allthingsoz.org Blog

by John Fricke

Welcome! to the third and final installment of blogs that ponder the question, “What might L. Frank Baum have thought about the classic Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer musical movie made from his first Oz book?” – a film that wasn’t completed or released until twenty years after he himself had passed away. Baum, of course, is the man who discovered Oz and chronicled its earliest histories; it’s certainly fair to wonder if he would have enjoyed all the many aspects of his work that Hollywood brought to glorious, Technicolored life. Beyond that, though: What about those episodes or whole chapters that Metro remodeled, reconfigured, eliminated, or expanded — and the characters who were added, amalgamated, or simply subtracted?

Devotees of both THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ book and the MGM film are already aware of Hollywood’s variations on the Baum text. There were, to be sure, many alterations, but it’s also true that THE WIZARD OF OZ screenwriters — Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf (and the uncredited Arthur Freed and John Lee Mahin) — were also adroit at sticking close to Baum when and where they could. One of the realizations that evolved across the assemblage of this three-part series was the fact that Frank Baum might well have been legitimately pleased that his template had been so regularly followed so much of the time.

There is, indeed, a definite, omnipresent, and genuine Baum spirit that permeates much of MGM’s version of THE WIZARD OF OZ. The blogs here for February and March discussed many of those facets of the film and included comments — in sometimes arbitrary order — about the 1939 Los Angeles and New York City movie premieres, the OZ songs, and the picture’s casting. There were, as well, details about scenes in, on, or involving Kansas, the tornado, Glinda, the ruby slippers, Munchkinland, the Yellow Brick Road, the apple trees, the Deadly Poppy Field, and the first visit to the Emerald City. (For any who might want to catch up on those initial installments, please scroll down past this entry for parts one and two below.) This month, we pick up the story in the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West and continue to the film finale, chronologically recounting a number of distinctive Baum narrative features and their treatment by MGM.

Dorothy’s melting of the Wicked Witch of the West in the film was certainly a direct carry-over from the OZ book. In the latter, however, the WWW isn’t even encountered “in person” until chapter twelve (of twenty-four), and she’s dispatched by the end of it. To add drama and tension to their plot, however, MGM’s adaptation made known the Witch’s threatening presence — and her desire for the magic slippers — almost as soon as Dorothy arrived in Oz. Additionally, the Witch became such a source of evil throughout the movie that the audience was rooting for her to be eliminated, and Metro improved on her departure, as well. In the book, the WWW arranges for Dorothy to trip over an invisible iron bar in the middle of the kitchen floor of her castle; the little girl loses one of her silver shoes in the process, and the Witch gleefully grabs it. As Frank Baum described the situation, “This made Dorothy so very angry that she picked up the bucket of water that stood near and dashed it over the Witch, wetting her from head to foot.”

We all know what happened next. For that movie moment, however, the screenwriters gave Dorothy a much more noble and heroic reason for seizing the pail. The Witch set fire to the Scarecrow, and the girl tossed the contents of the bucket to save him – simultaneously and fortunately hitting the villainess, as well.  In this change of narrative, the menace of the Witch was heightened one final time, and Dorothy had an honorable rationale for her action, rather than that of a little girl’s anger at being deprived of her (however-magical) shoe.

Once the WWW was liquidated, our five famed travelers returned to the Emerald City throne room in both book and movie. They were at first nonplussed, however, and then furious when “the Great and Powerful Oz” refused to immediately grant their requests. Given such circumstances, Baum wrote that “The Lion thought it might be as well to frighten the Wizard, so he gave a large, loud roar, which was so fierce and dreadful that Toto jumped away from him in alarm and tipped over the screen that stood in a corner. As it fell with a crash, they looked that way, and the next moment all of them were filled with wonder. For they saw, standing in just the spot the screen had hidden, a little old man . . . who seemed to be as much surprised as they were.”

