First the Movie - Then the Book
By Shane Timson
For High Plains Public Radio Readers Book Club, I'm Shane Timson in Colby, Kansas, and today we are talking about the book The Wizard of Oz. In most cases, the movie never overshadows a book, but in this case, the movie definitely overshadowed the book.
In fact, this was my first time reading the book. In fact, a lot of the things that we associate with The Wizard of Oz are not in the original book. For example, the saying, “Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore. ”That's not in the book.
All of the singing in the movie is not in the book. I think that the characters are more well-defined in the book than in the movie. I feel like the movie was trying to fill up a lot of time, so they had to add a lot of stuff, whereas the book flows naturally, and the book is a great read.
What I love about this book is we can learn about ourselves. For example, everybody wanted something. But it turns out they had what they needed already. They didn't need the wizard to give it to them. They already had it within them. They just had to dig deep. They just had to live life.
Sometimes that's what it's all about. You think you need something. You think you lack something. But maybe you've already got it. The Tin Woodman wanted a heart because he didn't think he could love, but as we find out, he shows great compassion.
The Cowardly Lion finds out that he indeed is not a coward. A lot of times we believe things that other people have told us, but that doesn't mean it's true, and we find that out in The Wizard of Oz. Those characters believed a lot of things that just weren't true, and how much of that is true in our own lives.
We believe things that aren't true, and if we were just- if we could just not believe those things, we might be better off.
Even the wizard himself was no wizard, as we find out. He built himself bigger than he actually was. And how many times have we done that? We want people to like us and accept us, so we'll make ourselves bigger than we actually are. And that's what the wizard did.
One thing I found out is that there are apparently a lot of Oz books. I think there're like 12. I'm going to read another one because I'm curious how they read, what they sound like. What are the other characters like? This book, of course, was his most famous book out of all the Oz books. But obviously there must have been a market for
it, or he wouldn't have written so many. I mean, obviously somebody was buying them. There was enough interest that he kept writing Oz books. So I'm going to read some more of those and see what happens.
But I want to encourage you. Maybe you've seen that movie. And yes, I think the movie is great. It has its strong points. I think especially for the time in which the movie was made, it's good for its time. And I do think it holds up. But again, I think that the book is much better. The characters are stronger. It flows better. You don't have to look too hard to find the meanings of what the author is trying to get in the book. The movie kind of plods along because it's trying to kill time to get its point across.
The book does so much better. So, get out there, and read that book.
Forget what you know about the movie and start all over and read the book. That's what I did. I forgot all about the movie and read the book and it gave me a sense of wonder.
For High Plains Public Radio Readers Book Club. I'm Shane Timson in Colby, Kansas.
