Ian Penman writes:
I went to see The Wizard of Oz “again” recently and actually had the feeling of seeing it for the first time. I had seen it before of course–fragmented, telescoped–on television. But trapped for its full duration, up against the big screen, it was a different matter: you are indeed swept up, like Dorothy, into the chilly vortex of the film’s inexplicable logic.
Interesting. When I was a kid, The Wizard of Oz was on TV once a year–I think it was in February–and we would watch it from beginning to end. It was an annual event, and we were swept up, like Dorothy.
Back then there were fewer cultural products. There was whatever was on prime-time TV, whatever was on reruns, The Wizard of Oz, cartoons, old movies, old comedy like the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, whatever movies they happened to be showing on UHF, and . . . that was about it!
I can suspend disbelief for a lot of things, but giving a college degree as a substitute for a brain is just too absurd to be taken seriously.
Hey, you got it! That’s the message Baum wanted to convey without ranting or preaching, just a charming story.
That whole scene is hilarious satire. What the Wizard does, explicitly, is to give out symbols rather than substance, while forthrightly explaining how the symbol is the substitute for the substance. It’s perfectly in character for a con man.
“Wizard of Oz: Why anybody can have a brain. That’s a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from we have universities, seats of great learning, where men can go to become great thinkers and when they come out. They think deep thoughts, and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven’t got. A diploma.”
Of course the Scarecrow has a brain. He couldn’t want one if he didn’t already have one. But he doesn’t have a credential. And note, once he gets that credential, he starts confidently talking about a technical topic, gets it wrong, but nobody notices it, though he sounds impressive (I wonder if the error was intentional on the part of the writers, it would be very subtle if so).
“Scarecrow: The sum of the square roots of two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to square root of the remaining side.”
That’s completely garbled. Note he says sqrt(a) + sqrt(b) = sqrt(c), not a^2+b^2=c^2. And he presumably means right triangle, not isosceles triangle. For Internet reasons, I guess I have to disclaim that, yes, there is overlap between right and isosceles triangles. But in context he clearly means “an” denoting the general case, not as in there exists at least one.
There’s more than that. Throughout the book and the movie, the Scarecrow has been the smart one. He’s the one who figures out how to get apples from the trees, who figures out how to enter the Emerald City, who plans the assault on the wicked witch, and so on. (There are still more examples in the book.) It is clear not only that he has a brain, but that it works pretty well. So it is true that all he lacks is recognition of his smarts; hence a diploma. So the diploma is not an empty gesture, but a recognition of existing ability. In the book, Dorothy is the “heart”, Scarecrow is the “brain”.
I suspect the faulty math is the fault of the movie writers
And the tin man is the one with the heart. He’s the one that starts crying (and rusts up). Someone could probably find examples of the cowardly lion acting bravely.
The tin man shows his love and care for Dorothy and friends multiple times, he has a heart. The lion may be scared, but when his friends are in danger he jumps in to protect them.
Not Ebert:
“But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man
That he didn’t, didn’t already have”
“Tin Man” https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/7240/
‘But in context he clearly means “an” denoting the general case, not as in there exists at least one.’
There does not. It doesn’t even have to be an isosceles triangle, if you square both sides you get a violation of the triangle inequality.
To me the statement is so obviously wrong that I must admit I always thought it was intentional. But I’ve been wrong on that point often enough by now…
Well spotted!
Also, apparently there’s a draft of the script which clearly establishes that the phrasing is intentionally wrong:
https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2017/09/the-scarecrows-math-being-wrong-was.html
“We now have further proof AND a longer story: In the book Hollywood Science: The Next Generation, From Spaceships to Microchips (see here) they discuss the issue (page 90). The point to our blog as having discussed it (the first book not written by Lance or Lipton-Regan to mention our blog?) and then give evidence that YES it was intentional.
They got a hold of the original script. The Scarecrow originally had a longer even more incoherent speech that was so over the top that of course it was intentional. Here it is:
The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side: H-2-O Plus H-2-S-O-4 equals H-2-S-O-3 using pi-r-squared as a common denominator Oh rapture! What a brain!”
The whole point is that the Lion is plenty brave, the tin man is already knows how to love and the scarecrow is smart. Giving out the symbols just makes them believe it.
And Dorothy has a home.
My childhood was preTV. My parents took me to the movies instead of getting babysitters. I loved the getting drawn in and swept away by the drama and somehow actually living it for a little while. The movies felt very real to me at age seven. Before that, I got bedtime stories. My mother told me the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Baba Yaga, the 1001 nights, etc. She used the Bruno Bettelheim approved method of not reading the text but recounting it with additions and subtractions to make it developmentally suitable. I’d lay back in my blanket and drift away. When I became a father I passed this on. When the kid is three years old sometimes they want the same story over and over. My daughter was fixated on the genie in the bottle from the 1001 Nights; maybe because it shows the little guy triumphing over the big scary thing by using guile.
Maybe we have lost something when our narratives have become standardized and chopped into segments that fit between commercials. Maybe “Once upon a time…” is a better prelude than an ad for some must have toy.
Remember that this was the first movie to be shown in color. Imagine going the cinema having only ever seen black and white movies and then having the screen burst into color when Dorothy lands in Oz. That must have been an incredible experience.
It was not the first film to be shot in color, though it was an early one, and it preceded Gone With the Wind by a couple of months. But A Star Is Born from a couple of years earlier is usually regarded as the first non-animated (Disney had been in Technicolor for some time) non-hand-colored (e.g. George Melies) film.
And a lot more at https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8dgyz2/when_the_wizard_of_oz_was_premiered_in_1939_was/
Looking forward to the post that link will eventually lead to.
When I was a kid we definitely watched it once a year, on a black and white TV. Imagine the surprise when seeing it with color for the first time.