In 1938-1939, Cairn Terrier Terry/Toto was already an intrepid little film actress, but it was probably beyond her heft to knock over a reasonably large screen. Thus, at Metro, the Lion didn’t get to roar at the Wizard, but Dorothy did continue to berate him: “If you were really Great and Powerful, you’d keep your promises!”  Meanwhile, the diminutive dog moved upstage right and pulled aside a light-weight curtain to reveal “a very good man . . .

a very bad Wizard.”  This was a happy cinematic echo of Baum’s saga, although if you watch the scene closely, you’ll observe that Terry had the hem of the curtain attached to her collar before the director called “Action!” In this manner, she was only called upon to walk in the direction of her off-camera trainer to effect “the reveal.”

A side note: It’s safe to say that Baum would have been fascinated by the Wizard’s electronic gadgetry as supplied by 1939’s Hollywood. In the original OZ book – published thirty-nine years earlier – all of the humbug’s tricks were “magicked up” out of the more prosaic elements or stunts of the time:  ventriloquism, oversize puppets, thick paper, wires, oil, animal skins, a costume, a mask, and a huge ball of cotton,.

The ensuing MGM “presentation sequence” — in which the Wizard grants the desires of Dorothy’s three friends — is, once again, a reasonable approximation of Baum’s approach, although the writers seemed to be subliminally following a dictate of the legendary George M. Cohan. The celebrated author/songwriter/performer once gave an actor in one of his plays the directorial suggestion: “Whatever you do, kid . . . serve it with a little dressing.” (The performer in question, incidentally, was Spencer Tracy.) The OZ scripters took Baum’s basic gifts to the trio – a mixture of bran, needles and pins; a sawdust-stuffed, satin heart; and a bowl of mysterious liquid – and transmogrified them into a diploma; a ticking timepiece (albeit in the correct shape); and a prideful medal. Philosophically, these gifts transmitted the same, basic tenets as did those in the book – they were just glamourized a bit for Technicolor.

For the conclusion of the presentation dialogue, Noel Langley wrote a line that has, in recent years, often been attributed to Baum. It actually never appeared in the Oz book texts, yet it certainly resounds as an unforgettably Ozzy theme of human and humane commonality: “A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.”

Back to Baum! The Wizard’s subsequent explanations to his new friends and his “premier balloonist” departure play out in much the same style as that employed by the author. In the film, Frank Morgan describes himself as “an old Kansas man myself, born and bred in the heart of the Western wilderness.” Meanwhile, the little man in the book admits to Dorothy, “I was born in Omaha” (which is pretty much next door). MGM made specific use of that Baumian information by giving the onscreen Wizard a hot air balloon grandiosely gilded with the three words: STATE FAIR/OMAHA. (As a side note: This segment in the film has given rise to a trivia inquiry that falls in and out of favor and familiarity: “What is painted on the other side of the Emerald City balloon?” The next time it comes around — and if someone asks you — just be aware that it’s a trick question; ain’t nuthin’ back there! The only actual three-dimensional balloon “set pieces” utilized in the movie are the wicker basket and its sandbags, the reinforced ropes that connect the basket to (and then extend slightly above) the ring-like cable “attachment block,” and the very narrow “mouth” or “throat” of the balloon itself. Everything else — the majority of the balloon (and its ornate lettering), the treetops and towering walls and turrets of the Emerald City, the distant countryside – is a matte crayon drawing, photographed separately and then “married” to the film of the live action scene.

At this point, the screenwriters did some further “marrying” of their own and again merged themselves with Baum’s book. Therein, the Wizard implores, “Come, Dorothy! . . . hurry up, or the balloon will fly away.” “I can’t find Toto anywhere,” she replies, and of course, she “did not wish to leave her little dog behind.” However, “Toto had run into the crowd to bark at a kitten, and Dorothy at last found him. She picked him up and ran toward the balloon.” Of course, it was just then that the Wizard’s tethering ropes snapped, and he sailed away without her. The film most naturally follows this same track, although cinematically it provides a beauteously rouged Emerald Citizen to hold the distracting feline:

The OZ motion picture then wraps up rather speedily with the arrival of Glinda and the poignant moments of our friends’ farewells. Alternatively, the Oz book places Glinda in her castle “Away to the South,” which creates another adventuresome trek for Dorothy & Co. (In the process, they move through five extra chapters and encounter fighting trees, a giant spider, the Dainty China Country, and the Hammer-Heads.) Once they arrive at Glinda’s “very beautiful” home, however, the story plays out in the same fashion as the film. Glinda knows the secret of the silver shoes: “They can carry you to any place in the world in three steps . . .. All you have to do is knock the heels together three times and command the shoes to carry you wherever you wish to go.”

