ABSTRACT
At the end of the classic film The Wizard of Oz (1939, Hollywood, Metro Goldwyn Mayer), Dorothy and her companions finally reach the Emerald City and are granted an audience with the Wizard. The Wizard is a terrifying apparition – a huge disembodied head with a booming voice, surrounded by gluts of flames. Toto, Dorothy's dog, goes to a booth on one side of the audience hall and pulls back a curtain to reveal a little wizened man manipulating a set of levers and controls. The man's face bears a remarkable resemblance to the Wizard and we discover that the awe-inspiring Wizard is in fact an illusion being cast by a small-time magician from the real world. When Dorothy returns to Kansas, we see that her companions in OZ, the Tin Man, the Straw Man and the Cowardly Lion, all bear remarkable resemblances to three kindly hired hands on the farm (and the Wicked Witch of the West to rich old Miss Almira Gulch who wanted to have Toto put down). As the film showed with the transition from black-and-white to colour, when Dorothy awoke in Munchkin Land, OZ was (is?) a marvellous, rather dangerous, land that certainly isn’t Kansas and in which the rules of the real world do not apply. At the end we are left musing if OZ was a dream of a tornado-concussed Dorothy. In a way, whether or not is irrelevant since Dorothy has learnt much from her time there (not just ‘There's no place like home.’) and we hope that this knowledge will stay with her. 1
