MGM's The Wizard of Oz gets a new rating

 So, over in the UK, MGM's musical film The Wizard of Oz is getting reissued to theaters.

As a part of the process of reissuing the film, it is sent to the BBFC—the British Board of Film Classification—for reclassification. "Classifying" a film for the UK works like the MPA—the Motion Picture Association—in the US. The film is given an abbreviation with a recommendation about the audiences the film would be best suited for.

"U" in the UK is "Universal," meaning it's fine for anyone to watch, similar to the US' General audiences or "G" rating. Next is "Parental Guidance" or "PG," which is the same in the US, that there are some elements that might require adults to help their kids process. The UK's "12A/12" is a similar to the US' "PG-13," in that the film is not recommended for audiences under the age of 12 or 13. (12A is for cinema releases, while 12 is for video releases.) The analog to the US' "R" or "Restricted," indicating intense subject matter is a little more varied with 15 and 18 ratings, recommending them for those ages and up.

In any case, what's been making news is that The Wizard of Oz was previously released under a "U" classification and is now being classified as "PG." The reason is for "offensive language."

This took Oz fans by surprise as it's a film from 1939, what offensive language could there be?

The answer is during the song "If I Were King of the Forest," the Cowardly Lion states the line, "What makes the hottentot so hot?"

I was aware of this line as the word "hottentot" is similar to "Tottenhot," a controversial group in the book The Patchwork Girl of Oz. Baum clearly flipped some letters around and put a parody of an African tribe into an Oz book.

And you should already guess what a "hottentot" is, a derogatory term for a stereotype of an African native, depicted as an animal skin-wearing person who is hostile, not intelligent, being compared more to an animal than a human being. It seems it originated from Dutch people about the Khoikhoi tribe of southern Africa, who used a lot of clicking sounds in their language, sounding to the outsiders like stuttering, or "hotteren-totteren" in German.

You should already get why this word is considered offensive. While it's largely fallen out of general use, it was a common term thrown around that got alluded to in the Oz books and actually popped up in the most famous version of Oz.

As we've begun to respect the humanity of more groups given our increasing communication between societies thanks to widespread media and the internet, derogatory terms for people have begun to be seen as unacceptable in civil conversation. It says less about the people who these terms are meant to describe and more about the people who continue to use them. We recognize people as people, acknowledging their different cultures and backgrounds. If you use terms that have been historically used to deride groups, you're basically trying to keep that tradition alive. People aren't offended that you hurt their feelings, they're offended that you're being a jerk.

So yeah, essentially, the rating changed because of a word that's been there all along. Most of us didn't give a single thought to the word when we first saw the movie and likely most young audiences wouldn't either. But a lot of us are likely people who this word wasn't meant to describe. The people who it does are people too and they deserve their dignity.

May I add that the new classification isn't banning the film, it isn't suggesting that people not watch it, it simply tells people that there's a topic in here parents might want to handle with their kids.

And remember, the MPA actually gave The Wizard of Oz a new rating when the 3D version debuted in 2013, the scare factor of the Wicked Witch and the Winged Monkeys increasing the rating from G to PG.

And ultimately, the classification recommends parents watch the movie with their kids, and isn't a family enjoying the movie together one of the best ways to watch it?

No, the Wizard of Oz isn't a political allegory

 This comes up over and over online. Even in comments on this blog, I've seen it come up.

The Wizard of Oz is a parable or allegory on Populism! Everything matches up! The Silver Shoes are the Silver Standard, the yellow brick road is the Gold Standard, the wicked witches are the east and west coast bankers, Dorothy is the common man, the Scarecrow is the farmers, the Tin Woodman is the industrial workers, and the Lion is William Jennings Bryan, who didn't win the presidency, while the Wizard is the president.

It's an interesting way to read it.