Naturally, Dorothy decides to depart “at once.” In the author’s words, “She threw her arms around the Lion’s neck and kissed him, patting his big head tenderly. Then she kissed the Tin Woodman, who was weeping in a way most dangerous to his joints. But she hugged the soft, stuffed body of the Scarecrow in her arms instead of kissing his painted face, and found she was crying herself at this sorrowful parting from her loving comrades.”

Hollywood offered its own most-affecting visualization of this, and even the hardcore contemporary newspaper and magazine reporters were quick to admit it. Seventy-five members of the international press were invited to MGM for a first glimpse of OZ on August 9, 1939, and as James Francis Crow wrote the next day in the HOLLYWOOD CITIZEN-NEWS: “When the lights went up after the projection-room showing, many of the critics still had the tears in their eyes. They had been crying with . . . Judy Garland, at her farewell to the wonderful people of Oz.” He declared, “OZ is a great motion picture. It is not only a magnificent, history-making technical achievement; it is a warmly human, deeply emotional photoplay, too.”

In addition to the scripting and performances, those good-byes of the five principals were further and immeasurably enhanced — as was much of THE WIZARD OF OZ movie — by its ultimately Academy Award-winning musical score. Herbert Stothart was justifiably honored with the Oscar for OZ on February 29, 1940; a perfect example of his genius at musical composition and arrangement may be found in the music cue for the partings. “I Hereby Decree” wove the melodies of Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” and “If I Only Had a Brain” with that of the nineteenth century classic, “Home Sweet Home” by Henry Rowley Bishop.   

The Baum book swiftly concludes when Dorothy finds herself “sitting on the broad Kansas prairie.” Just ahead, she sees “the new farmhouse Uncle Henry built after the cyclone had carried away the old one. Uncle Henry was milking the cows in the barnyard . . . and Aunt Em had just come out of the house to water the cabbages.” The sober-faced, never-smiling, thin, gaunt, and gray woman of Baum’s chapter one is now nowhere in view. Instead, Em cries, “My darling child!” and folds Dorothy in her arms, repeatedly kissing her.

The movie more than duplicates this joy at Dorothy’s “return.” In the film, of course, she’s in her room, coming out of the delirium caused by a tornado-induced head injury. The too-busy Em of the earlier Kansas scenes is here replaced by an aunt who lovingly tends to the little girl in bed, applying and removing a cold compress, holding and clasping her hand, calming and reassuring her. Dorothy’s formerly preoccupied Uncle Henry stands nearby, leaning forward and concerned, but when the girl awakens, looks around, and begins to speak, he slowly stands straight and discreetly exhales in relief.

Excepting MGM’s “You’ve just had a bad dream” copout, it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch to think that Frank Baum would have joined the 1939 critics: He would have been emotionally touched, as well, by these Emerald City goodbyes and the Kansas welcome-homes; they were, as can be seen here – and however elaborated – very much extensions of his own writing.

Moving past the advance press screening on August 9 to August 15, 1939, Baum certainly would have loved the manner in which his wife, Maud Gage Baum, was honored at the actual OZ premiere in Hollywood. Frank Whitbeck served as MGM’s master of ceremonies on that occasion, and when he brought Maud up to the KMTR radio microphone in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, he declared, “Tonight, Mrs. Baum, we of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer are proud to have you here . . . to dedicate this premiere to your husband and the books he wrote – and to the happiness he brought to millions of children . . . .”

