Frequently Asked Questions about the Oz Club, The Wizard of Oz, etc.

Keeping the Curious Cottabus satisfied!

What do I get for my membership dues?

Every member receives The Baum Bugle three times a year (Spring, Autumn, and Winter issues). Club members also receive information on the International Wizard of Oz Club's Special Publications and can order at member prices, which are 20% below retail. Information on the several annual regional conventions is automatically sent to members in the spring.

How do special memberships work?

Many members support the International Wizard of Oz Club by electing special levels of membership. Such special memberships (above $25/$35) are tax deductible to the limit established by IRS regulations for 501(c)(3) organizations.

Contributing Membership includes first-class mailing for an annual contribution of $50. Sustaining Membership includes first-class mailing, the Oz Calendar, and Oziana for $100 per year. Patron Membership offers the same benefits as Sustaining Membership and is granted for a contribution of $250 or more.Wizard's Circle Membership is the highest level of membership and is $500. (Due to mailing costs, all prices are $10 higher for members outside the the U.S.A.)

I mailed in an order for Oz Club membership or books. How long will it take to receive them?

Orders are normally processed and shipped in 4-8 weeks. Because the Oz Club depends on the services of volunteers in different areas of the country to process orders and to store and ship publications, extra time is needed to coordinate order fulfilment.

Who can I contact if my address changes or if I have not received club mailings?

See our member service page to furnish address change information or inquire about missing mailings. Or send an e-mail to feedback@ozclub.org. Please put MAILINGS in the subject line.

How can I obtain out-of-print issues of the Baum Bugle?

The International Wizard of Oz Club publishes a quarterly "Buy & Sell" column, The Oz Trading Post which also appears in an online edition on the Internet (e-mail address feedback@ozclub.org). Please put TRADING POST in the subject line. You can check the Oz Trading Post to see if the Bugles you want are offered for sale, or you can place your own ad listing the specific issues that you want. In addition, each of the Oz Club conventions features an auction of Oz books and other collectibles. Items for these auctions are donated or consigned by members of the club. Frequently early issues of the Bugle are included in the auction. Occasionally there will be issues of the Bugle available at the vendor tables following the auction.

Where can I get pictures online from the 1939 MGM Wizard of Oz?

Turner Entertainment owns the rights to the film. Our recommendation would be to send an inquiry to Turner through their web site. Keep in mind that these images are protected by copyright, and as such it is illegal to download them without permission from the copyright holder.

Can you send me a signed picture of the cast?

The International Wizard of Oz Club does not market or distribute photographs from the 1939 MGM movie. However, there are several excellent books in print that provide photographs and reference information about the film. Two such works are The 50th Anniversary Pictorial History of the Wizard of Oz by John Fricke, William Stillman, and Jay Scarfone (contains color and B&W photos and The Making of the Wizard of Oz by Aljean Harmetz (contains B&W photos) Both books are currently in print and can be ordered through your local bookseller.

Where can I get the lyrics/sheet music from the 1939 MGM film?

Warner Brothers is the current publisher in the U.S. Their current offerings include a book of vocal selections (#TSF0038), an easy piano arrangement book (#AF9502), and the sheet music for Over the Rainbow (#8785OPV). There is also an "Easy Play Today" book published by Hal Leonard (#00002256).

Where can I get a script for the 1939 MGM Wizard of Oz musical?

This book is available through the International Wizard of Oz Club and can be ordered through our special publication section:

THE WIZARD OF OZ : THE SCREENPLAY
Edited by Noel Langley, FLorence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf
A Delta book, published by Dell Publishing, a division of Bantam Doubleday
Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
1989
ISBN 0-385-29760-2

Where can I get a script/score for a Wizard of Oz Stage Play?