The political allegory of Oz took off after Gore Vidal referred to an article by Henry Littlefield in which he describes a view using the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to explain the 1896 presidential election. He first came up with this to explain it to his class while teaching about the economic theory of Populism.

After it hit mainstream, it's been repeated over and over and gotten changed up (the Wicked Witch of the West's hostility is described by Littlefield as "she is Baum's version of sentient and malign nature," not being a banker).

Does this work? To a point, yes.

The problem is when the claim is made that this is what L. Frank Baum intended.

Why do we see fantasy as allegory?

Fantasy opened the door wide for allegory. With fantasy, writers could use utterly impossible scenarios to describe concepts they wanted to communicate.

The most famous allegory is John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. It uses a journey with fantastic monsters and strange locations to describe the life of a believer in Christianity, staying true to their teachings, sometimes getting sidetracked, but eventually making it to Heaven. It's the go-to example of an allegory because there's no mystery as to what the characters and places represent: the main protagonist is named Christian, he is told of the journey he needs to take by a man called Evangelist, he has companions named Pliable who turns back at the first danger he encounters, as well as his successful friends Faithful and Hopeful. While it's clear what it means, it's also a fantasy as Christian faces a monster he must battle and is later captured by a giant.

In 1950, another fantasy was published with clear Christian themes: C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Likely, most of the people reading have read it themselves or have enjoyed some adaptation of it. Like the Oz stories, children go to a land where magic clearly exists, which Lewis clearly says is another world. During the events, one of the children, Edmund, is convinced to betray his siblings by telling the villainous White Witch about them and going to her after all of them enter the land of Narnia, putting them all in danger as the rest go to see the heroic Aslan who is trying to free Narnia from the Witch's reign. Aslan allows himself to be killed in place of Edmund, but as he is innocent, he resurrects and is able to finally defeat the Witch during battle.

 Lewis would claim that the story and its sequels—forming the series The Chronicles of Narnia—were not allegories. In the third book, Aslan reveals to Edmund and his sister Lucy that he also exists in their world, but has another name. Aslan is no longer is a fantasy stand-in for Jesus, he's supposed to be Jesus in a fantasy world. (YouTube literary reviewer Dominic Noble has come up with the phrase "Aslan was Jesus' fursona.") The stories did contain strong Christian themes, but they weren't properly allegorical.

One of Lewis' colleagues and friends, J.R.R. Tolkien, also wrote fantasy stories in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which some began to interpret as an allegory of World War II. It's not hard to see as the story sees an entire world at war. Even places that aren't going to war are still affected by it. However, Tolkien refuted these claims saying his story was "neither allegorical nor topical." He would also say a key line that I think of when addressing allegory: "I think people confuse allegory with applicability."

So, back to Oz.

In allegory, when something is made to represent a concept, it needs to represent that concept consistently. For me, a big point of the story of The Wizard of Oz that just doesn't get addressed is if the Wizard is a stand-in for a president, he abdicates his throne to help Dorothy. Where does this tie into a president leaving office? Furthermore, the Wizard names the Scarecrow his successor, but given the line of succession, the Vice President steps in as president, an incoming person wouldn't be made the president instead. Littlefield doesn't address this, and I haven't heard much about other interpretations addressing it either. A change in a country's leadership is a huge thing to discuss, but it's not addressed.

This doesn't mean there's no merit to using Oz to talk about Populism or even teaching the 1896 election. But the problem is attributing this—to take the term from Tolkien—applicability to Baum as his intent.

Could Baum have intended an allegory?

Baum was not a Populist. He did not support William Jennings Bryan as might be assumed from the interpretation Littlefield proposed. Baum also wrote many other works both under his name and under pseudonyms and anonymously, some even set in his modern world and in places that actually exist. The most political Baum got was in Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross, which was actually revised given the United States' position in World War I changing between the first and second versions.