Maud was indeed thrilled, but she relished an additional joy on that occasion, and it was a reunion that Frank would have savored with her. In the Grauman’s forecourt, she encountered two long-time friends with whom she’d shared an earlier extraordinary experience: the Chicago opening night of THE WIZARD OF OZ stage musical in June 1902. One of the gentlemen was Ashton Stevens, long regarded as the dean of American drama critics. The other was Fred A. Stone, who – in the role of the Scarecrow – had been at the forefront of the magic at Chicago’s Grand Opera House, thirty-seven years in the past. (Ella Wickersham, covering the MGM premiere for the LOS ANGELES HERALD-EXAMINER, eavesdropped on the trio and wrote the next day, “It was positively heartwarming to hear [them] discussing those exciting days.”)

As was noted in the first blog of this series, Mrs. L. Frank Baum publicly stated that she was well-satisfied with MGM’s film. She wrote to OZ producer Mervyn LeRoy within a day or so of her “big night” at Grauman’s to express her gratitude; her letter appears to be lost to time, but his response is worth quoting:

“Words fail me to tell you how happy your wonderful letter made me feel. Really, from the bottom of my heart, the picture’s success is complete knowing you loved it as I do, and that you especially liked Judy, and the Tin Man and the Lion and the Scarecrow as well. But most of all, as you stated it, we were able to retain Mr. Baum’s ‘kindly philosophy’ . . . and we in turn are grateful for Mr. Baum’s wonderful and remarkable imagination which made the picture possible . . ..”

This may be a solely personal conclusion, but after getting the idea for what turned out to be these three blogs (and then assembling them over the past eight or nine weeks), I don’t think we really have to guess what Frank might have thought about the MGM movie, back then or since. More than any of the many other Ozzy components of the last one-hundred-twenty-two or eighty-three years, the Oz book series and MGM’s THE WIZARD OF OZ have doubled, tripled, quadrupled – and then multi-multiplied — their success at conveying the happiness Frank Whitbeck referenced above. By now, and whether separately or together, L. Frank Baum and Judy Garland & Company have proudly entertained and enraptured billions of children.

Uncountable billions of children.

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Among the sources consulted for this month’s blog:

Baum, L. Frank: THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ. Chicago & New York: The Geo. M. Hill Co., 1900

Kanin, Garson:  TRACY AND HEPBURN: AN INTIMATE MEMOIR. New York: Viking Press, 1971

Mantle, Burns: “Ballyhoo and Judy Garland Lure Crowds to WIZARD OF OZ; Movie Recalls 1902 Version in Chicago Theater.” THE CHICAGO SUNDAY TRIBUNE, August 27, 1939

By John Fricke

Last month’s blog was conceived as a (pretty much unarguable) celebration of the two most important factors in the world’s continuing love affair with All Things Oz. These are, of course, the original story, characters, and concepts created by L. Frank Baum for his 1900 book, THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ, and the Technicolor motion picture musical of Baum’s basic tale, produced by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio some thirty-nine years later. When that film premiered, Baum already had been dead for two decades; in February, we used this space to imagine what his reactions might have been to MGM’s efforts. There were so many points to consider and illustrate that we now continue with those thoughts — both formulated and predicated as much as is possible on fact!

(For those who might like to peruse Part One of this purely personal fancy, please scroll down to the blog immediately below this one.)

Baum himself was a life-long “theatrical,” so it’s not at all difficult to suppose he would have appreciated many of MGM’s touches, whether they were original to the studio, derived from his book, or (legally) “lifted” from his 1902 THE WIZARD OF OZ musical play. Baum’s own show business career spanned four decades, and during that time, he oversaw or produced numerous stage shows and silent movies. These efforts were — both respectively and in the extreme — dazzlingly colorful and special effects-wonderful. In fact, Baum’s first Oz films were created for his FAIRYLOGUE & RADIO PLAYS tour, and though photographed in black and white, the footage was then colorized, frame-by-frame — by hand. As a result, even it was multi-hued . . . in 1908.

