The Wizard of Weird

Why Toto is the star of The Wizard of Oz

So who IS my favourite character in The Wizard of Oz?

I found myself writing this mini-essay in response to someone who posted something on Facebook about The Wizard of Oz. It's something I maybe, oh maybe wrote about already, but I want to write about it again because, ohhhh, I just do!

Everyone plays that game where you ask people, "So. Who was your favorite character in The Wizard of Oz?" Almost everyone chooses the Lion because he does slapstick comedy (really, old-fashioned vaudeville) so well, and sings in that quavery voice like every hammy tenor you've ever heard. But the point of the game is that your choice is supposed to reveal your deepest inner nature. One day it came to me, not so much "who is my favorite" as "who is the most important character?" NO ONE ever mentions this, I swear. It's not Dorothy or the Tin Man or Scarecrow or even the Wizard.

It's Toto.

Think about it: if it weren't for Toto, there would be no story at all. If Toto hadn't (deservedly) bitten Miss Gulch, she wouldn't have taken him away in her basket and Dorothy wouldn't have had to go rescue him (which in fact she didn't have to: he got away!). And thus, when the "twister" came up, she would've been at home and just gotten into the storm cellar with everyone else.

But no! She landed in Oz, where Toto always ran on ahead of her and was her companion and guide. It was Toto who discovered the Scarecrow and Tin Man, Toto who flushed out the lion from the bushes (feisty little thing), Toto who got away from the Witch when Dorothy was imprisoned in the castle (remember him jumping off the drawbridge?) and ran to alert her three friends so they could rescue her.  And all this with the Witch's evil henchmen throwing spears at him!

AND. . . (drum roll, please - this is turning into a blog post!) - just who was it who pulled back the curtain and revealed that the Wonderful Wizard of Oz was in fact a fraud? 

At any rate, this Timeless Tale would not even exist without that scrappy little Cairn terrier, who is not a cute or a glamorous dog at all, nor even a Brave and Noble dog. He's just Toto, scruffy and nondescript. He's a little implausible as a farm dog, unless maybe he was a ratter (and can't you picture it? This dog is not afraid of anything). Dorothy is in some ways the classic heroine in that, at one point, she is literally imprisoned in the tower and must be rescued by the three heroes. But it is Toto who actually does the rescuing, risking his own doggy life in the process.

 I'm not sure what-all this says about me. Hmmmm - greatness is never recognized?

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The Wizard of oz- The jitterbug ( DELETED SCENE)

The Jitterbug! I used to tell my friends at school that this was a song from The Wizard of Oz (which we all watched slavishly once a year in glorious black and white, taking a little chunk out of the technicolour surprise of "I guess we're not in Kansas any more"), and they would look at me like I was crazy.

I'd get that look a lot in my childhood. I might as well have gotten used to it.

I had a record with the songs from The Wizard of Oz on it. I am not sure now if it was by the original cast. But I think not. I wore out the grooves on this thing, and most especially I noted a song about The Jitterbug, which I assumed was a dance of some kind.

I don't know how many eons later I found out that it HAD been a song in The Wizard of Oz, one that was deleted for various reasons. The video/gifs here depict the rehearsals, and I have highlighted the choreography between the Tin Man and the Lion.

These guys were expected to stumble around on a soundstage covered with fake leaves, under broiling hot lights, sweating buckets in their confining, 50-pound costumes for take after take. . . and they weren't even dancers. Or they sure don't look like it here.

Jack Haley was, maybe, but I can only picture him doing the Old Soft Shoe with a top hat and a cane. Lahr was a vaudevillian by trade and by nature, a sort of aggressive carnival barker type - and yes, when he played the lion, he barked! "With a rrrrroof. And a rooooroof. And a rrrRROOOOOOF!" He was most people's favorite character in the movie, with his big fur coat and his waving tail and that incredible song he sang, "If I Were King of the Forest". Here he does a dead-on impersonation of every hammy, pretentious singer that you've ever heard. Kids just think he's funny, but adults recognize a "type", giving his broad humor a sly edge of parody.

Anyway. The poor Tin Man really stumbles through some of these takes (and you can tell they're different takes by what the trees are doing in the background. The one on the right is the most active, waving and clapping its "hands". In the video, we see that they're really giant puppets with guys in behind them, moving the branches and the mouths. And throwing the apples.) Jack Haley nearly falls down in some of them, leaning forward to avoid a backward-falling, immobilizing disaster. The lion just sort of clomps around, trying to find the rhythm.