But when it comes to claiming Baum had allegorical intention in his work, generally only The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is brought up. It was Baum's first novel, his previous fiction books being short story collections and poetry. Given his later work, he did much better in stories like Queen Zixi of Ix and Sky Island at creating strong, linear stories, while Wonderful Wizard is a series of story time episodes that link together into a clear narrative. Baum could produce some great work, but some of his other books fall quite short, and it'd be strange that early on in his literary career, he'd masterfully weave in a neat allegory that no one noticed for over fifty years.

I have seen claims that the Wooden Gargoyles in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz represent native Americans and the Awgwas in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus represent Jewish people, but the reasoning behind these was either not presented or very sketchy. Still, it's worth remembering that Baum was a white man from a well-off family in the late 19th century and while eventually becoming poor while caring for his own children (he wasn't good with money) and embracing his mother in law's views on feminism, he fell short in embracing other progressive ideals, his editorials on the Sioux being a dark stain on his legacy.

People have also read the Army of Revolt in The Marvelous Land of Oz as a comment on the suffragette movement of the time, but Baum was a supporter of the suffragist movement, and in that book, Oz is under a woman's rule at the end and going forward, and the Army of Revolt meets another all-female army in Glinda's far more skilled and disciplined forces.

Baum also makes Oz into a communist society without money by his sixth Oz book, The Emerald City of Oz in which everyone is able to get what they need thanks to a benevolent ruler operating a government that doesn't forget that it's supposed to care for the people. People provide for themselves and their fellow citizens and when they need more, they simply are given more by their local leaders. This isn't a reading of the subtext, it's actually spelled out in passages from Emerald City and The Road to Oz. Yet, we didn't see him advocating for a similar system in the United States.

Littlefield later clarified that he didn't mean to claim that his Populism interpretation was Baum's intent. However, his original article could easily confuse readers into suggesting it was intentional:

Yet once discovered, the author's allegorical intent seems clear, and it gives depth and lasting interest even to children who only sense something else beneath the surface of the story. Consider the fun in picturing turn-of-the-century America, a difficult era at best, using these ready-made symbols provided by Baum. The relationship and analogies outlined above are admittedly theoretical, but they are far too consistent to be coincidental, and they furnish a teaching mechanism which is guaranteed to reach any level of student. 

(Emphasis mine.)

It's worth noting that Oz has been interpreted by a number of other philosophies and has even been seen as a reflection on contemporary relations between China and Japan. I even saw someone claim it was supposed to be a Christian story with Dorothy's friends representing God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. (No other explanation was given, simply that three characters must represent the Holy Trinity.)

It's worth pointing out that stories mean a lot to many different people. Once they leave the creator and go out to the public, they're there for audiences to enjoy and part of that is finding meaning in them. It's impossible for everyone to exactly match up with the author's intent while creating the work, and Baum specifically wrote that he intended The Wonderful Wizard of Oz "solely to please the children of today" in the introduction to the book.

Why shouldn't we say it's Baum's intent?

While everyone is welcome to read Baum's works and come away with their own interpretation, claiming their take on it is Baum's intent is to claim you know something you have no proof of. You don't even know what a close friend or family member might be thinking at this moment. Can you really claim you can tell what someone was thinking over 100 years ago?

We do have context for Baum's life in all of his works together and the biographical information researchers have turned up. Yet it doesn't really support the Populist interpretation as mentioned above.

Claiming without evidence colors views of a person unrealistically. These unfounded ideas can get sensationalized and spread far more quickly than their rebuttal. This goes on to this day where if someone makes a strong accusation on Twitter to someone, the accusation can get retweeted and shared, but a fair rebuttal and apology likely won't make the same waves.

Thus, when you're presenting information, it's important to make the distinction between something backed up by facts and evidence and what might be a fair assumption, and what is entirely conjecture. This is why in journalism, someone charged with a completely likely crime they may have committed is only said to have done it "allegedly."