The three-strip Technicolor filming process was only a few years old when MGM innovatively decided to use it for OZ. Perhaps the most imaginative aspect of their approach came with the idea of opening and closing the movie in black-and-white (bathed in warming tones of sepia in the final printing process), so as to counter those moments with the glories of full-tint as Dorothy stepped into Munchkinland. Second only to that was the studio’s resolve to change Baum’s magical silver shoes to equally mysterious ruby slippers. Red — contrasted with the blue of Judy Garland’s socks and the blue-and-while of her dress – would especially “pop” on the screen against the Yellow Brick Road; silver (or, so to speak, black-and-white) shoes would have never made the same impression. This was a plus that Baum would have immediately grasped.

The author would have marveled, as well, at Metro’s realization of his Winged Monkeys and their extraordinary recreation of a Kansas tornado. Both innovations grew out of teamwork on the part of multiple studio departments, designers, and crews. Their labors included aspects of special effects (a division masterminded by A. Arnold Gillespie), unique costuming, trick photography and process photography, and the creation of elaborate inventions, set pieces, and props in wide-ranging dimensions. Among other “assemblages,” there were battery-packed actors wearing wings, jockeys and other diminutive men garbed as primates and suspended by piano wire from soundstage rafters, wind machines, dust machines, yards of muslin wrapped around a thirty-five-foot-long concoction of chicken wire. . . and on and on. (Baum “flew” several characters in his silent OZ films and made excellent use of trick camera work, as well, but such efforts were both far superior and infinitely more complicated in color in 1938-39.)

As noted, these were one and all Baum inventions. Yet as the monkeys, slippers, and “cyclone” continue to overwhelm all ages today – one-hundred-twenty-two years after the original book and eighty-three years after the movie – it’s fair to assume that Baum, too, would have been impressed by what had been wrought from his imagination and words on a printed page.

MGM also made “original” visual contributions to the OZ story, including the skywriting of the Wicked Witch of the West and based on early “aeroplane” maneuvers first practiced toward the end of Baum’s own lifetime. My feeling is that he would have relished that but drawn even more pleasure from another of the studio’s contrivances: the genial and strikingly versatile mammal enjoyed by Dorothy and her friends when they first arrived at the Emerald City:

Beyond all this, there were countless other Baum-based touches that Metro incorporated into their OZ – whether the particular elements were directly drawn from the author’s ingenuity or adapted from his apparently limitless inspirations. The on-screen realization of so many of his ideas, whether major or minor, surely would have resonated in his heart and pride had he seen MGM’s adaptation.

For example, we’re told in the first pages of Baum’s primary text that Aunt Em “never smiled” and Uncle Henry “never laughed.” They, in effect, “worked hard from morning until night and did not know what joy was.” Although slightly leavened for their MGM incarnations and initial on-screen moments, Clara Blandick and Charley Grapewin were also anxiously preoccupied with farm worries when Dorothy arrived home “in a fret”; their busyness with the “old incubator. . . gone bad” found them distracted, unable to sympathize with the girl, and hard at work to save their chicks:

When the screenwriters set up the sequence, however, there was a further serendipity that MGM couldn’t have realized: Baum himself had experienced a glowing and prime reputation as a knowledgeable chicken breeder! According to preeminent Baum historian Michael Patrick Hearn, the author-to-be (while in his early twenties) began his exploration in “the care and management of fancy,” exotic, and ultimately prize-winning fowl. He “ambitiously founded his own commercial journal, THE POULTRY RECORD, in March 1880”; his five-part series on the Hamburg strain of chickens in 1882 was later brought together and published in 1886 as THE BOOK OF THE HAMBURGS. Per Hearn, this was “the first [volume] to ever carry on its title page the line ‘by L. Frank Baum.’”

