Cyanide and Happiness: It Isn't Even In Color

Things That Make You Go Hmmm... Oz - The Great and Powerful

Since we're on the subject of The Great and Powerful Oz.

The name for Oz in "The Wizard of Oz" was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence "Oz." Hmmm...

You can take Baum's word for it, or you can take his wive's.  Your choice.

We don't have to rely upon whatever Baum's children may have been told for verification, however, as Baum himself had offered essentially the same story many years earlier in a press release drafted to announce the reissue of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1903:

I have a little cabinet letter file on my desk that is just in front of me. I was thinking and wondering about a title for the story, and had settled on the "Wizard" as part of it. My gaze was caught by the gilt letters on the three drawers of the cabinet. The first was A-G; the next drawer was labeled H-N; and on the last were the letters O-Z. And "Oz" it at once became.

This evidence wouldn't seem to leave much room for doubt, as Baum himself is undeniably the one person who knows how he came to choose the name, and this explanation comes straight from the horse's pen, so to speak. Baum's version does differ from the one offered by his son in that the latter places him in a roomful of children rather than alone in his study, but that difference might be dismissed as a mere literary embellishment on his son's part. Even Baum's version contains its own discrepancies, though, as various pre-publication references and copyright registrations reveal that Baum considered several titles for his book using the word "Oz" but not the word "Wizard" (e.g., "The City of the Great Oz," "The Fairyland of Oz," "The Land of Oz"), so clearly he had not "settled on the 'Wizard' as part of it" before coming up with the name 'Oz.'2 Moreover, Baum's wife Maud wrote to a friend in 1943 that:

The word Oz came out of Mr. Baum's mind, just as did his queer characters. No one or anything suggested the word — or any person. This is a fact.

snopes.com

Little Munchkin Passes Away

Slover seen on right

Who doesn't know of The Wizard of Oz ?  It's impossible not to know about it.  We watched it as children, and as adults.  Hell, Ryan even got me the 70th Anniversary Blu-ray gift box for Christmas last year.

Well, unbeknownst to me, Karl Slover, one of only four surviving little people who played the Munchkins in the movie died this past Tuesday. :-(  He was 93.

The four-foot-five Slover, one of the shortest men in the movie, portrayed not only the lead trumpeter in the Munchkins band, but also a townsman and a soldier. The little guy was born Karl Kosiczky in what is now the Czech Republic, the only dwarf-sized child in the family. According to The Washington Post, his father inflicted inhumane treatments to make him taller, burying him in the backyard, immersing him in heated oil until his skin blistered, and attaching him to a stretching machine at a hospital. Eventually, at the age of nine, his father sold him to a traveling freak show. In his 20s, Slover moved to the States and joined a vaudeville troupe called the Singer Midgets, its 30 members becoming the core group of movie Munchkins. Slover was paid $50 a week, a salary lower than Toto’s. 

Later in life, he appeared around the country at festivals and events related to the movie, and was one of seven Munchkins representing all the little people of Oz at the 2007 unveiling of a star dedicated to them on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “He has a genuine immortality,” said 100 Years of Oz author, John Fricke. “Of the 124 little people, he’s one of the handful who got to enjoy this latter-day fame, to have people know who he was and be able to pick him out of the crowd in the movie.”

What If The Wizard of Oz Had An Alternate Ending?????

I posted the following video on Facebook over a year ago, and OMG it still makes me laugh my ass off.  It's absolutely, insanely hilarious!  

MAD TV couldn't have done a better job of creating an alternate ending to The Wizard of Oz, even if they tried.  The actors sound just like the originals, and they look a lot like them too!

Dorothy:  Oh, My, Oh, Will you help me, can you help me?

Good Witch:  You don't need to be helped any longer, you've always had the power to go back to Kansas.

Dorothy:  Excuse ME? (sarcastic look)

Scarecrow: Why didn't you tell her before?

Good Witch: Because she wouldn't have believed me.

Dorothy: Are you out of your Fucking Mind!  

OMG, I'm laughing my ass off right now!!