It's why many fans bristle at simply labeling Baum "racist" even though we clearly have evidence to back it up from his articles on the Sioux to his use of stereotypes in his literature to even a few uses of the "n-word." While we can't deny Baum had racist views or views inspired by racism, coloring him as simply a racist ignores what else he was or can stop you from thinking about his work outside of that scope. It's important to understand all of who Baum was when reading his works critically.

I need to link to Eric Gjovaag's take on addressing this on his website's FAQ. An earlier version of his answer was my first exposure to the idea and I did touch on some of the same points he did.

Why Warner Brothers' New Wizard of Oz and The Wicked Movies Shouldn't Connect

 Screenrant posted a piece by Kayla Laguerre-Lewis arguing that the two-part film adaptation of Wicked and Warner Brothers' Kenya Barris Wizard of Oz should connect. I saw a link to the piece on Facebook, and of course, fans were disagreeing with the point or even the headline.

It's entirely possible for studios to collaborate. Right now, we have Sony's Columbia Pictures and Disney's Marvel Studios giving us Tom Holland's Spider-Man movies set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

However, with Oz, it's completely possible for studios to make projects independently as long as they don't cross trademarks and copyrights and licenses. Warner Brothers owns the MGM film The Wizard of Oz through their absorption of Turner Entertainment, who had bought MGM's catalog in the 1980s.

Universal was always going to be the one to make the Wicked film adaptation happen as they'd backed the musical. And the primary source material of both, L. Frank Baum's book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the sequels he wrote to it are public domain, allowing for them to be freely exploited by anyone who can. Wicked is, of course, based on Gregory Maguire's novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a derivative work of the Baum story.

Oz has been adapted many times over the years, allowing for different artists to bring their own spins to the material, from the original musical adaptation that hit Broadway in 1903 to the 1925 silent film, to 2007's Tin Man and 2017's Emerald City. Some fare better than others with fans, others have fans split.

Gregory Maguire's Wicked was a difficult piece to adapt into a Broadway musical, with a huge overhaul of the story dropping a lot of elements. Yet the musical took off and has a life of its own, still aware of its roots in Maguire's text, Baum's creation and the MGM landmark adaptation.

The novel questions the nature of Good and Evil and where our perceptions lie, using a famous character whose name was more a description as a protagonist. It's also worth noting that the word "wicked" doesn't necessarily mean evil, but twisted. It has the same root word as "wreath," "wicker" and "wraith." It's something that has been changed from its original purpose.

The musical found a different way to handle it. Early in the musical, Glinda asks, "Are people born wicked, or do they have wickedness thrust upon them?" If we take the "twisted" definition, Glinda in the musical is also "wicked," not that she's evil, but that she found herself taking a different path than she anticipated. (In the novel, Glinda is far less of an active character after her school years.)

The thing is, Wicked is not the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Oz is the story of Dorothy Gale, a young girl thrust into a strange and unfamiliar world, looking for a way to get home, empowering other people to improve their lives. Wicked is adjacent to Dorothy's story, looking at the character held to be the villain of Dorothy's story in an alternate universe to the original Baum or MGM incarnations.

Oz fans are split on Wicked to this day. I wouldn't be surprised if there are fans of Maguire's novel who dislike the musical and vice versa. However, the property is in itself an example of what can be done with Oz when one is not constrained by another version.

Maguire's book decided to pull away from Baum's Oz (but brought over the green skinned witch from MGM) and create its own version with a more civilized ugly side. The musical adaptation used it as inspiration for a very different adaptation, not feeling constrained by its source material.

And the movie version of the musical is going to be in two films, likely involving new characters, plotlines and songs, again not constrained by its source.

So why should Kenya Barris make his new interpretation of The Wizard of Oz connect to another version? It's likely not going to be the MGM film again, and it won't be exactly like Baum's book (though I hope we'll see the basis).

