SOURCE: Street, Douglas. “The Wonderful Wiz That Was: The Curious Transformation of The Wizard of Oz.” Kansas Quarterly 16, no. 3 (summer 1984): 91-8.

In the following essay, Street discusses Baum's intent to create a uniquely American fairy-tale, distinct from the European tradition, in which a sense of reality was paramount, and then examines the reasons why the story was transformed back into pure fantasy for the film version.

L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is perhaps America's best remembered children's fantasy—or is it? After forty-five years the 1939 MGM cinematic adaptation of this tale has so saturated generations of Americans that what most people assume to be Baum's story of a little girl from Kansas has actually little in common with the original publication. While this lost-story phenomenon is possible whenever fiction is transformed into film, few works have received such international exposure and at the same time...