The dramatization most often performed includes a score, which may come in both a piano score and an orchestral score. That's "The Wizard of Oz"published by Witmark Publishing. (The script that goes with it follows the movie closely, except for interpolating some would-be funny scenes for the Wicked Witch of the West's skeleton butler, and so on.) Samuel French Inc. does not have a musical "Wizard" version. They used to sell copies of a non-musical version, but they let it go out of print. The reference section of our web site has a checklist of Oz plays and scripts over the years.

Where can I get a directory of Oz Club members?

The last member directory for the Oz Club was published in 1997 and is based on the 1996 membership roster. It is still available and can be ordered by club members only. The club has no definite plans to publish a new directory.

How much is my book/collectible/collection worth?

The Oz Club publishes a reference book, Bibliographia Oziana, which contains descriptions of all the editions of the Oz books so that collectors can identify them. There is no official "price guide" for Oz books or collectibles, as the market is constantly changing. However, in the original edition of The Wizard of Oz Collectors' Treasury by William Stillman and Jay Scarfone, published in West Chester, PA, there was an insert that contained then-current pricing information about collectibles with the caveat that they were subject to change. The most reliable source of pricing information would be a professional appraiser.

Is it true that there was a murder/suicide/hanging during the filming of MGM's The Wizard of Oz?

This rumor is completely false. In the background of one of the forest scenes, there is movement that is suggestive of a body swinging from a tree. In reality, this is one of the large birds that roamed the set to give the forest its creepy appearance.

There's been nothing cut or deleted at any time from the M-G-M home video releases of the film, so it would be impossible to have "seen" the "suicide" in one version and not another. And -- lest we forget -- this WAS all about making a movie; M-G-M didn't just take its color cameras to a bend in the Yellow Brick Road and wait for a Scarecrow, Tin Man, and little girl to come singing and dancing by. There WERE upwards of fifty other people on the set at any given moment: directors, producers, assistants, wardrobe, sound, lighting, make-up people, stand-ins, visitors, etc., standing around behind the cameras. Can you imagine that THAT many people wouldn't have noticed a suicide in progress...or even a "successful" one...and not done something about it? Or, even if they somehow missed it...that they would leave THAT take in the film?

See the movie on a big screen: it's a bird! M-G-M rented a bunch of them from L.A. Zoo Park to give an "exterior" feeling to a sound stage set. You can see them wandering around elsewhere in that set during the Tin Woodman sequence.

Was The Wizard of Oz written as a political allegory?

The theory was written by Henry Littlefield when he was a high school teacher and published in the spring 1964 issue of the American Quarterly. Since that time, the theory has been widely publicized in academic journals and the popular press.

In the spring 1992 issue, The Baum Bugle ran two articles about the populism theory. One of the articles was by Littlefield, who explained how he and his students made up the theory as a project for a summer history school class.

The other article documented the uncritical acceptance of the theory as the real motivation behind Baum's writing of The Wizard of Oz. That article showed how academics and popular writers repeated and embellished the theory even though there was no historical evidence to support it.

Littlefield's original article in the American Quarterly can be found in many libraries. It was also reprinted in The Wizard of Oz edited by Michael Patrick Hearn and published by Shocken Books as part of the Critical Heritage Series.

The Bugle articles have been reprinted in a pamphlet. If you would like copies of the articles, please send a large (9" x 12") self-addressed envelope with 55 cents in stamps to:

Michael Gessel
P.O. Box 748
Arlington, Virginia 22216

Please tell me if The Wizard of Oz was originally released in color or black and white?

The Wizard of Oz was one of the first movies to be filmed in Technicolor. The Kansas scenes were originally printed in sepiatone and were later rendered in simple black and white. The silver shoes that Dorothy obtained from the Wicked Witch of the East were changed to "Ruby Slippers" in order to show off the brilliance of the new film process.

When was the Wizard of Oz first shown on television?

November 3, 1956. Saturday night. CBS program: Ford Star Jubilee!

What are the copyright restrictions regarding The Wizard of Oz?

