The Wizard of Oz

On the data. Three things. The 1939 film is not the book. The most significant change is the ending: in the novel Oz is a real place that Dorothy genuinely visits, and the silver shoes she wears get left behind there. The film makes it all a dream and the shoes ruby, because ruby looked better in Technicolor. Everything downstream, including Wicked, inherits the film's version rather than Baum's. There are about forty Oz books and Baum wrote fourteen of them. After he died in 1919 his publisher continued the series with other authors, chiefly Ruth Plumly Thompson, who wrote nineteen. Those later books are officially part of the series and are much less read. The copyright situation explains the volume of adaptations. Baum's books are in the public domain, so anyone can make an Oz film. The 1939 MGM film is not, which is why later films avoid its specific inventions, most famously the ruby slippers. Wicked has three layers and they differ sharply. Gregory Maguire's 1995 novel is an adult book about complicity and political violence. The 2003 musical keeps the premise and makes it a friendship story. The 2024 and 2025 films adapt the musical, not the novel. People who love the musical and pick up the book are often taken aback. Return to Oz, from 1985, is the adaptation people rediscover. It adapts the second and third books, it is genuinely frightening, and it flopped completely on release.

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