Oz and Ends

In my Characters of Oz essay “A Good Man but a Bad Wizard?: The Shifting Moral Character of the Wizard of Oz,” I took the opportunity to talk about L. Frank Baum’s successful characterizations in general:

Baum built most of his best characters around contradictions. Ozma looks and plays like a young girl, but she is a dedicated monarch and, later books say, a powerful fairy. The Scarecrow and the Patchwork Girls are literally dummies made of cloth, straw, and cotton, yet they are among the most intelligent people in Oz. The Tin Woodman is metallic but warm-hearted. The Shaggy Man is a hobo proud of his ragged appearance. Jack Pumpkinhead is a tall man with the mind of a child. Tik-Tok the robot is utterly reliable and liable to run down at any moment. Even Dorothy is a paradox, a simple little girl who spends most of the first books in the series deposing one ruler after another like Napoleon sweeping through Europe.

Resolving those paradoxes, Baum came to understand, rendered the characters far less interesting. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz settled the contradiction inherent in the personality of the Cowardly Lion by dosing him with courage, leaving him as a stereotypically brave lion ruling the forest. That character was no longer as compelling, and he had no role in the next book. When Baum brought the Lion back in Ozma of Oz, the first thing the character says is to assure Dorothy and readers that he’s “As cowardly as ever.”

(That’s my original text. The printed page says, “Tik-Tok the robot is utterly unreliable,” shifting the contradictory fulcrum within the sentence by a couple of words. I’d never want to call Tik-Tok that when he could hear me—i.e., when he’s wound up. It’s not his fault that other people neglect to wind him.)

Of course, in the essay I then had to tackle why Baum resolved the interesting contradiction he originally built into the character of the humbug wizard by making him a real wizard. And does that make the Wizard uninteresting?

The comics universe of The Legend of Oz: The Wicked Witch and Legends of Oz: The Scarecrow will expand a little this summer as publisher Big Dog Ink releases a comics miniseries subtitled Tik-Tok and the Kalidah this summer.

As created by Tom Hutchinson, this comics continuity “mashes up the Land of Oz with a classic Western,” in the words of Rob Anderson. Anderson pitched the idea of Tik-Tok, the mechanical man, as a bounty hunter in that universe.

Tik-Tok’s partner is a kalidah, a creature L. Frank Baum invented in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Kalidahs are crosses between bears and tigers. They’re smart, they’re nasty, they’re carnivorous. They can swim like ducks. Their king knows a bit of magic. In sum, they’re extremely dangerous. And it’s hard to imagine a kalidah partnering up with anyone except another kalidah.

The miniseries is scripted by Anderson and Keith Thomas, with art by Renato Rei and Ceci de la Cruz. It looks like they’ve redesigned Tik-Tok significantly. It’s harder to tweak a kalidah.

This figurine is based on Tik-Tok in Return to Oz.

It was crafted by Alessio or Ale Buz, an Italian artist who works in polymer clay sculpture. It’s part of a small set of Oz figurines.

Alessio has molded similar figures of many other fantasy figures. His style seems to work particularly well with characters from Jim Henson’s Labyrinth.

This week I pledged in a Kickstarter campaign for a production of The Tik-Tok Man of Oz, first shown in 1913-14, at this summer’s Winkie Convention in San Diego.

I’m attending that convention (in fact, I’m helping with the daytime programming), so I’m already going to reap the benefit of this production. But I admired producer Eric Shanower’s theatricality in a bare-bones ballet adaptation of The Road to Oz a few years back, so I thought this show would be worth a real ticket price.

As a celebrated artist, Eric had the ability to offer a very rare incentive for a large pledge: a “20"x24" original painting by Eric Shanower of 30 major Oz characters.” Having just one person sign up for that reward would have brought the campaign two-thirds of the way to its goal. I assumed that was the sort of pie-in-the-sky level that Kickstarter campaigns offer people in order to make the next level down seem less expensive.

Instead, two people have signed up for that grand reward, putting the campaign over the top and producing an unusual pattern in the pledges. Recent Kickstarter campaigns for a documentary film titled “Who Stole the Ruby Slippers?” (still ongoing) and a “Shadow of Oz” tarot deck (which just made its goal) seem to have a more common distribution, with most people pledging in the low and middle tiers and nobody offering four-figure sums.

The demand indicated by this pledge pattern for Tik-Tok Man would make me seriously think about doing nothing but original paintings of 30 major Oz characters.

In 1980 the Muller Rosen animation company released a half-hour holiday special for television titled Thanksgiving in the Land of Oz. That show was then recut to remove the Thanksgiving references and released on video as Dorothy in the Land of Oz; as of this holiday, it can be watched in two parts on YouTube. In 1982 Romeo Muller adapted his screenplay into a short illustrated book titled Dorothy and the Green Gobbler of Oz.