I don't want to see an artist make their version of Oz be forced to fit some inter-corporate synergy. I want them to offer their own version, unique and able to be what it wants. Not the other side of Wicked. And as The Chronicles of Oz proved, you can nod your cap to other versions lovingly while not constraining yourself to them.

Now what do I have to do to get an Oz movie featuring Ozma, Scraps and Polychrome?

Mr. Hoffmann and Mr. Baum

 When people discuss the classic young female heroines of fantasy literature, they usually get down to three: Alice from Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, Dorothy Gale from the Oz books, and Wendy Darling from J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. There's others who could make the cut (Betsy, Trot and Ozma could back up Dorothy), and some get ignored, whether for near obscurity (Anthea and Jane from E. Nesbitt's Five Children and It), and others are left out due to copyright concerns (Jane and Barbara Banks from the Mary Poppins stories, Susan and Lucy Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia), but there's one before Alice who routinely gets ignored: Marie Stahlbaum.

Marie is from E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, originally published in 1816. Maybe Marie doesn't usually get lumped in because the story was originally written in German and all the others are written in English. Or perhaps as the story opens at Christmas, it gets considered a Christmas story while the others aren't necessarily tied to a holiday. And there's also the fact that the public at large is less familiar with the original text than they are a highly streamlined version of the story that gets adapted into countless ballet variations every year.

Wait, the original text gets ignored for a popular streamlined adaptation? Oz fans, we know the feeling.

Interestingly, there's several parallels with Oz. Alexander Volkov rewrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in Russian as The Wizard of the Emerald City, naming characters Baum hadn't and changing names. Similarly, Alexandre Dumas (yes, the Three Musketeers guy) rewrote Hoffmann's story in French as The History of a Nutcracker. The Nutcracker prince got the name Nathaniel (yes, Hoffmann didn't name the title characters, Baum also didn't name the Wizard until Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz), and Marie's family name was changed to Silberhaus. Dumas' version helped launch the story into wider consciousness and is the version the ballet was based on.

In the original production of the ballet, Marie's name was changed to Clara for the first time, carrying over into later adaptations of the story. I suspect it was to prevent any connection drawn to the daughter of librettist and choreographer Marius Petipa, the famous ballerina Marie Petipa. In Hoffmann's original story, Clara is the name of a doll Marie gets for Christmas. Some claim the name gets swapped between them, but I've only seen one adaptation of the Nutcracker have the doll named Marie when our heroine is named Clara. (Disney's recent takes on the story find ways to use both names.)

Regardless of the name, Marie (as I'll call her) is explicitly said in the original text to be only seven years old when the main action of the story takes place. This makes her the same age as Alice, and around the same age a lot of readers assume Dorothy is on her first adventure in Oz.

It is well known that Alice was named for Alice Liddell, a girl that Lewis Carroll was friendly with. It's also believed that Baum named Dorothy for his late niece, Dorothy Gage. Just like them, Marie and her brother Fritz were named for Marie and Fritz Hitzig, children of a dear friend of Hoffmann's, Julius Eduard Hitzig. It's believed that he expressed himself through the mysterious Godfather Drosselmeyer, who presents the the Stahlbaum children with an elaborate clockwork castle. In real life, Hoffmann created a cardboard castle for the Hitzigs while spending the holiday with them. Then the next year, he delighted them with his new story inspired by the festivities.

Similar to Baum, who tried to improve on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (although it became his claim to fame), Hoffmann took to heart much of the criticism of The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, later producing The Strange Child. Both stories appear in his collections The Serapion Brothers, in which his stories are presented with a framing device of writers who share their stories with each other and critique them. (English translations of The Serapion Brothers, save print on demand affairs, are long out of print with publishers favoring new translations of selected Hoffmann stories. Luckily for us, we have Project Gutenberg to give us Alexander Ewing's serviceable if outdated translation.) Hoffmann has the other writers call out some of the story's weaknesses.

