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BobG said:Missing an experience like that is almost as bad as having never watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a theater.
I never did that.
BobG said:Missing an experience like that is almost as bad as having never watched the Rocky Horror Picture Show in a theater.
Saint said:all of you had been off-topic
Saint said:all of you had been off-topic
Ivan Seeking said:So the Wizard was Timothy Leary?
Njorl said:The Dorothy in Oz was dreaming Dorothy's ego. Toto represents the subconcious. The wizard was her superego. Dorothy's delusional state was a manifestation of her selfish desires, but her subconscious sought out the means to bring her to a mature, rational decision.
BobG said:Math is Hard is #1 so far (that was really good).
"The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism." Littlefield described all sorts of hidden meanings and allusions to Gilded Age society in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: the wicked Witch of the East represented eastern industrialists and bankers who controlled the people (the Munchkins); the Scarecrow was the wise but naive western farmer; the Tin Woodman stood for the dehumanized industrial worker; the Cowardly Lion was William Jennings Bryan, Populist presidential candidate in 1896; the Yellow Brick Road, with all its dangers, was the gold standard; Dorothy's silver slippers (Judy Garland's were ruby red, but Baum originally made them silver) represented the Populists' solution to the nation's economic woes ("the free and unlimited coinage of silver"); Emerald City was Washington, D.C.; the Wizard, "a little bumbling old man, hiding behind a facade of paper mache and noise, . . . able to be everything to everybody," was any of the Gilded Age presidents.(1)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was no longer an innocent fairy tale. According to Littlefield, Baum, a reform-minded Democrat who supported William Jennings Bryan's pro-silver candidacy, wrote the book as a parable of the Populists, an allegory of their failed efforts to reform the nation in 1896. "Baum never allowed the consistency of the allegory to take precedence over the theme of youthful entertainment," Littlefield hedged at one point; "the allegory always remains in a minor key." Still, he concluded that "the relationships and analogies outlined above . . . are far too consistent to be coincidental."(2)
It was an interesting notion, one scholars could not leave alone, and they soon began to find additional correspondences between Populism and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Richard Jensen, in a 1971 study of Midwestern politics and culture, devoted two pages to Baum's story. He implicitly qualified Littlefield by pointing out that not all pro-Bryan silverites were Populists. But Jensen then proceeded to add two new points to the standard Littlefield interpretation, finding analogies for Toto and Oz itself: Dorothy's faithful dog represented the teetotaling Prohibitionists, an important part of the silverite coalition, and anyone familiar with the silverites' slogan "16 to 1"--that is, the ratio of sixteen ounces of silver to one ounce of gold--would have instantly recognized "Oz" as the abbreviation for "ounce."(3)
The Wizard of Oz in American Popular Culture:
This interpretation was actually conceived as a Doctoral Dissertation by Neil Earle, but was later published as a book. This book consists of seven chapters. In the introduction, Earle describes his intentions as follows: "To answer the question as to why a fairy tale has lingered so long and so lovingly in the minds of generations of Americans and has cast such a spell across the popular arts necessitates this broad-based approach. This explains my analysis in Chapter Two. Chapters Three and Four aim to provide a fresh commentary upon the original text informed by theories derived from both popular and archetypal studies. Chapter Five analyzes the 1939 film and its significance. Chapter Six attempts to do the same for the all-black 1978 musical film The Wiz. Chapter Seven will try to summarize how Baum's classic helps define popular culture and its critical parameters. Fortunately, this historical and literary journey along the "Yellow Brick Road" has a neat and timely starting point: the year 1900. It is to that period of history we will have to first turn to place the events that were shaping not just the Gale farm in Kansas but also the larger American scene. Before all of this, however, I want to recall earlier, ingenious attempts to unravel the Baumian world. The analysis of these interpretations takes us to Chapter One."
It was an interesting notion, one scholars could not leave alone, and they soon began to find additional correspondences between Populism and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.