Like most Oz videos in the television age, this cartoon was written to invoke MGM’s Wizard of Oz. Dorothy meets the Wizard in Kansas again, the Cowardly Lion is bipedal, there are songs, and so on. But the filmmakers also obviously knew the Oz books and used them as inspiration for characters, settings, and plots points, albeit without being faithful to those books.

Thus, for example, just as in L. Frank Baum’s original novel and the MGM movie, Dorothy and Toto accidentally travel to Oz and meet three male companions who help her on a quest to vanquish a villain. One of those companions is an animated refugee from a farm, another made of metal, and the third a big carnivore with gentle habits. But in this movie those characters are Jack Pumpkinhead, Tic Toc [sic], and the Hungry Tiger, whom Baum introduced in different ways in his second and third Oz books.

Jack lives in a pumpkin house, as John R. Neill drew it in The Road to Oz. Other Oz houses resembles those he and W. W. Denslow designed, and a sequence of children opening Christmas presents owes a lot to Denslow’s art, rendered with less character. However, a trip over a rainbow at the end is clearly inspired by the MGM movie’s most famous song.

The end of the cartoon shows Ozma as rightful ruler of the Emerald City, but there’s no explanation of how she came to the throne. This Ozma seems much older than Dorothy and more like the Glinda of the movie.

Another element that the filmmakers borrowed from Baum’s books appears at the start: Uncle Henry and Aunt Em are about to lose their farm to the bank. The couple plans to go into an “old folks’ home” while Dorothy will have to live somewhere far away with a cousin—perhaps Zeb Hugson from Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz. This is a better fate than what Baum wrote about in The Emerald City of Oz, which suggested Dorothy would have to go to work while her aged relatives might end up begging. Still, it was probably a shock to many viewers.

The big-name star of the production is Sid Caesar, who plays the Wizard and narrates the story in that role. Caesar also plays a mince pie that’s brought to life, takes the name U.N. Krust, and delivers every line in a different foreign accent. The pie and its speech patterns play no role in the plot; they seem to have been included just to put Caesar’s shtick to use. We haven’t seen so much ethnic humor in an Oz adaptation since the 1903 Broadway show.

Another notable casting detail: Joan Gerber supplied the voices for both Ozma and Tic Toc.

The cartoon includes a couple of forgettable songs. Dorothy uses one to convert the villain back into a benevolent toymaker, and at the same time deliver a paean to Christmas shopping. In that respect, this modestly produced special was a perfect start to commercial television’s holiday season.

Here’s the late, great Maurice Sendak on the power of the MGM Wizard of Oz, from the pages of the New York Times:

“Children make crucial decisions at that point,” he said, “and it happens in the wink of an eye. It’s those crucial seconds when the mother and father can’t watch. This was so absolutely, beautifully, rendered for me when I was very young and I saw ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ There’s a scene that I think was a little bit St. Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus for me. It was near the end of the movie, when Dorothy is imprisoned in the room with the Wicked Witch, and the witch takes the hourglass and turns it over and says: You see that? That’s how much longer you’ve got to be alive.

“And Dorothy says, I’m frightened, I’m frightened, and then the crystal ball shows Auntie Em, and Auntie Em is saying, Dorothy, Dorothy, where are you? and Dorothy hovers over it and says: I’m here in Oz, Auntie Em. I’m locked up in the witch’s castle. Don’t go away, I’m frightened. And I remember that when my sister took me I burst into tears. I knew just what it meant, which was that a mother and child can be in the same room and want to help each other, and they cannot. Even though they were face to face, the crystal ball separated them. Something separates people now and then. And I think it’s that moment that interests me, and compels me.”

When Disney was planning a quasi-sequel to that movie, the studio hired Sendak to help design it. Ultimately he had little to do with Return to Oz, but he did produce this poster for the publicity campaign. This image is from Surrender Dorothy’s Etsy site.
I’m not sure who the somewhat sinister gent on the right is supposed to be.

Sendak also drew the more cheery cover art for Books of Wonder’s Oz: The Hundredth Anniversary Celebration. But why would the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman have eating utensils?

If you’re in the mood for Ozzy holiday decorating, check out this posting from John Nickolaus’s Adventures in Oz blog. I suspect that’s one of Karyl Carlson’s handmade Woozy dolls; I keep mine at my bedside.

The effort of creating that holiday display might have worn Mr. Nickolaus out since he hasn’t posted much more, but he left quite a bit to explore in just those images.

