May 17th - Wizard of Oz

Today the Wizard of Oz first came out in theaters in 1939. I have read the original book, so I'm going to talk about some of the ways the movie is different. Two things in particular: the big one everyone else talks about, and the big one I personally care about. The first one everyone else seems to talk about is the shoes being Ruby vs being Silver. It was a technical choice, as the silver looked bad on early technicolor or something like that. The biggest change in my mind, and I don't think people talk about this enough, is the witches. The movie has Glinda of the north and the unnamed east and west witches. In the book, there are actually four witches for the four cardinal directions. Glinda was originally the good witch of the south, and not the witch who meets Dorothy in munchkin country, but instead someone Dorothy has to go out of her way to see her after the Wizard accidently leaves in the balloon without her. East and west are close enough, so I'm not going to complain this time.