History Trivia / LandOfOz

* {{Expy}}: Betsy Bobbin for Dorothy. Betsy was created as a substitute for Dorothy around the time of ''Tik-Tok of Oz,'' since the rights to the character of Dorothy had been acquired by the stage production of ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.'' Betsy was more or less identical to Dorothy except that she was from Oklahoma instead of Kansas and had a pet mule instead of Billina the Chicken. She even arrives in Oz in the same manner as Dorothy did in ''Ozma of Oz.'' Later, when Baum regained the rights to Dorothy, he retained Betsy as a character, where she gradually became more of an independent entity.

* FanNickname: Publisher Reilly and Lee came up with “The Famous Forty” to describe the 40 official books published by their company. However there are further books that could be considered as canon, including Baum’s Trot and Cap’n Bill series and other fantasies he wrote (which crossover with Oz), a book of short Oz stories also by Baum, and Oz books by later authors in the series that did not get published by Reilly and Lee for various reasons, some of which would eventually be published by Books of Wonder (who rereleased the Oz books in the 1980s and '90s) and the International Wizard of Oz Club. With the addition of these arguably canon works, Oz publisher Joe Bongiorno coined two terms for this complete Oz series on his website, "The Soverign Sixty" or "The Supreme Seventy-Five".

* ImageSource: HoYay/{{Literature}}

* QuoteSource:
** BanOnMagic (''Literature/TheTinWoodmanOfOz'')
** InconsistentColoring: To what degree the landscapes of the four quadrants of Oz were colored blue or red or whatever tended to shift between books and authors.
** PlatonicKissing (''Literature/TikTokOfOz'')
** SocietyOfImmortals (''Literature/TheTinWoodmanOfOz'')

* ExiledFromContinuity: The series already had LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters before Baum's death, but Thompson and Neill exacerbated the problem. When author Jack Snow took over the series, he did a ContinuityReboot and picked up where Baum left off, disregarding the previous 22 books. Thompson and Neill's original characters would never appear in the series again after this point. Although, since many of Thompson's books are now PublicDomain, characters from them have appeared in unofficial books since.

* ImageSource:
** [[HoYay/{{Literature}} HoYay/Literature]]

* Ruth Plumly Thompson was a fan of Baum's work before being appointed his successor in the ''Oz'' series.

* ExecutiveMeddling: Editors at Reilly & Lee rewrote portions of Neill's books, reportedly making them even weirder than they already were. They also forced Jack Snow to rewrite the entire first half of ''The Shaggy Man of Oz'' on short notice; tellingly this was his last of only two Oz books even despite his obsession with Oz and lifelong dream of writing Oz books.

* PromotedFanboy: Ruth Plumly Thompson was a fan of Baum's work before being appointed his successor in the ''Oz'' series.
** Jack Snow wrote to publisher Reilly & Lee at age 12, asking to be the one to continue the Oz series after Baum's death. They declined of course, but over twenty years later, he ''did'' get to write two books for the series.

* CreatorBacklash: As the books went on, Baum became increasingly annoyed with how they began to dominate his bibliography and how he was unable to work on any other project since the public just demanded more and more Oz books. Baum attempted a few times to decisively end the series with increasingly final-seeming spells that kept more people from finding Oz or blocking the readers from seeing Dorothy's adventures but none of these took and the Oz books continued to be published long after his death.
** Amusingly, even in some of the earliest sequels, Baum included Author's Forewords hinting that he knew about lots and lots of ''other'' magical lands that he would love to write about if only children would stop asking for more Oz books, going so far as to include characters from his other series as guest stars in the Oz books in hopes of luring fans toward them (for example, almost all the guests at Ozma's royal birthday party in ''The Road to Oz'' are featured in Baum's other work[[note]]including Santa Claus[[/note]]). These pleas grew ever more desperate until ''The Emerald City of Oz,'' where Baum reports that Dorothy sent him a letter saying, in essence, "Glenda's closing the borders with magic so you'll never hear from any of us again, sorry!" This seemingly permanent decision was handwaved away when Baum wrote a follow-up.

* FanNickname: Publisher Reilly and Lee came up with “The Famous Forty” to describe the 40 official books published by their company. However there are further books that could be considered as canon, including Baum’s Trot and Cap’n Bill series and other fantasies he wrote (which crossover with Oz), a book of short Oz stories also by Baum, and Oz books by later authors in the series that did not get published by Reilly and Lee for various reasons, some of which would eventually be published by Books of Wonder (who rereleased the Oz books in the 1980’s and 90’s) and the International Wizard of Oz Club. With the addition of these arguably canon works, fans call the complete Oz series “The Supreme Seventy-Five”.