Moving on: As most Oz fans are aware, THE WIZARD OF OZ book features two Good Witches. One is a lovely elderly woman known only as the Good Witch of the North; it is she who first welcomes Dorothy on her arrival in Oz. The other is a young and beautiful redhead, who sends Dorothy back to Kansas at the end of the story: Glinda, the Good Witch of the South. MGM, of course, conflated the two characters, casting the red-haired, fifty-four-year-old Billie Burke as Glinda and titling her the Good Witch of the North. With that change of the character’s directional and her own advanced years, Ms. Burke has seldom (across all the decades) been embraced as the ideal Glinda by strict Oz book devotees. Looking back at 1939, however, she — in her own way – lived up to the reaction the sorceress inspired in Dorothy and her friends when they first met her in Baum’s text. As he writes, Glinda “was both beautiful and young to their eyes.”

This is borne out by comments in some of the very first press reviews garnered by THE WIZARD OF OZ, and they certainly concurred with Baum’s descriptive line above. The Los Angeles TIMES found Miss Burke “indeed skillful casting. [She] might have stepped out of Baum’s literary make-believe. She appears almost like a being eternally young.” Louella O. Parsons in the Los Angeles EXAMINER was even more fulsome in her gush: “[She] looks like a twenty-year-old . . . a delight to the eye.”

Ms. Burke was recalled in an even closer, more personal contact by Karl Slover, who took multiple roles in the Munchkinland sequence of OZ. (By his own accounting, Karl’s assignments included appearances as the first trumpeter — preceding the entrance of the Mayor — as well as work as a Munchkin soldier, townsman, and townswoman!) Some fifty-five years after filming OZ, Karl remembered the on- and off-camera contrast in Billie Burke’s appearance: “She came in like an old woman, with a cane. I thought, ‘My gosh, she must be one-hundred-years old – or close to it.’ But when I saw her all dressed up [and] made up, she looked like she was about thirty-five! She looked beautiful – I mean BEAUTIFUL!”

Attendant to this same portion of THE WIZARD OF OZ story, Baum reported that only the Good Witch of the North and three Munchkin gentlemen actually appeared as Dorothy’s meet-and-greet committee when the girl first stepped out of her farmhouse. The motion picture, of course, turned the event into a musical extravaganza involving more than one-hundred-twenty on-camera participants. Yet the latter tactic was also Baum-founded. At the end of her first day in Oz — after Dorothy and Toto departed down the Yellow Brick Road for the Emerald City – Baum wrote that she “began to wonder where she should pass the night, [until] she came to a house rather larger than the” other Munchkin dwellings she had thus far seen en route. “On the green lawn before it, many men and women were dancing. Five little fiddlers played as loudly as possible, and the people were laughing and singing . . . to celebrate their freedom from the bondage of the [W]icked [W]itch [of the East].” Recognizing Dorothy as their national heroine, they invited her to join them to eat and spend the night, as “this was the home of one of the richest Munchkins in the land” – a gentleman who then personally waited on the girl himself. (Baum gave his name as “Boq,” a factoid sure to stir any WICKED book or musical aficionados who might be reading here.)

In their own manner, then, MGM compressed Baum’s description of Dorothy’s first day in Oz — from arrival into the evening — yet duly incorporated all of it into the first production number of their movie. Crowds of Munchkins danced and sang in celebration of their freedom from slavery – and even the five little fiddlers eventually led a musical procession:

Returning again to Baum: The next morning, a few hours (or a few paragraphs) later, as Dorothy continued her walk, she came to “a great cornfield,” and met the Scarecrow. Although MGM’s set decoration was merely a movie plot point and probably not meant as an identifiable Baum homage, there was a physical crossroads created for this scene, where Judy Garland’s character discovered a second yellow brick lane. Baum’s later Oz books, particularly THE PATCHWORK GIRL OF OZ (1913), offered proof of an additional such paved pathway in the Munchkin Country, although we’re not told (nor do the official maps of Oz indicate) that the two byways ever coincide. Yet such alignment in the film enabled the girl and Scarecrow to – in best movie fashion – “meet cute,” as he is the one who is able to ultimately point out the correct route to the capital.

