The Wizard of Oz books

The green Wicked Witch was just a movie choice.

People honestly just didn’t care about random trans details until the Republican Party recently decided they needed a new acceptable minority group to attack to distract from their complete lack of positive policy ideas.

Ruby slippers are made up for the movie too. Was a ruby crown and it controlled the monkeys.

I was never a fan of the movie but I have been told that I would like the books because they are a bit more darker. Would you agree? I love Alice in Wonderland for context.

I read the entire original Oz series (the first 14 written by Baum) when I was a kid and loved them. I still have many of the books and will occasionally re-read them.

1. The green came from the filming. Same with the ruby slippers. Color film was relatively new, so they were trying to find things that would really pop on screen. The author of Wicked took this and ran with it as if it was cannon, but it really wasn’t. The first time I read Wicked, I didn’t like it at all because I was comparing it too much to the original books. I liked it more on my second reading.
In book 2, yes, that’s the reason the city appears green, but that changes in later books. I think Baum was still figuring things out as far as world-building.

2. Ozma isn’t trans in the way that trans is known today (someone who has a different gender identity than what they were assigned at birth), and even in context of the book, she wasn’t trans. She was bewitched. The only reason there’s any kind of discussion about her being trans is because of right-wingers looking for any reason to ban books, and trans people have become their boogeyman. There are other arguments against the book, and the author in particular, that are more valid than Ozma being trans (because, again, she isn’t).

A lot of things in the original book were not included in the movie that I would have loved to have seen, particularly the china country, where all the figurines are made from delicate porcelain.

Personally, I actually don’t like the first book in the series as much as some of the later books. The Magic of Oz was particularly good, as was the final one, Glinda of Oz. I also liked Dorothy and The Wizard in Oz because of all the interesting worlds they visit before they arrive in Oz. Plus there are so many fascinating characters that come up throughout the whole series.

But keep in mind that Oz series of children’s books are the original source material, and the movie, Wicked, and the Sci-Fi series are all adapting those into their own formats. And they aren’t necessarily staying true to the original. Not that they have to, but this is definitely a book series where I’ve seen HUGE liberties taken with how it’s adapted on screen.

My favorite part of all the Oz books is where Baum introduced the book and it’s very clear he doesn’t want to write anymore about Oz but he continues to do so for money and v cause everyone begs him to. You can see this in some of the later books where he just writes totally unrelated stories and then randomly has Ozma, Glinda or the Wizard show up so it counts as an Oz book and this will sell more

The reason Ozma begins as a boy in the story and then becomes a girl is to stand as an allegory for tomboys growing up into women; it’s an early 20th-century lesson for the young-girl readership of the books on how, as much as they may like goofing off and being boyish, eventually they need to grow up into proper women.

It has also been suggested that, because Baum knew that the book would be adapted into a play and, as was always the case back then, the young male lead would be played by a young adult female actor, he just decided to incorporate that into the plot so that in the end the actress could play a female role.

In my opinion the first three books are the best, with descending quality in each; and the remainder of the books are very uneven, with delights here and there, but mostly just silliness (sometimes good, sometimes patience-trying) without much substance.