But in any case, the number was pulled. It wasn't the fact that the jitterbug was just a dance craze and thus likely to "date" the movie (and who cared? No one even knew that television would exist, and that it would give what was essentially a flop a brilliant second life.) It wasn't even that Lahr and Haley danced so badly. It's the fact that it was just so totally out of character for them. The best part about this movie is the sureness with which all the actors inhabit their characters, so to make them do this - . There was an extended dance scene with the Scarecrow that was cut, and it's a shame, but I saw it once and I see why. He ricochets off the rails of a fence in one shot, then appears to ricochet backwards when they reverse the film - and the rails of the fence vibrate BEFORE he hits them. It just didn't work. Too bad, because he was the only real dancer in the lot.

OK: so we know all that. But the real issue here is, who is my favorite character? It's not quite the witch, though I think Margaret Hamilton deserved an Oscar for the razor-witted sadist who still freaks kids out to this day (and who can forget that nasty, macabre music?). No. . . my favorite is one that absolutely nobody else picks.

Toto.

Why Toto? 

Without Toto, there would be no Wizard of Oz.

If Toto hadn't bitten Miss Gulch, she wouldn't have taken him away in her basket. And if she hadn't taken him away in her basket, he wouldn't have jumped out and run back to Dorothy. And Dorothy wouldn't have gotten all paranoid about losing her dog and decided to run away from home.

And and and. Shall I tell you more? Had she stayed home and fed the chickens and slopped the hogs like she was supposed to (and a more unlikely farm hand than Bert Lahr you will never find), she would've been hunkered down safely in the storm cellar with the rest of the family.

And the whole thing never would have happened.

But wait: there's more.

It's Toto who bravely confronts the Lion and barks at him when everyone else is cringing in terror. It's Toto who fearlessly leads the Tin Man, Lion and Scarecrow back to the Witch's castle where Dorothy is imprisoned (and I confess I ALWAYS cry when Auntie Em appears in the crystal ball). And it is Toto, my friends, who ends the story as dramatically as it began: by pulling back the curtain and exposing the Wizard of Oz as a fraud.

So do you get it now? Do you? I'll get you, my pretty. And your little dog, too.

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There's that bird again!

OK then. . .one more Oz video, and I promise to shut up. Though we haven't quite resolved the controversy over the Suicidal Munchkin in  The Wizard of Oz, we're closing in on a solution. Conspiracy theorists swear they see a munchkin swinging from a noose in the background of the sprightly "We're Off to See the Wizard" quickstep number. And I've seen it, believe me I've seen it. It was way weird and it really did look like something swinging, even if it was only a sandbag.

Then these other clips of the same scene started showing up that had something else in place of the so-called dead munchkin.  If you really looked at it, it was obviously a giant bird of some kind stretching its wings out. Bizarre, but that's what it looked like.

So now Oz afficionados are combing every frame of the movie to find evidence of That Bird. And here it is! Right at the beginning of the Tin Man's song, one of my personal faves because I loved how he had to be oiled, you see a giant bird madly flapping its wings between Dorothy and the Tin Man. It's only on for a second, but if you watch for it it's totally obvious.

So which came first. . . dead midget or flapping crane?
Which one is real, and which one is photoshopped? Wouldn't it be a whole lot easier to photoshop a swinging dead body than a bird?

But that just raises another issue: what the hell is a tin man? I mean. . . a scarecrow. A lion, yes. Maybe even a munchkin, coz there are lots-a short people around. But who'd make a guy outta tin, I ask you. In the original book he was the Tin Woodman, but that doesn't make me feel too much better.

As for that bird, who knew? I don't remember no dern-toon-derrin' birds in Wizard of Oz. I need to watch the whole thing again and do a bird count.

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Wizard of Oz GIFs: And your little dog, too!

 

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The Wicked Witch: Isn't She Lovely

While we're on the subject of Oz, let's get away from dead munchkins hanging from trees for a while and look at a little snippet of Margaret Hamilton's screen test for The Wizard of Oz. This wasn't an audition, as she was an obvious shoo-in with her ascetic face and gorgeously witch-y voice. I think this was a test of makeup and costume: the producers didn't want another Buddy Ebsen on their hands (he nearly expired from the lead-based makeup for the Tin Man and had to wait thirty more years to attain legendary status as Jed Clampett on The Beverley Hillbillies).

She does a little good-natured witching, showing her hands to the camera,  etc., but from .16 to .20 she suddenly smiles so radiantly that you wonder how she ever could've played such a . . . witch. She actually looks lovely, sunny, and full of good humour.

Who'd a thunkit, eh?

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