Disneyfication in Oz

We've all complained about the Disneyfication of stories, where, as my guest blogger described it: ``All of the disagreeable or immoral aspects had been excised from the story, so that the one presented had almost no bearing on the original story, other than the famous names and the most basic story elements.'' I'd always thought of this as a relatively modern phenomenon, based in celluloid, so imagine my surprise when I read this introduction to a book entitle The Wizard of Oz:

"Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.

Yet the old time fairy tale, having served for generations, may now be classed as "historical" in the children's library; for the time has come for a series of newer "wonder tales" in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.

Having this thought in mind, the story of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.

Any further comments I'd had on the subject are obvious and left as an exercise to the reader.

In an attempt to keep with the blog's current title, I should also mention some of the story's economic aspects. It has been posited in no less than the Journal of Political Economy (the University of Chicago's house journal) that the story is an allegory about the debate about switching to the gold standard (gold is measured in ounces=Oz, but it was her silver slippers which saved poor Dorothy, et cetera). But, alas, the political-allegory interpretation is the entirely false offspring of a too-vivid imagination. This article gives an interesting account of the rise and fall of the gold-standard interpretation.