More recently, Bill Campbell at the Oz Enthusiast has shared pictures of his handmade Jack Pumpkinhead and Sawhorse and Tik-Tok, to go along with the Scarecrow and Scraps.

I prefer to decorate vicariously by posting links like these. Otherwise, it seems too much like work.

From Tom De Haven’s authorized novel It’s Superman!:

Clark Kent is more than just passingly familiar with robots.

As a boy, he read all of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels, and from his introduction in Ozma of Oz, Tik-Tok the Clockwork Man became Clark’s favorite of all the series characters.

I’m still mulling over the rest of It’s Superman! Usually the tension in Superman coming-of-age stories is between Smallville and Metropolis. De Haven takes the whole country as his setting, with episodes in Hollywood and elsewhere, and Clark and Lois ending up in La Guardia’s New York instead of its shiny comic-book stand-in.

Among other touches I think are new is Clark as science-fiction fan. A Kansas boy of the 1920s reading the Oz books makes sense. Clark writing sci-fi stories like Jerry Siegel—that made me pause.

Nathan DeHoff today posed several questions of how physics works in the land of Oz and surrounding countries, with the general conclusion that it’s questionable.

One particular matter is the tunnel through the center of the Earth depicted in Tik-Tok of Oz, redundantly called the Hollow Tube. The Nome King tricks all the book’s heroes into falling into one end of the tunnel, and they exit the other end like this:

Tik-Tok popped out into broad daylight and, after making a graceful circle in the air, fell with a splash into a great marble fountain. . . .

Queen Ann sailed up from the Tube, took a ride through the air as high as the treetops, and alighted squarely on top of the Peculiar Person’s head…

Later in the book, Quox the adolescent dragon takes all those heroes on his back and crawls into that end of the tunnel. When Quox comes out,

he shot into the open air a hundred feet or more and sailed so far away from the slanting hole that when he landed it was on the peak of a mountain and just over the entrance to the many underground caverns of the Nome King.

Does that accord with the laws of physics? Martin Gardner addressed that very question in The Annotated Alice, in his discussion of Alice’s fall into the Earth. And the basic answer is: gravity doesn’t work like that.

In a frictionless environment, people would travel exactly as far from the center of the Earth as they traveled down into it. Tik-Tok and his companions fall into the tunnel while hiking through some mountains, so conceivably they’re at a higher altitude, farther from the center of the Earth, than the garden at the other end. That would make it possible for them to pop up to some height on the other side and, with some wind and movement of the Earth, not fall right back down into the Tube.

But there are two problems with that scientific explanation:

• The return journey wouldn’t work at all. Starting from the garden, Quox wouldn’t fall far enough to reach the other end of the tunnel as he rose, much less fly out the other side.
• The tunnel is not a frictionless environment. In fact, Quox slows himself down by scraping his claws against the Tube’s inner walls.

In an environment with friction, Gardner wrote, air resistance would slow the travelers enough that they wouldn’t rise as far as they had fallen. They would therefore fall back down into the tunnel, pass the center of the Earth again, and rise not quite as far as where they had started from. Those unfortunate folks would continue to oscillate for many trips of decreasing length until coming to a stop at the gravitational center of the Earth.

So what explanation is there for how the Hollow Tube works? I can only assume that it’s magic. It does, after all, run from one fairyland to another, and the Nome King can even shift the opening around.

When creator Hiergargo the Magician first used the tunnel, according to Polychrome the rainbow fairy, “he tumbled through the Tube so fast that he shot out at the other end and hit a star in the sky, which at once exploded.” That hints that Hiergargo juiced the Tube with magic to make the journey faster, and some residual or revised magic might remain.

L. Frank Baum admired science, deliberately mixed it into his fairy tales, and even wrote a bit of science fiction. Occasionally he got some things remarkably right, but he never worked in the field, and never really treated science as more than a jumping-off point.

Saturday’s Oz-book allusion appeared in the heading for the post, which quoted this passage from L. Frank Baum’s Tik-Tok of Oz, describing the heroes’ overmatched assault on the Nome Kingdom, spearheaded by a clockwork robot:

It was now Queen Ann’s turn to attack, so the Generals yelled “Forward march!” and the Colonels and Majors and Captains repeated the command and the valiant Army of Oogaboo, which seemed to be composed mainly of Tik-Tok, marched forward in single column toward the nomes, while Betsy and Polychrome cheered and Hank gave a loud “Hee-haw!” and Shaggy shouted “Hooray!” and Queen Ann screamed: “At ’em, Tik-Tok—at ’em!”