Lothair, the fictional writer who The Nutcracker and the Mouse King gets attributed to, declares: "I think it is a great mistake to suppose that clever, imaginative children—and it is only they who are in question here—should content themselves with the empty nonsense which is so often set before them under the name of Children's Tales. They want something much better; and it is surprising how much they see and appreciate which escapes a good, honest, well-informed papa."

One could imagine Baum saying the same thing. In his introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (a simple piece that is often overlooked when evaluating his work), he writes "every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal." Two years later in the piece "What Children Want," he wrote "Positively the child cannot be satisfied with inanities in its story books. It craves marvels – fairy tales, adventures, surprising and unreal occurrences; gorgeousness, color and kaleidoscopic succession of inspiring incident."

I would hesitate to claim that Baum read Hoffmann. To be sure, it wouldn't be impossible as English translations of Hoffmann were available. However, Hoffmann is one of the earliest writers of what became modern science fiction and gothic fantasy. In many of his fantasies, such as The Golden Pot, we find a person living a normal life when they happen to witness something wonderful. A serpent under a tree becomes a lovely woman, a tiny flea helps a young man see beyond the deceptions thrown in his way, a miner sees a fantastic underground kingdom, a little girl sees a damaged nutcracker's eyes sparkle, or a bedridden invalid interprets the goings on outside his window. In a similar vein, Baum made a common but terrifying Kansas cyclone become the gateway to an incredible adventure.

Hoffmann is known to have inspired writers Baum would almost certainly have read, such as Edgar Allen Poe and also Charles Dickens, who Baum claimed was a favorite. (In fact, some wonder if Dickens' nickname Boz was actually the inspiration for Baum's most famous creation.) So even if Baum didn't know Hoffmann directly, some inspiration passed along.

There are other similarities between Baum and Hoffmann. Given their lifespans, they both settled into the life of an author late in their lives, with Baum picking up on children's writing in the last 22 years of his life. Hoffmann began publishing his stories in his last decade of life. Both were fairly progressive in their views and enjoyed music and the stage, Baum writing many pieces for the stage in his life, and Hoffmann created the opera Undine and composing music on his own. And yet as varied and fascinating careers as both men had, both are remembered chiefly for a fantasy work for children they produced: The Nutcracker and the Mouse King and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And both works inspired far more popular dramatic adaptations famous for their music: The Nutcracker ballet scored by Tchaikovsky and MGM's classic film The Wizard of Oz.

In fact if we may go further, both of these famous adaptations often under serve their heroines. Judy Garland's Dorothy is less headstrong than her literary counterpart, relying on her friends to rescue her from the Wicked Witch of the West when she's captured and her defeat of the Witch being a happy accident. Baum's Dorothy also accidentally kills the Witch, but in an act of defiance. Don't get me wrong, Judy is still a powerhouse of a performer in the film, but her character could have stood up to the Witch a little more.

In The Nutcracker ballet, Marie (or Clara, depending on the production) is largely passive until she happens to throw her shoe at the Mouse King. In Hoffmann, Marie only wishes throwing her shoe was the end of the Mouse King. Instead of immediately being whisked to a fairyland, she awakens in bed with a nasty cut in her arm and her parents chiding her for being careless. While she's recovering the Mouse King comes to her at night and demands her Christmas candy and then her sugar dolls in return for not destroying the Nutcracker. (And note, with German customs, her injury means she had to sit out most of her family's Christmas celebrations, so those are all she had left of her holiday.) She finally realizes the Nutcracker needs a new sword and manages to procure one from her brother, allowing the Nutcracker to finally defeat the Mouse King. The Nutcracker hails her as the reason for his victory.

Baum and Hoffmann, despite coming from different cultures and different times, seem to have nearly been on the same wavelength when it came to their sensibilities, writing of the mundane turning into the bizarre and fantastic, and even describing wondrous fantasy worlds.

So, if one is going to have Dorothy meet up with Alice and Wendy, perhaps they should also make room for a little German girl.