Earlier in this entry, there was a brief discussion of Baum’s early days of chicken breeding. This personal hobby continued and evolved across the years, as “Ozcot” — his final home in Hollywood — boasted an enormous rear garden, where he bred not only fowl but champion flowers, as well. Per TO PLEASE A CHILD, the first Baum biography, the Baum backyard also included “a circular aviary almost twelve feet in diameter and containing a constantly running fountain.” Therein, “Baum kept several hundred songbirds and brilliantly colored members of the feathered kingdom. These were the companions of his hours while he sat in the summer house, penning a new story.” One might then imagine the author’s quiet bemusement at the birds of MGM’s OZ: not just the hypothetical, odd-looking (and oddly-shrieking and cawing) denizens of the Haunted Forest, but especially the more brightly-hued live toucan on the tree branch and the live peacock behind the fence as Dorothy and the Scarecrow sauntered into view of the apple orchard.

(Pay no attention to that witch behind the tree trunk . . ..)

A side note: Contemporary MGM publicity proclaimed that the studio “rented” the toucan, peacock, and others from the financially strapped Zoo Park in Los Angeles. It purportedly fell to OZ director Victor Fleming to select an appropriate few (from among some three hundred birds) to appear as background atmosphere amidst the trees of the orchard. Another of Fleming’s apparent choices, an oversize Sarus crane, is later seen further upstage at the end of this segment of the film; it’s the wing-flapping of that crane that has evolved into the preposterous saga of a visible, “hanging Munchkin” on a WIZARD OF OZ set.

The apple trees in MGM’s orchard offer another instance of the studio’s “Baum utilization.” Late in THE WIZARD OF OZ saga, Baum depicts a grove of fighting trees, one of whose branches “bent down and twined around [the Scarecrow], and the next minute, he was raised from the ground and flung headlong among his fellow travelers.” The straw man then approached a second tree, with the same result. Metro placed combative trees earlier on in their cinematic version of Baum’s tale, and those in the movie were a trifle more sedentary. Their unexpected conversation, selfish fruit fixation, and expert apple tossing, however, certainly provided active hostility to challenge both the Scarecrow AND Dorothy. (They also inadvertently and conveniently led the girl to discover the rusted Tin Woodman.)

A brief you-are-there! moment to conclude this month’s blog: Little Karl Slover had his own unsettling encounter with one of MGM’s apple trees. During a rehearsal break for the Munchkinland sequence of the OZ movie, he and several fellow actors were taken to an adjoining soundstage to see the orchard set. Slover never forgot his astonishment at the sight, especially as he was compelled to exclaim to a companion, “That durn tree just made a face at me!” The friend was doubtful and dismissive: “There’s no such of a thing as that,” but Slover maintained, “I know what I saw!” A moment later, the friend wonderingly apologized: “That durn tree just made a face at ME, too!” The Metro technician acting as their guide then laughingly explained to the little people that “There’s a man in each tree, and they’re practicing” for their upcoming scene with Judy’s Dorothy and Ray Bolger’s Scarecrow.

There’s – also — still a lot to discuss, and my space is just about “up” for March. I hope you’ll welcome a third (and, I promise, concluding) episode of “What Might Frank Have Thought?” next month.

And, as ever, we appreciate the fact that you’re here — whether you’re looking at the artwork or reading the text or both! 😊

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Sources referenced above:

Baum, Frank Joslyn and Russell P. MacFall: TO PLEASE A CHILD (Chicago: Reilly & Lee Co., 1961)

Baum, L[yman]. Frank: THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ (Chicago: The George M. Hill Co., 1900)

Hearn, Michael Patrick: “L. Frank Baum: Chicken Fancier,” THE BAUM BUGLE, Autumn 1986 (Volume 30, Number 2), pps. 23-25. Journal of The International Wizard of Oz Club, Inc.: ozclub.org

Slover, Karl: Interview conducted by John Fricke for the home video documentary, WE’RE OFF TO SEE THE MUNCHKINS. Portage, IN: September 1993