Recent Visits to Oz

Ozma of Oz, one of the 20th century's
earliest transgendered characters. Isn't she fabulous?

I finally did get around to seeing the current film Oz The Great and Powerful in IMAX and 3-D. The prequel to classic MGM film The Wizard of Oz purports to tell the story of how the Wiz got to the enchanted land long before Dorothy. The production design was beautiful and I'm glad I saw it in 3-D, but you don't need to spend the extra $10 for IMAX, at least not in the theater I went to on 34th Street in Manhattan.

The mythology put forth conflicts with that of L. Frank Baum's Oz books and Gregory Maguire's Wicked series. Yes, for those who don't know there are about 40 Oz books altogether. Baum wrote 14 of them and Ruth Plumly Thompson carried on after his death. She stopped in 1939 and others carried on periodically after that. In the new movie, James Franco as the Wizard has affairs (or stays up all night "dancing") with both the Wicked Witches of the East and West and does some serious canoodling with Glinda the Good Witch of the South. The good witch of the North is missing. In the Baum books, the Wiz unseats the rightful ruler, a fairy baby named Ozma, who is turned by enchantment into a boy. Outside of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Ozma is probably literature's most famous transgendered character. In The Land of Oz, the first book after the Wizard of Oz, the transformed Ozma, now named Trot, goes on an adventure with Jack Pumpkinhead, and is eventually re-assigned by Glinda to his/her original form. "I'm the same as I was before," she explained to the astonished Ozites,"only now I'm a girl." And a fairy to boot. This was in 1904, long before LGBTQ issues were on anyone's mind.