Silver Shoes Before Ruby Slippers: What Hollywood Changed When It Filmed Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz

The biggest differences are the shoes, the ending and whether Oz is real. In L. Frank Baum's 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dorothy wears magical silver shoes; the 1939 MGM film turned them into ruby slippers to show off its three-strip Technicolor process. In the book, Oz is a real place, and when Dorothy clicks her heels and flies home, the silver shoes fall off and are lost in the desert. In the film, the whole adventure becomes a long dream: Dorothy wakes up in her own bed in Kansas, and Aunt Em tells her she just had a bad dream. The book is also longer, stranger and more violent, with episodes the film never shows. This guide covers who Baum was, what happens in the novel, its main characters, the ways the film changed it, the political readings it attracted, and why both versions still matter.

Who was L. Frank Baum?

Lyman Frank Baum was born on 15 May 1856 in Chittenango, New York, and died on 6 May 1919. He disliked his first name and always went by Frank. Before he became famous, he tried many careers. He was a theatre producer and playwright without much success, ran a shop in Aberdeen, South Dakota, edited a local newspaper there, and then moved to Chicago, where he worked as a newspaper reporter and began publishing children's books.

He was enormously productive. Besides fourteen Oz books, he wrote 41 other novels, 83 short stories, more than 200 poems and at least 42 scripts, and he kept trying to bring his stories to the stage and screen; near the end of his life he even tried to set up a film studio in Los Angeles. His wife, Maud Gage, was the daughter of the women's suffrage campaigner Matilda Joslyn Gage, a connection that matters for how the book's witches are read.

How the book came about

Baum's son remembered his father telling the children whimsical stories long before they became books. Many details came from Baum's own life. As a boy he had nightmares about a scarecrow chasing him across a field, which he later turned into the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman grew out of a figure he built from a wash-boiler, stovepipes and a saucepan for a shop-window display. The heroine's name has a sad origin. Baum's wife adored their baby niece, Dorothy Louise Gage, who died at five months old in 1898; to comfort her, Baum named his heroine Dorothy and dedicated the book to his wife.

The novel was illustrated by Baum's friend W. W. Denslow, whose lavish colour pictures were praised as being "quite as much of the story" as the text. It was published by the George M. Hill Company in September 1900, the first edition sold out within weeks, and by 1956 three million copies had been sold. In his introduction, Baum said he wanted a "modernized fairy tale" that kept the wonder and left out the nightmares.

The story in the book

Dorothy lives with Aunt Em, Uncle Henry and her dog Toto on a farm on the Kansas prairie. A cyclone carries the house to the Munchkin Country in the Land of Oz, where it lands on and kills the Wicked Witch of the East. The Good Witch of the North gives Dorothy the dead witch's silver shoes, kisses her forehead for protection, and tells her to follow the yellow brick road to the Emerald City and ask the Wizard for help.

On the way, Dorothy frees a Scarecrow who wants a brain, oils a rusted Tin Woodman who wants a heart, and meets a Cowardly Lion who wants courage. In the Emerald City everyone must wear green-tinted spectacles, and the Wizard appears to each visitor in a different form: a giant head, a lovely lady, a terrible beast, a ball of fire. He promises to help only if they kill the Wicked Witch of the West.

The witch sends wolves, crows, bees, soldiers and finally the Winged Monkeys against them. Dorothy is enslaved until, angry that the witch has tricked her out of one shoe, she throws a bucket of water over her, and the witch melts away. Back in the Emerald City, Toto knocks over a screen and reveals that the great Wizard is a "humbug", an ordinary old man from Omaha who arrived by hot-air balloon. He gives the Scarecrow brains of bran, the Tin Woodman a silk heart and the Lion a potion of courage, then floats off by accident before Dorothy can join him. After one more journey, Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, tells Dorothy that the shoes could have taken her home all along. She knocks her heels together three times and wakes up rolling on the Kansas grass.

The main characters

Dorothy is practical, kind and stubborn, more an organiser of the group than a girl who needs rescuing. Her three companions are a neat lesson in irony: the Scarecrow keeps having the cleverest ideas, the Tin Woodman is the most tender-hearted member of the group, and the Cowardly Lion stands firm against the witch's soldiers. What the Wizard hands them at the end only gives a focus to qualities they already showed on the road. The Wizard himself is not evil, just a showman. The Wicked Witch of the West, with her single telescopic eye, is a ruler who keeps the Winkies enslaved, and Glinda, in the book, is the good witch of the south rather than the north.

Book versus film: the changes that matter

The 1939 film, starring Judy Garland, is the most popular adaptation, celebrated for its special effects and its use of Technicolor. Many of its most famous images are inventions. The Kansas scenes were filmed in black and white and tinted sepia, so the jump into colour when Dorothy opens the door to Oz is a film idea, not a book one. The ruby slippers are another. The shoes became red to take advantage of Technicolor, and screenwriter Noel Langley is credited with the change. Those slippers became so famous that they are now the most valuable pieces of film memorabilia in the world.

The film also merges the two good witches into one Glinda of the North, has Dorothy close her eyes and repeat "There's no place like home", and turns Oz into a dream. Langley seems to have thought a 1939 audience was too sophisticated to accept Oz as plain fantasy, so he reconceived it as a long dream sequence. That changes the meaning. In Baum's book, Oz is a real place Dorothy visits and leaves; in the film it is a reflection of her own worries about home. The book also includes adventures the film drops, such as the second journey south to Glinda's castle and the Lion's fight with a giant spider.

A political fable? Read with care

Decades after it appeared, the book attracted political readings. In 1964 Henry Littlefield argued that it was an allegory of the late nineteenth-century American debate over whether money should be backed by gold alone or by gold and silver, and later the historian Richard Jensen suggested that "Oz" might come from "oz.", the abbreviation for ounce. Littlefield's theory found some support but was widely criticised, so it is best treated as an interesting reading rather than as Baum's secret plan. Biographers have also linked Baum's good witch to the feminist writing of his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage.

Why it still matters

The Library of Congress has called the book "America's greatest and best-loved homegrown fairytale". It has been translated or adapted into nearly every major language, sometimes with local changes: in Russia, Alexander Volkov's version grew into his own series, The Wizard of the Emerald City, and in 1974 the story was reimagined as The Wiz, a Tony Award-winning musical with an all-Black cast. The film, for its part, is according to the Library of Congress the most seen film in cinema history, and "Over the Rainbow" won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. If you only know the film, the book is worth reading for its stranger, braver Dorothy and an Oz that does not vanish when she wakes up.

Learn with The Wizard of Oz: English words and phrases

Word or phrase	Meaning	Example
There's no place like home	home is the best place to be	After a month away, there's no place like home.
to follow the yellow brick road	to follow a path toward a goal	Just follow the yellow brick road to graduation.
the man behind the curtain	the ordinary person behind an impressive show	The CEO was just the man behind the curtain.
a humbug	someone who pretends to be more than they are	The famous healer was a humbug.
We're not in Kansas anymore	we are somewhere strange and new	First day in Tokyo: we're not in Kansas anymore.

Try this: Write three English sentences about your first day in a new place, using "We're not in Kansas anymore" and "There's no place like home".