People know the Oz characters: Dorothy, the Scarecrow, Toto, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion, the Wizard, Glinda and the Wicked Witch. Yeah, many people have seen the movie The Wizard of Oz or read the book it’s based on, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Even if you’ve seen adaptations like The Wiz, or spinoff media like Wicked or Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful, these characters are usually the focus.
It’s no surprise why, these characters are winsome and relate a lot to the universal human experience. Dorothy looking for a way home in many adaptations has to discover what that means before she can finally do it. The Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Lion feel their inadequacies and seek ways to overcome them, realizing that their actions during their quest actually prove that they had the qualities they thought they lacked all along. Even Glinda and the Wicked Witch have been built on, especially in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West and its musical adaptation which is getting its long-anticipated film treatment at last.
So, why on earth are audiences missing out on even more Oz characters?
If you happened to see Disney’s Return to Oz — Walter Murch’s 1980s dark fantasy love letter to L. Frank Baum’s Oz books — you met some more: the helpful and innocent but sometimes awkward Jack Pumpkinhead, the clockwork robot Tik-Tok (the first sentient robot in English literature), the sassy and capable chicken Billina and the helpful but embarrassed flying Gump.