History Literature / LandOfOz

* WackyWaysideTribe: Plenty of examples in Baum's books.

* FeministFantasy: The Land of Oz was founded by a woman (Lurline), and the countries in it were ruled by four women (the Witches) up until the end of ''The Marvelous Land of Oz''. (It's pretty clear the Wizard and the Scarecrow only ran the Emerald City, and nominally at that.) In that book, one of the women (Glinda), works with another woman (Mombi) to restore the rightful ruler of the land of Oz. Guess who ''that'' is? Yep, a woman (Ozma).

* MadeASlave: In ''Ozma of Oz'', the Nome King justifies turning the queen of Ev and her children to ornaments because they had been sold to him as slaves, and it was more humane than slaving in the mines.

** In ''Ozma of Oz'', Billina almost eats Ozma as a grasshopper ornament, but discovers her real nature just in time, and restores her form.

** In ''Ozma of Oz'', Princess Langwidere of Ev is a justified example, as she's merely acting as ruler until the return of the Royal Family.

* RoadMovie: Many Oz books are the literary equivalent, with the characters taking a journey that results in a series of small adventures (rarely more than two chapters each) that have nothing to do with the main plot or each other. Occasionally, there might be an interlude that advances the main plot along the journey. The main plot will generally wrap up very quickly once the characters reach their destination.

* ScienceMarchesOn: Note to readers of ''The Patchwork Girl of Oz'': Building your house out of solid radium is a ''really bad idea''.

Interestingly, WaltDisney saw possibilities in Oz, and at one time considered making an animated feature based on the stories. He bought the movie rights to 11 of Baum's books, but for reasons that were never made clear later canned the project well along into the pre-production stages. The Walt Disney Company kept the rights until the 1980s. You can read more about the project [[http://jimhillmedia.com/blogs/jim_hill/archive/2006/11/03/6565.aspx here]]. It features interestingly faithful designs for characters that didn't appear in the 1939 movie, like Princess Ozma and Patchwork Girl, clearly based off the Neill illustrations. Oddly enough, the Disney Books on Tape, which mostly just adapted the movies (with some exceptions), had one for this story. Decades later, a few elements of ''Literature/TheMarvelousLandOfOz'' were used in the Disney animated film ''Disney/WreckItRalph''. (Perfectly legal as the book has gone into the public domain.)

The majority of adaptations focus on the first book of the series; for a list of those, see TheWizardOfOz. One adaptation that included some of the later books was the 1986 anime ''Anime/TheWonderfulWizardOfOz'', which adapted four of the first seven books. The 1985 film ''ReturnToOz'' is a loose adaptation of the second and third novels in the series.

* AbuseIsOkayWhenItIsFemaleOnMale: Jinjur, having failed to take over Oz, appears in a later cameo, placidly explaining that she is content with her quiet life with her husband -- and her husband is nursing a black eye because he had milked the cows in any order she did not approve of.

* BackStory: In response to fan mail asking question about Oz and its characters. There's just enough info to give an idea what Oz was like before Dorothy came to it.

Interestingly, WaltDisney saw possibilities in Oz, and at one time considered making an animated feature based on the stories. He bought the movie rights to 11 of Baum's books, but for reasons that were never made clear later canned the project well along into the pre-production stages. The Walt Disney Company kept the rights until the 1980s. You can read more about the project [[http://jimhillmedia.com/blogs/jim_hill/archive/2006/11/03/6565.aspx here]]. It features interestingly faithful designs for characters that didn't appear in the 1939 movie, like Princess Ozma and Patchwork Girl, clearly based off the Neill illustrations. Oddly enough, the Disney Books on Tape, which mostly just adapted the movies (with some exceptions), had one for this story. Decades later, a few elements of ''Literature/TheMarvelousLandOfOz'' were (unofficially) used for a Disney animated film, ''Disney/WreckItRalph''.

Most adaptations focus on the first book of the series; for a list of those, see TheWizardOfOz. One adaptation that included some of the later books was the 1986 anime ''Anime/TheWonderfulWizardOfOz'', which adapted four of the first seven books. The 1985 film ''ReturnToOz'' is a loose adaptation of the second and third novels in the series.

