstructed.

and reformatted using Google-powered AI to fit the massive 160,000 square foot field of LEDs. The classic 1939 MGM film surrounds the audience inside this massive 22-story high orb, which spans the length of three football fields. The attraction is designed to make audiences feel like they're in Oz. For example, inside the eye of the tornado, as it hurts. hurtles Dorothy over the rainbow to munchkin land with the help of a 750 horsepower fan. And also not for the faint of heart. Some of the flying monkeys are real, like life-sized drones swooping in from above,

almost as terrifying as we remember as a kid. That with all the other craziness come with those tickets. Some awe, purists and cinephiles have criticized the spectacle. One called it an affront to art and nature. But it's not a stretch to imagine that L. Frank Baum, dreamer, innovator, showman would disagree with them. Here's Ryan Bunch, head of the Oz fan club. He would love it. He not only for the theatrical aspect, but he was really into technology.

And combining technology and theater, he really believed in progress, taking the form of kind of technology. And the way he talks about magic in the Oz books is really kind of similar to the idea of technology improving our lives or being able to manipulate, you know, the elements to do things. So he'd love the spectacle of it. He'd love the technology of it. He wasn't a purist about his own work. And if like me, a 22-story-tall version of winged monkeys isn't for you, you are still. free to go to that land that you've heard of and make it your own. It really belongs to us now. And every time we stage a new production, or every time we play Wizard of Oz in the backyard, or do something in the community, a festival like Chittendenango, we are incorporating our experiences and making Oz speak to the America we want to have.

Because, Oz, if nothing else, is aspirational, a cyclone of ideas and images and characters and influences that upon landing always finds an audience. He says, now folks, that is all I've got. you today. Thank you. Enjoy your time at the festival. Feel free to browse the workshop. We also have a little back from here. Someday you wish upon a star, wake up with a What an enduring legacy. You've been listening to ideas and to a documentary called No Place Like Oz. It was produced by Donna Dingwall.

Technical production by Emily Kiervezio, Will Yard, and Danielle Duval. Special thanks to Gita Dorothy Morena, L. Frank Baum's great-granddaughter, for reading excerpts from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The web producer of Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.