The Wonderful Wizard of Oz/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


See also:

The original book

  • Adaptation Displacement: The MGM movie adaptation is much better known than the Oz books. Some of the more recent sequels to The Wizard of Oz—such as Wicked—are based on the movie and not the book version.
  • Applicability: See the entry for the details.
  • Non Sequitur Scene: 'The Dainty China Country' chapter in the original book features Dorothy and her companions finding a town where the houses, animals, and citizens are all made out of china. Some, such as the accident-prone clown, Mr. Joker, have been broken and mended several times. Nothing of any relevance to the story happens here—the china citizens neither help nor hinder the protagonists—and after Dorothy and her friends leave, it's never mentioned again.
    • It's more or less accepted that it only exists to lengthen the journey from point A to point B. It does make you wonder why they bothered to go over the wall instead of around it, as would be sensible.
  • Broken Base: The fandom is largely split between fans of the books and fans of the MGM movie. And that's not counting residents of the former Soviet Union, whose experience comes mostly from Volkov's adaptation, Tales of the Magic Land.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: The Wicked Witch of the West being played by Margaret Hamilton really helped this.
  • Fanon Name: Other authors have given the names "Elphaba", "Evillene" and "Bastinda" for the Wicked Witch of the West in their versions of Oz.
  • Nightmare Fuel: How the Tin Man got his parts, or rather, how he lost them. Also, when he meets up with his disembodied head. His former and sentient disembodied head; as he has a tin replacement now.
    • When the Wicked Witch commands her airborne simian lackeys to destroy the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow and Dorothy and make the Cowardly Lion into her prisoner.
  • Older Than They Think: Movie fans are often surprised to learn that The Wizard of Oz is based on a book that was published in 1900 and the book had sequels published over the span of 50 years.
  • Sequelitis: Baum wrote thirteen more books about Oz. While some were quite good, a lot just got very formulaic.

The anime series

  • Non Sequitur Scene: The visit to the land of the Cuttenclips that takes up most of episode 44 and has no effect whatever on the rest of the plot. (It's a holdover from the book that section is based on, The Emerald City of Oz, which includes an extended sequence of Dorothy visiting various strange lands in and around Oz.)
  • Moe: Dorothy
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz/YMMV?oldid=1745512"