Interestingly, WaltDisney saw possibilities in Oz, and at one time considered making an animated feature based on the stories. He bought the movie rights to 11 of Baum's books, but for reasons that were never made clear later canned the project well along into the pre-production stages. The Walt Disney Company kept the rights until the 1980s. You can read more about the project [[http://jimhillmedia.com/blogs/jim_hill/archive/2006/11/03/6565.aspx here]]. It features interestingly faithful designs for characters that didn't appear in the 1939 movie, like Princess Ozma and Patchwork Girl, clearly based off the Neill illustrations. Oddly enough, the Disney Books on Tape, which mostly just adapted the movies (with some exceptions), had one for this story.

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* CrapsaccharineWorld
* DeadpanSnarker: Surprisingly, the narrator in ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' shows this at times.

** In his sixth Oz book, ''The Emerald City of Oz'', the Nomes and a few other unruly tribes of creatures plan to invade Oz, destroy it, and enslave the people. The surprise is initially ruined by Ozma's convenient Magic Picture, allowing her to plan ahead of time. With her trusty ChekhovsGun, the Magic Belt Dorothy stole from the Nome king in a previous book, Ozma uses its power to dehydrate the army, whose invasion tunnel is conveniently right next to the fountain containing the Water of Oblivion, which makes anyone who drinks of it forget everything. The first thing the invaders do when they come out of the tunnel is drink the water; war avoided.
* TheDitz: Button-Bright, in spite of his nickname, is actually kind of dim. He asks a lot of questions, but he's not good at taking the answers to those questions and making connections or thinking critically about it.

* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: The Oz of the first two books is ''notably'' different from the Oz in subsequent books. A lot of this can, and has, been explained and justified by Ozma coming to power and radically changing things.

* ''Was'' by Geoff Ryman (1992)

* SugarBowl

* ''[[Literature/{{Wicked}} Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West]]'' by Gregory Maguire (1995)

* ''Son of a Witch'' by Gregory Maguire (2005)

* ''A Lion Among Men'' by Gregory Maguire (2008)

* ''Out of Oz'' by Gregory Maguire (2011)

* {{Steampunk}}: Oz, both the literature ''and'' the 1939 film, has strong elements of this. Tik-Tok is a prime example.

* WorldBuilding: Baum's Land of Oz predates other fictional lands like [[TheLordOfTheRings Middle-Earth]] and {{Narnia}}.

* DeusExMachina: ''The Road to Oz'' has one of the more infamous examples of this.

* CardCarryingVillain: The Nome King again, as well as the Wicked Witch of the West.

* VileVillainSaccharineShow: While in the original books the Land of Oz had many CrapsaccharineWorld elements, the stories were mostly light-hearted. However most of the villains were truly evil, menacing and dangerous.

* TheNeedless: The Sawhorse is a saw horse which Pip brought to life using Old Mombi's life-giving powder. Later Jim the (real) Cab Horse comes to Oz, and tries to convince the Sawhorse that being a meat and bones horse is better than being a wooden horse magically brought to life, but all the examples that Jim gives actually come out in the Sawhorse's favor: for example Jim says that he can bleed and that's good because people can know where he's hurt - the Sawhorse points out that he doesn't get hurt, so he doesn't need to bleed. Jim is the only animal from our world who, having come to Oz where he can talk, begs to go back to the real world where he's just a dumb animal.

* {{Cyborg}} and UnwillingRoboticisation: Possibly the earliest example of a full-body-replacement cyborg in modern literature is the Tin Woodsman from ''Literature/TheWonderfulWizardOfOz''. He was once a perfectly ordinary human being until a witch cursed his axe, which repeatedly attacked him to chop off his body parts. He gradually replaces his missing body piece by piece with tin prosthetics -- until essentially all that was left was a mind in a tin shell. [[hottip:*:The tinsmith kept his old head in a closet, where, due to the no-death nature of Oz, it remained sentient, desiring nothing to do with the Tin Man when he returned to retrieve it.]]