The nomes did not await the Clockwork Man’s attack but in a twinkling disappeared into the underground caverns. They made a great mistake in being so hasty, for Tik-Tok had not taken a dozen steps before he stubbed his copper toe on a rock and fell flat to the ground, where he cried: “Pick me up! Pick me up! Pick me up!” until Shaggy and Files ran forward and raised him to his feet again.

The lesson of this part of Tik-Tok of Oz is that when you’re planning an attack on a magical kingdom with an immense number of warriors, and your own forces include a large dragon who’s been equipped by an incredibly powerful enchanter, you should let the dragon go first.

It's rare that I see my stated interests mirrored so uncannily, but the venerable LiveJournal community scans_daily has just offered, one after the other:

• DC's preview images of the next Nightwing comic book, featuring a (brief) tussle between the once and current Robins.
• Pages from Oz Squad #6, a 1991 comic book featuring the Scarecrow of Oz meeting the Leonardo of Vinci.

And since it seems only fair, I'm offering links to the Mythographical blog of Steve Ahlquist, who wrote those issues of Oz Squad and has posted those scans and many more. His annotated collection of that pioneering Oz comic is now on sale.

The image up top, drawn by Andrew Murphy, comes from that first Oz Squad comic, and shows what made it so controversial among Oz fans. On the one hand, nobody likes the idea of a murderous Tik-Tok. On the other, the mechanical man is talking just as he does in The Road to Oz when his thinking runs down, showing how well Ahlquist knows the books. The twist in the comic book is that the problem's affected Tik-Tok's ethical thinking as well.

It's been over a week since my last Oz-related post, which seems far too long. So I'm sharing one of my favorite passages from The Road to Oz.

This is from the chapter in which all tension drains merrily from the book. Though Dorothy and her companions haven't gotten home yet, none is now under enchantment and it becomes clear that her powerful friend Ozma is looking after them. In other words, there's no reason for readers to worry about them any longer. Yet it's only chapter 14 out of 24, so what can possibly draw us through the rest of the book?

Despite that apparent weakness, The Road to Oz was one of my elementary-school favorites, and I've heard several other people mention it as a favorite as well. I think the key to its appeal is that, no longer worrying about plot, Baum focused all his attention on bringing out the vivid personalities of his characters. The Emerald City favorites never seem more real than in the final chapters of this book because Baum displays their foibles and failings as well as their strengths; we can weigh both and feel reassured of their appeal.

One example of how Baum added new layers to established characters appears in this little exchange between Dorothy and Tik-Tok, the mechanical man. Introduced a couple of books earlier in Ozma of Oz, Tik-Tok has separate mechanisms for thinking, speaking, and moving. Throughout that earlier book he had a tendency to freeze, calling for help until his speech failed. But Dorothy is pleased with him nonetheless.

"This," [Dorothy said,] turning to her traveling companions, "is Mr. Tik-tok, who works by machinery 'cause his thoughts wind up, and his talk winds up, and his action winds up--like a clock." . . .

The copper man bowed low, removing his copper hat as he did so.

"I'm ve-ry pleased to meet Dor-o-thy's fr-r-r-r---" Here he stopped short.

"Oh, I guess his speech needs winding!" said the little girl, running behind the copper man to get the key off a hook at his back. She wound him up at a place under his right arm and he went on to say:

"Par-don me for run-ning down. I was a-bout to say I am pleased to meet Dor-o-thy's friends, who must be my friends." The words were somewhat jerky, but plain to understand.

"...how did you happen to be here, in the Country of the Winkies, the first of all to meet us?"

"I'll tell you," answered Tik-tok, in his monotonous voice, all the sounds of his words being on one level--"Prin-cess Oz-ma saw you in her mag-ic pic-ture, and knew you were com-ing here; so she sent Bil-lin-a and me to wel-come you as she could not come her-self; so that--fiz-i-dig-le cum-so-lut-ing hy-ber-gob-ble in-tu-zib-ick--"

"Good gracious! Whatever's the matter now?" cried Dorothy, as the copper man continued to babble these unmeaning words, which no one could understand at all because they had no sense.

"Don't know," said Button-Bright, who was half scared. Polly whirled away to a distance and turned to look at the copper man in a fright.

"His thoughts have run down, this time," remarked Billina composedly, as she sat on Tik-tok's shoulder and pruned her sleek feathers. "When he can't think, he can't talk properly, any more than you can. You'll have to wind up his thoughts, Dorothy, or else I'll have to finish his story myself."

Dorothy ran around and got the key again and wound up Tik-tok under his left arm, after which he could speak plainly again.

"Par-don me," he said, "but when my thoughts run down, my speech has no mean-ing, for words are formed on-ly by thought."

If only my iPod Shuffle were that easy to reboot when it freezes.