Have the Kids These Days Seen The Wizard of Oz?

So I spent most of Friday being monstrously hungry, for reasons that are unclear…

I am finishing up my re-read of Codex Alera by Jim Butcher, and it’s going well! Next is Earthsea, I think? I tried out the first episode of the new Netflix Devil May Cry, and it’s… eh? It wants to turn the story into one about American imperialism and intolerance after 9/11, which is a frankly bizarre direction to take the adaptation of a mostly light-hearted video game series about killing demons not set in the US.

I successfully made cake waffles earlier this week? That may have been the highlight of the month.

Have the Kids These Days Seen The Wizard of Oz?

Well, have they?

I asked myself this when I saw the first part of the cinematic adaptation of Wicked in theaters last year. Because the story assumes that you have familiarity with the source material. A movie or play about how the Wicked Witch of the West became an iconic villain makes a lot more sense if you’ve seen the movie in which she is the iconic villain.

[I’m mostly assuming the book and its sequels don’t really matter to the equation–my understanding is that while there are some elements drawn from Baum’s Oz novels, the majority of the influence on the novel and play Wicked are from the movie. Elphaba being green, for starters, isn’t actually mentioned in the book, and she’s not actually a big deal in the scheme of things, unlike the iconic movie in which she’s apparently The Worst.]

And it made me wonder, too, because The Wizard of Oz is such a huge part of popular culture. If you don’t have at least a passing familiarity with that movie, there are a ton of references in all sorts of media that are going to go over your head. “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” or “Follow the Yellow Brick Road,” or half a dozen other quotes. Describing a robot as “Tin Man”, or why witches are green in pop culture a lot, or flying monkeys, or all of that. If you’ve been alive in this country since 1939, the assumption by the movies and television shows you watch is that you have seen this movie. Honestly, I don’t know when I saw this movie, though I know I have at some point. 

It’s really weird that the movie has this much lasting of a presence. Not just that it’s referenced, plenty of older movies are referenced. But it's basically a standard text for being American! You can drop lines from it anywhere, and no one will bat an eye, really. Highlander 2 has a reference, it makes up so many of the characters in RWBY, and it’s the favorite movie of the lead from Cheetah Girls (don’t ask me how I remember that; I don’t know).

So, again, have the kids these days seen The Wizard of Oz? I probably should have asked this while watching RWBY, considering that series has references out the wazoo from pretty much the word ‘Go’ (the headmaster is named ‘Ozpin’, after all). We all tend to assume that children are into the same stuff that we are, hence the pile of remakes that we keep getting. I remember there being a Christmas riddle thing we had to do in third grade, and the clue given was the Lone Ranger, which no one in my class understood. “You guys watch him every Saturday, don’t you?” our teacher declared. No, ma’am, we don’t. And we haven’t ever claimed to. Is The Wizard of Oz something like that? A movie that we all assume everyone younger than us has seen because we have?

It feeds into a conversation I’ve seen about how there are those wondering if young people are actually being exposed to original stories, or just riffs, parodies, and remixes of those stories. Are younger people actually being exposed to fairy tales and their retellings, or are they just reading/watching parodies, subversions, or different genre versions of those stories? If the original is never known, have we lost something? We had this moment with the teen paranormal romance boom, too. We wondered if there were ever going to be mainstream horror vampires and other monsters, or would they be stuck as emotionally tormented byronic love interests for all time.

Which is… maybe a dumb thing to ask. Look, stories change over time, that’s how it goes. Fiddler on the Roof is based on an older story that most people don’t remember. And going back to the vampire example: we weren’t working with the original stories to begin with. In the old Slavic vampire stories, they’re usually just zombies that suck blood sometimes. Dracula and Carmilla are already new takes on old stories.

I’m tempted to say that this is different, because The Wizard of Oz is such a huge part of our modern pop culture. That’s irrelevant, though, isn’t it? That’s like those people who insist that you need to read certain books in the “literary canon” (we’ll talk about that one day) because they’ve always been the things that people think are important. There’s not nothing to that, because yeah, if you’re an English major, you’re going to have to brush up on some literature if you want to understand a lot of references, but at the same time, saying something is important to know because “It’s always been important,” rather than because of any practical, moral, or spiritual reason is just silly.

If the kids aren’t watching The Wizard of Oz, well, no, that’s not the downfall of American culture or anything (that’s Minions). At the same time, I still think something is lost if they’re not. I still don’t know, either way, though: have all those young people who are enjoying the heck out of Wicked seen the original movie it’s pulling from?

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