The girls and I have been rereading L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz. We read it just over a year ago, then decided to read The Wizard of Oz and The Marvelous Land of Oz, followed by the short Woggle-Bug Book. Then they wanted to hear Ozma of Oz already again, just because they want to do them in order. Between our first and second readings of Ozma, the girls were avidly following Eric Shanower’s comics adaptation of that book, so they really know it well by now.
Shanower’s version shows the characters other than how they’ve imagined them, but it didn’t jar them at all, as he follows the books’ plots very closely his adaptations.
Just as theatergoers these days are as likely to know Oz from the musical Wicked as from the 1939 MGM movie, Mabel & Sally are aware of the famous John R. Neill illustrations of Baum’s original Oz books, but much more familiar with Shanower’s. The Kindle edition of the Oz books which I read to them from—all 15 or so in the series, for just a few bucks—doesn’t have any illustrations at all.
The supporting characters and regional villains are what Oz books are all about, though Baum learned that they couldn’t quite carry the series by themselves. Ozma marks the return of Dorothy Gale as heroine; she was absent from Marvelous Land. Ozma was in that one, but mostly in her enchanted guise as Tip, a young boy unaware that he’s actually a beautiful princess inside. (It is my belief that the gay men who label themselves “Friends of Dorothy” should more accurately be called “Empathizers of Ozma.”) Marvelous Land features a motley crew of supernaturally charged stragglers—a figure made of sticks with a pumpkin for a head; a sawhorse; a winged beast with no limbs and a couch for a body—who would not be alive if not for magic powder. There’s also the Woggle-Bug, a know-it-all irritant whose cultural brethren of later generations would seem to include Jeremy Boob from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and Yoda from Star Wars.
Ozma’s cast includes a talking chicken named Bill, whose name Dorothy changes to Billina because the hen is female. The first villains encountered are The Wheelers, who have wheels instead of hands and feet and could be one of the street gangs in Walter Hill’s The Warriors.
Best of all is Tik-Tok, an all-metal mechanical man, from a time before the word “Robot” had even been invented. Baum presents Tik-Tok’s speech by inserting lots of hyphens between syllables. He’s anticipated not just artificial intelligence but the very invention on which I read Ozma of Oz to my daughters: when I read Tik-Tok’s chatter aloud, it breaks up into monotonous word-bites which sound just like the Kindle’s own text-to-speech function. Perhaps if I tire of reading to them, the Kindle can take over, and all Tik-Tok’s talk will sound just right.