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"Oh, she bit her dog, eh?"


I haven't seen either of the recent WICKED pics.  I don't plan to see them.

Years ago I had some interest in the OZ fantasy world.  Back when it meant the Frank Baum books on the one hand and the 1939 movie on the other. 

The Baum books were written as an allegorical take on the monetary debates of Baum's day. The word "Oz" itself suggests ounces, the standard measurement for gold. The notion of a "yellow brick road" suggests gold bricks, and perhaps that an insistence on a gold standard was leading the farmers of the US, the Kansans, toward danger. And so forth. 

Of course the Garland movie didn't do much with the allegory -- It could have, since the '39 movie came out between FDR's abandonment of the gold standard (1933) and his partial reinvention of it by way of Bretton Woods (1944) -- but it didn't. 

Personally, I have never asked myself prequel-producing questions like "how did the monkeys learn to fly" or "why does one witch get around in bubbles and the other on a broom?'.  As to the '39 movie, anyway, I always figured that when a Kansas girl gets hit in the head by furniture during a tornado her addled head comes up with random stuff. 

The new round of interest, a round in which I have no part, began with a new book, WICKED (1995) by Gregory Macguire.  That book was inspired by a Rashomon-style desire to take the "other side" of the central conflict on the one hand and by prequel inducing questions like the two I just asked on the other. Neither cause does anything for me. 

You know what might be interesting?  A continuation of the 1939 movie's story line in Kansas and AFTER the dream. Remember there was an underlying argument about Toto, who bit a neighbor.  The neighbor didn't take kindly to it and there was talk of taking the dog away from Dorothy (and, at least by implication, there was a threat of euthanasia.)

What was going to happen there?  Dorothy's effort to escape and see "the crowned heads of Europe" had gotten her nowhere, her time in Oz was a dream ... but Toto still requires rescue. The movie offers no resolution, since the real-world villainness was neither doused with deadly water nor killed by a falling house. Does Dorothy have the brains and the nerve to deal with the situation in real-world Kansas? 

Hollywood, call me.  I'll work up a screenplay. 

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