The Wicked Witches of the West (6)
Now that the green elephant is out of the room, let's talk again about the original Wicked Witch of the West, before MGM changed our perception of her forever. Because not all of the Witches of the West are green, far from it!
And when you look at the earliest adaptations of the Wicked Witch, you will notice one recurring trend... The one of fusing the Witch of the West with Mombi, the evil sorceress from "The Marvelous Land of Oz", later retconned into the former Wicked Witch of the North.
This is seen first in the 1910 silent movie "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz", one of the earliest movie adaptations of Baum's book - while the antagonist of the movie is clearly the Wicked Witch of the West, her name in the story is... Momba. One letter away from Mombi. It is especially interesting to note that Baum was directly involved in the making of this movie, and so the name was not chosen randomly. Or it might have been Baum's famous tendency of not really giving a crap about continuity and preferring a booming, anarchic creativity over any strict and rigorous world-building. He likely named the antagonist "Momba" as a simple nod to his more famous Mombi character.
A later Oz adaptation with another direct input and participation by Baum enlightens us on the matter: 1914 "His Majesty, The Scarecrow of Oz", a movie where the antagonist is clearly designed after Denslow's illustrations of the Wicked Witch of the West, and yet is called "Old Mombi"... It is obvious by now that Baum wanted, to rach the movie-audience, a mix of the main witches of his two earlier works, creating this Mombi-Momba hybrid serving as a stock villain in early Oz movies.
Things get even more complicated when you look at the novel "The Scarecrow of Oz", that Baum wrote as an expansion of the short film, or rather as an inclusion of the story of "His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz" into the book-canon of his literary series. And in there, a witch antagonist does appear, with an appearance described as being quite similar to the Wicked Witch of the West... but she is not her, nor is she Mombi, as she rather becomes a new witch, "Old Blinkie". After all, the Wicked Witch of the West was supposed to be dead in the book-continuity... even though it became a big rule later that nobody could die in Oz... as I said, Baum literaly did not care for continuity beyond the first two books and even less so after his sixth one.
Beyond early Oz media, the confusion doesn't seem to have been maintained, as Mombi and the Wicked Witch became very distinct character... Except for this one Polish animated show, a children series of 1988 called W krainie czarnoksiężnika Oza, and that adapts both "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and "The Marvelous Land of Oz" (plus pieces of other Oz books if I saw well?). I unfortunately don't know Polish, but the episodes are fully on Youtube, and from what I got the Wicked Witch of the East and West in Baum's novels were fused here as one same character, The Wicked Witch of the East, main antagonist of the "Wizard of Oz" arc, while Mombi from the "Land of Oz" arc was renamed the Wicked Witch of the West? And yet some of the scenes of Mombi in the Marvelous Land of Oz were given to the Polish Witch of the East which is in turn Baum's Witch of the West? It's a bit confusing X)
