Hey, guys...

Yeah, the move went well, but sadly, I've found little time to devote to my Oz projects. (That latest podcast I need to finish editing keeps looming at me... My guests on it have been very gracious...) I couldn't switch jobs, so my time to get to work and back greatly increased. (Two and a half times?) That might change soon, though.

Anyways, I do look around on the IMDb message board for the MGM movie, and one poster asked what the message of the movie was. Here was my reply:

The book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written simply to entertain children ("Modern education provides morality," noted Baum in the introduction, "therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales..."). There are many, many messages people have read into it, many of which work. Some people want to see LGBT messages, some anti-religious, some Theosophist, and some take the story at face value. My thought is Baum was more interested in telling a story than making a takeaway message. No one ever reads so deeply into his other books, though...

The movie definitely did stress the "There's no place like home" message (a concept only touched on in the book rather early on), but I think it shares the book's "multiple messages" trait.

Contest winner to be announced tomorrow... But there's still time to enter!