The movie version of Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland came out in 1939,
and it was based on a 1900 book by L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz. 1939 was 22 years after 1917. Baum wrote sequels,
one almost every year, until his death in 1919.
There were particular elements in the movie that were not in the original
book. Other elements that were in the book were not included in the
movie, for various reasons. I don't know about the various sequels, as I
can't find any copies of those. I'm going by the various summaries to be
found online.
One difference is the arrival of Glinda, the "good witch," by means of a
glowing orb that drifts in through the air and alights in the presence of
Dorothy and others. I cannot but think of the similarity of this to the
arrival of Our Lady at Fatima. The glowing orb is reminiscent of the disc
that would be the sun in the sky during the Miracle of the Sun, which
moved toward earth, albeit in a menacing manner. So the movie
combined the two themes and made the "good witch" arrive by means
of the descending and glowing orb.
In the book, the place Dorothy went to was not in a dream, but a real
place to which she could later return. In the movie, Munchkinland and
Oz were places inaccessible to Dorothy after her return to Kansas.
Likewise, for Sister Lucia, she would never be able to "return to Fatima"
and those days of the visions she and her cousins had were locked in
her distant past, as if in a dream.
In the movie, Dorothy's house falls on the Wicked Witch of the East,
crushing her head with the rest of her body - except for her feet,
which were left exposed from under the house. Dorothy then wears the
Ruby Slippers, which came from the witch, and these slippers will give
Dorothy great powers over evil. At Fatima, it is the heel of Our Lady
that threatens to crush the head of satan, and the Message of Fatima
is a powerful weapon against the wiles of the devil. The three shepherd
children carry this powerful Message with them (as Dorothy wore the
slippers!) which makes them practically invincible against evil. The
precise arrangement of elements is different, but the themes of a heel
being part of the feet and a head being part of a body and not the feet,
are curiously similar.
On the way to the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy and
her dog, Toto are captured and imprisoned, with the threat that the
witch will drown Toto unless Dorothy gives her the Ruby Slippers. At
Fatima, the shepherd children were kidnapped by the mayor of Ourem,
and threatened with death by boiling oil, unless they give him the Secret
from the Lady that they conceal. It seems that this imprisonment theme
and threat of death by immersion in a liquid unless the symbol of power
is relinquished, is missing entirely from the original book.
In the book, Oz is a real place where Dorothy physically visits when a
tornado actually transports her there, but in the movie, it seems to be a
dreamland. Even so, the movie's depiction of the land of Oz has a more
realistic flavor, as if it is more real than her parent's farm in Kansas. This
dreamland portion of the movie was shot in Technicolor, while the first
and last parts regarding life in Kansas were shot in sepia-toned Black
and White. This was a huge break with tradition in film making, where
quasi-reality is in Black and White and real life is shot in color. The
question, "Do you dream in color?" seems to have come from this. In
Book of Dreams, by Sylvia Browne, the color dream is a prophetic
dream. Prophetic dreams are always in color.
Now, remember, during the Miracle of the Sun, the "whole world" was
splashed with vibrant colors, causing the normal and mundane world from
which the crowd had come, and to which it returned after the Miracle, to
seem "Black and White" in comparison!
At Fatima, the spiritual reality that the seers experienced became for
them the REAL reality of existence - their real home - and this temporal
world on earth became for them a kind of less permanent place, a sort
of pilgrimage. This is actually a very Catholic principle of life. This seems
to hint at the big switch the movie made from having the land of Oz a real
part of earth in the original book, to having it be an inaccessible place of
a different reality, in color, compared to life in Kansas in Black and White,
as it seemed to Dorothy before and after her dream-experience.
All of these things, and perhaps more, combine to give the movie the
appearance of having been influenced by reports of the apparitions in
Fatima.
Topic: Wizard of Oz...communist? (Read 3175 times)