Category: Ozblogging
-
Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 2
In Chapter Four the scene shifts to a ship caught in a terrible storm. Betsy Bobbin is introduced and falls overboard in one sentence, followed by a thin, sad-faced mule named Hank. Then the ship explodes and sinks (well, it is 1914 . . . ). Betsy and Hank climb onto some floating wreckage. Betsy…
-
Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 1
It has been nearly four years since my last Ozblogging effort, but since Oz is a timeless fairyland we can pick up where we left off as if nothing had happened. Tik-Tok of Oz (first published in 1914) has a rather complicated history: it's an Oz book based on a stage show written by L.…
-
Movie Magic
Last weekend the family went out to see Dr. Strange, the latest Marvel Comics movie. This one is the origin story for Dr. Stephen Strange, Sorcerer Supreme and master of the mystic arts. It was entertaining and visually wonderful. It did get me thinking (uh-oh) about how magic is depicted in most modern films — and…
-
Ozblogging: Oz the Great and Powerful Review
I saw Oz: The Great and Powerful earlier this week with my wife and my 10-year-old son. He liked it a lot, we . . . liked it less than he did. Oz: The Great and Powerful isn't a bad movie. It's a perfectly fun children's movie that adults can enjoy. But I'm afraid that…
-
Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 5
Beyond the Tottenhot village the team enters some rocky mountains, and immediately start seeing warning signs: "LOOK OUT FOR YOOP" and "BEWARE THE CAPTIVE YOOP." Eventually they come to a huge cage carved into a cliff, in which is imprisoned the ferocious giant Mr. Yoop. Yoop is fierce and hungry, and longs to eat up…
-
Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 4
Our heroes have a couple of random encounters on their way out of Munchkin country — a weird spacetime distortion, a giant porcupine, and an illusionary wall — but with the help of the Shaggy Man they get past all of them. As in Road to Oz, these sequences strongly suggest that Baum was thinking…
-
Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 3
We have a chapter of blatant filler in which the travelers seek advice from a Foolish Owl and a Wise Donkey. The Wise Donkey is apparently an immigrant from one of Baum's other books, and provides the opportunity for some wordplay while the Owl recites nonsense verse. I haven't seen anyone try to claim that…
-
Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 2
The three heroic questers set off searching for the plot coupons, and discover a problem which the Crooked Magician really should have thought of: none of them has the faintest idea where they're going. Ojo has lived his entire life in a remote cabin in the woods with a man who says about two words…
-
Ozblogging: The Patchwork Girl of Oz, Part 1
At the end of his previous novel, The Emerald City of Oz, L. Frank Baum brought the series to what he thought was its end. Threatened by the possibility of discovery by aeronauts, the kingdom of Oz had been cut off from the rest of the world by a powerful magic spell, and there could…
-
Mr. Diggs Goes to the Movies
I don't normally say "Squee!" about upcoming movies. As an adult my most frequent emotion upon leaving the theater has been disappointment, which means that about the highest pitch of enthusiasm I can work up for something I haven't seen yet is "guardedly optimistic." Well, I'll confess to being as guardedly optimistic as a fourteen-year-old…
The Cambias Digression 