The copyright in L. Frank Baum's work, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (later re-titled The Wizard of Oz), expired in 1956. From that point on, the book's original illustrations by W. W. Denslow and the text by L. Frank Baum, were in the Public Domain, and could be used freely by publishers and adapters alike. Derivative works, such as abridgments, adaptations, newly illustrated versions, and dramatic works (such as the MGM version of The Wizard of Oz) produced by arrangement of the copyright holders before 1956, are largely still protected by their individual copyrights. The International Wizard of Oz Club is unable to provide detailed information about later copyrights, but alerts all would-be users that they should verify the status of such copyrights before making use of possibly copyrighted works. The authoritative source for such information are the records of the United States Copyright Office, located at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The records are open to public inspection, although the Copyright Office offers a fee-for-service searching service. Additional information can be obtained from:

U.S. Copyright Office
101 Independence Ave., S.E.
Washington DC 20559-6000

Hours of public service are 8:30 a. m. to 5:00 p. m., Eastern time, Monday through Friday, except legal holidays. During these hours you may telephone the Copyright Office at (202) 707-3000 to speak to one of our copyright information specialists. The U.S. Copyright Office has a very well developed Web site at: http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/

Where did Baum get the name Dorothy, and was the character based on a family member?

L. Frank Baum first used the name "Dorothy," a popular name at the turn of the century, in Mother Goose in Prose in 1897 for a small farm-girl, whose sweetness and innocence permitted her to be able to speak the language of the farm animals. His co-biographer and eldest son, Frank Joslyn Baum, did not recall a family tradition about the potentiality that Baum named Dorothy of Oz in honor of a family member. Rather, in To Please a Child, he and Russell P. MacFall report on p. 134: "In those days it was common dinner table conversation of the Baum family to discuss each claimant [as the source of Dorothy of Oz's name] as a phenomenon of their new literary prominence. The author laughed them all off with the remark that he had liked the name of Dorothy long before he had used it in one of his Mother Goose prose stories, and that when he came to write The Wonderful Wizard of Oz he 'just picked it out of the air.'"

In The Baum Bugle, Autumn 1984, Sally Roesch Wagner, biographer of Matilda Joslyn Gage, Baum's mother-in-law, published "Dorothy Gage and Dorothy Gale," a well-documented account of the relationship between Baum and his wife Maud. Sally had access to numerous pieces of family correspondence, including the letters preserved in the Matilda Jewell Gage Collection (now in the Aberdeen, South Dakota, Mitchell Public Library), the Robert A. Baum, Jr., collection, and the Laura Jane Musser collection. In addition, Sally had interviewed Matilda Jewell Gage, Maud's niece, who lived in her nineties in Aberdeen. According to the article, shortly after Matilda Joslyn Gage died in 1898, her son T. Clarkson Gage and his wife Sophie Jewell Gage (Matilda Jewell Gage's parents) gave birth to a daughter they named Dorothy. The baby died five months later in November 1898. Sally reports that "Maud attended the funeral and was so distraught she had to have medical treatment. 'Dorothy was a perfectly beautiful baby,' Maud wrote her sister Helen. 'I could have taken her for my very own and loved her devotedly.' Frank was then working on a children's story and, when it came out in 1900, he dedicated it to 'my good friend and comrade, My Wife.' And in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Frank gave Maud her Dorothy." The quotation from Maud was in a letter written to Helen Leslie Gage, November 27, 1898, in the Matilda Jewell Gage Collection.

After years of searching, Sally Roesch Wagner  finally located the grave of the small Dorothy Gage in Bloomington, Illinois. There is to be a special gathering in Bloomington in 1999 to commemorate Dorothy Gage and to rededicate her grave site with a new tombstone.

Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

If you are asking this question, you are at a decided disadvantage. You will probably be transformed into a bell-snickle before you can say "pyrzqxgl." And would you really expect to get a straight answer? Your best bet is to bring Toto along to do the sniff test - he'll know the difference.

Howzatagin?

The Wizard will explain it, believe me!

We invite all visitors to send us comments and suggestions.