The "Ozification" of American Children's Fantasy Films: The Blue Bird, Alice in Wonderland , and Jumanji

Abstract

The "Ozification" of American Children's Fantasy Films:The Blue Bird, Alice in Wonderland, and Jumanji Joel D. Chaston (bio) Recently a national touring company presented a stage version of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) at the Juanita K. Hammons Center for the Performing Arts in Springfield, Missouri, where I live, a surprising event since the town's major community theater had performed the same play a few months before. Despite a long-standing interest in Baum's novel, however, I did not go to either production. I had already attended the play a couple of years before in Toronto. More to the point, since all of these productions were based on the script of the 1939 MGM film version of The Wizard of Oz, I had seen it done better on television virtually every year since I was a child.1 That new dramatizations of The Wizard of Oz should be inspired by the MGM film instead of Baum's book will not surprise anyone who has ever tried to teach the latter. Students often mistakenly refer to the film as the "original" text and think of the novel as the "adaptation." The popularity of the film, which Jonathan Fricke suggests is "the most widely seen and most familiar film in history," has, for many viewers, eclipsed the work that inspired it (241). Indeed, Carol Billman's article on The Wizard of Oz, "I've Seen the Movie," argues that the film "transcends its original in American popular culture," producing a vision that "overlays and conditions readers' responses to L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (100). As a result, many subsequent literary sequels and film adaptations draw on the 1939 film. While The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has inspired a multitude of sequels, several recent novels about Oz, including Geoff Ryman's Was (1992), Thomas L. Tedrow's Dorothy: Return to Oz (1993), and Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (1995), incorporate elements of the MGM film into their vision of Oz.2 Filmation's Journey Back to Oz (1971), ABC's television series The Wizard of Oz (1990-91, recently rebroadcast on cable by Home Box Office), and Disney's Return to Oz (1985) are, in reality, sequels to the MGM film and not the novel.3 On 22 November 1995, the movie script and its songs were reincarnated as Turner Network Television's The Wizard of Oz in Concert: Dreams Can Come True (directed by Louis J. Horvitz and featuring Jewel as Dorothy, Joel Grey as the Wizard, and Natalie Cole as Glinda), and in 1996 the film metamorphosed into CBS's The Wizard of Oz on Ice, with Olympic gold medalists Oksana Baiul as Dorothy and Victor Petrenko as the Scarecrow.4 Perhaps the greatest influence of the film version of The Wizard of Oz has been on other non-Oz motion pictures. In Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America (1991), Paul Nathanson notes some of the many allusions to MGM's Oz in films as diverse as Labyrinth (1986), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), and Made in Heaven (1987), to which one could add more recent references in Wild at Heart (1990), Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), My Own Private Idaho (1991), Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1993), Rockadoodle (1994), and Twister (1996). As Alan C. Elms has noted in a 1983 article in The Baum Bugle, a number of science fiction films, in particular, seem to have borrowed their plots from MGM's Oz, including Star Wars (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Time Bandits (1981), and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982).5 The overpowering impact of The Wizard of Oz on film adaptations of other children's fantasy novels, however, has only been treated superficially. Since the 1939 release of the MGM film, a number of filmmakers have attempted to recreate its popularity (and eventual monetary success) when adapting other works of fantasy to the screen. In creating these adaptations, Hollywood has recast sometimes very different literary fantasies as new versions of...