* GodCreatedCanonForeigner: Trot, Cap'n Bill and Button-Bright all originally appeared in a separate series created by Baum, but got shifted to Oz after said series failed to catch on commercially. Santa Claus is technically an example as well, originally appearing a Baum-written book detailing his life and adventures before making a cameo in the Oz books.

** InconsistentColoring

* UnCanceled: Baum only intended to write the first book. Then, he wrote a sequel, following the success of a 1902 [[AllMusicalsAreAdaptations musical adaptation]] he wrote, using many of the elements he put into the stage version, hoping to adapt it, as well. Then, he wrote four more and ended the series. Then, he wrote '''eight''' more, until his passing, at which point Ruth Plumly Thompson took over and wrote 19 books before passing on the torch to illustrator John R. Neill, who wrote three books. Jack Snow wrote two books, and two more authors each wrote a book, totaling '''[[LongRunner forty]]''' [[LongRunner books]]. And that's just what's considered canon[[note]][[FanonDiscontinuity Officially]][[/note]].

* BigNameFan: Almost any well-regarded Oz work in modern times will have illustrator Eric Shanower involved; Shanower has for example edited and published a leftover manuscript of an Oz novel by John R. Neill from the 1940's (''The Runaway in Oz''), has lent his artistic talents to the Marvel Oz comic adaptation, as well as illustrated a lot of the higher profile modern Oz books. Another is Edward Einhorn, known for canon-friendly modern Oz novels such as ''Literature/ParadoxInOz''. Then you have of course the upper echelon of the International Wizard of Oz Club.

** BanOnMagic (''Literature/HandyMandyInOz'')

* ExecutiveMeddling: Editors at Reilly & Lee rewrote portions of Neill's books, reportedly making them even weirder than they already were. They also forced Jack Snow to rewrite the entire first half of ''The Shaggy Man of Oz'' on short notice; tellingly this was his last Oz book even despite his obsession with Oz and lifelong dream of writing Oz books.

* FandomLifeCycle: Type 6a; the books were very popular in their day, but in the 1950s and 60s the popularity of the MGM exploded and made Oz a permanent part of America's culture. This, however, had the side effect of pushing the books into MainstreamObscurity. The Oz book fandom today is small, tightly-knit and devoted, having shrunk back down to around a Stage 2, but with the infrastructure of a fandom that was once at Stage 5. That the decades-old International Wizard of Oz Club and their official yearly story collection ''Oziana'' are still going strong is a testament to how old and formerly-large the fandom once was.

* FandomLifeCycle: Type 6a; the books were very popular in their day, but in the 1950s and 60s the popularity of the MGM exploded and made Oz a permanent part of America's culture. This, however, had the side effect of pushing the books into MainstreamObscurity. The Oz book fandom today is small and tightly-knit, having shrunk back down to around a Stage 2, but with the infrastructure of a fandom that was once at Stage 5. That the decades-old International Wizard of Oz Club and their official yearly story collection ''Oziana'' are still going strong is a testament to how old and formerly-large the fandom once was.

* AdaptationOverdosed: While the MGM movie is the most remembered, the books have a lot of adaptations ranging from comic books to film to cartoons made in Russia. Tellingly though, actual big budget Hollywood adaptations are rare, in part due to the shadow cast by the MGM movie, as well as the box-office failure of ''Film/ReturnToOz''. Most of the later sequels have never been adapted.

* AdaptationOverdosed: While the MGM movie is the most remembered, the books have a lot of adaptations ranging from comic books to film to cartoons made in Russia.

* TorchTheFranchiseAndRun: Creator/LFrankBaum attempted to do this when he grew tired of writing sequels despite the demand from his fans and publishers. He had established that nothing dies in the land of Oz, so he couldn't kill anyone off. In the sixth book, he tried to use the LiteraryAgentHypothesis to justify never writing a single thing about Oz again because an invasion caused Oz to become isolationist and totally cut off all contact with the outside world, thus promising to never ever write another story about Oz ever again. When his other books failed to sell as well, he had to begin writing stories about Oz again to pay his bills, backpedaling and explaining that they discovered the radio in Oz that Dorothy could use to broadcast Baum news about Oz.

* ExecutiveMeddling: Editors at Reilly & Lee rewrote portions of Neill's books, reportedly making them even weirder than they already were. They also forced Jack Snow to rewrite the entire first half of ''The Shaggy Man of Oz'' on short notice; tellingly this was his last Oz book even despite his obsession with Oz.